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September 9, 2008 By Isabel Esterman Leave a Comment
File this under “apologizing for not posting more.”
I’ve recovered from being ill, but I’m still scrambling to get caught up on work.  (I’m running around so much I’ve started referring to my apartment as my “alleged home.”)

Still from an audio slideshow about Jack London Aquatic Center’s crew team for Oakland girls.

I’m working on a JSchool project to launch a community news site for North Oakland, which is sucking up a lot of my energy right now. When we get the site launched, I’ll start linking to articles, and some of my multimedia pieces about Oakland will start seeing the light of day.
In the meantime, I’ll post when I can, and even if I’m not blogging, I do upload photos to flickr pretty frequently.
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University of California – Bureaucracy

January 28, 2008 By Isabel Esterman 4 Comments

A new semester, and as usual I’ve spent most of the past week running from office to office trying to persuade people to bend the rules for me.
I really can’t decide whether there is something wrong with me or something wrong with the system that makes this such a pattern. As far as I understand, normal people do not do this. They sign up for classes online, show up, and that’s that.

Me, well…

Having to juggle multiple departments is a big part of why pulling my schedule together is always such an epic drama. As an undergrad, I completed 3 majors in 3 years, and now I’m working on two Master’s degrees simultaneously. So I have much more bureaucracy to deal with, and much less room to maneuver.

This semester’s big upset came from trying to join a journalism school class on Burma. International reporting, Southeast Asia – what could be more perfect, and (thanks to my past research and reporting in the region, not to mention those 3 majors competed and 2 Master’s in progress) something I’d like to think I’m pretty well qualified for. But of course there was a catch. Because of the way the dual degree program I’m in is set up, I have not yet taken one of the prerequisite J-school classes. But I applied anyway, and early last week a loophole, somehow, was found.

And then the next obstacle. The lecture component of the Burma class conflicts with Indonesian, which I’m absolutely required to take to remain eligible for my funding. So I had to convince my Indonesian teacher to let me take her course as an independent study, showing up twice a week instead of three times and working on my own to keep up with the class. Then I had to convince my advisor in the Group in Asian studies that this was okay. Then I had to double-check with the people who administer graduate fellowships that I could use an independent study course to meet their requirements. Then I had to get the department of South and Southeast Asian studies to sign off on my course plan for Indonesian.

It’s been raining like crazy all week, and I discovered it’s very, very hard for people to say no to me when I show up in their office wet and disheveled, making a sad face, and holding out damp papers for them to sign. It also helps that, unlike in Madison — where I had an actual nemesis who seemed to take personal affront at my I’m-such-a-special-snowflake attempts to bend the rules, and threw obstacles in my path at every possible opportunity (this woman is, to the infinite benefit of the students who follow me, no longer employed there) – everyone I met with actually wanted to help me. The University of California – Bureaucracy (just in case you were wondering what UC-B stands for) can be an absolute nightmare, but my experiences with the individual tentacles of the beast have been pretty good so far. The paperwork is still grinding through, but it looks like it’s all going to work out.

The upshot of all this is….I’m going to Thailand and Burma in March!

I won’t know for a few more days exactly where I’m going to be sent, and my project will obviously be location-specific, but no matter what, it’s going to be pretty amazing.

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September 7, 2007 By Isabel Esterman 1 Comment

2 weeks in.

I feel a lot better about school than I did a week ago. My schedule is more or less set, about half my classes are in the Journalism school, and I have keys, computer access, a mailbox, a webpage, and even a locker there now. It’s a good thing I have so much practice at being a squeaky wheel.

There are a lot of things about grad school that still make me uncomfortable. Or, to be more precise, about academic culture, in which so much of what goes on seems to be purely self-referential.
I’ve gone on about this before, but it hasn’t stopped bothering me that there often seems to be a tendency among academics to be completely divorced from reality, to the point of being concerned more about the field than the subject.

I don’t want to think this comes down to a lack of faith in knowledge in the abstract. There is, and I think will always be, part of me that is inspired by any pursuit undertaken out of genuine passion, even if it’s not demonstrably useful. After all, it’s pretty hard to justify art in concrete terms, but I’d hate to live in a world without it. And you could definitely make a case for even the most esoteric study of literature or prehistory as rooted in a desire for insight into the human condition.

But I’m very discouraged by a lot of work and talk that seems to be motivated by one-upmanship, making a name for oneself, and the other petty vices of academic politics. The academy can seem like an airless world, where whatever spark of curiosity students start off with is more easily extinguished than ignited.

It makes me more certain I was right to kick and scream until I got more access to the journalism school. The field of journalism is definitely not innocent of back-stabbing, self-aggrandizement, intellectual laziness and a thousand other crimes great and small. But because of the very nature of the profession, the public, the wider world, is always at the forefront of journalists’ minds.
And people here, so far, do seem to be very concerned not only with trying to explore, understand and explain the world, but also with the impact their work has on society as a whole.
After a few hours discussing what someone said about someone else’s article about pre-modern history, it’s refreshing to go to a class with people who write, or intend to write, about Asia, and be forced to examine how media coverage of non-violent vs. violent protests feeds into social instability.

I’m hoping a balance between the two will keep me sane. And honest.

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