a trial, with your peers

First off, Laura brilliantly beat me to this (see below, we’re posting nearly simultaneously tonight, because GREAT MINDS), but : it is registration time around here, so if anyone has BURNING questions (or any other kind, I suppose) please feel free to reach out and let us know.  We are happy to help.

On that note, for students in policy analysis, Thursday evening begins The Trial Round, a/k/a, the long, anticipated slide into, for most first years, a spring spent in Lab. I’ll have more to say about Lab proper as we get closer, but as I’m going to be one of the Lab Assistants (or TAs, or GAs, or Helper People) in the Trial Round, and later in the Spring, for Lab, I thought I would offer a few brief notes as we enter the first phase of this. My apologies if you are in either of my teams and I get repetitive.

1 ) Opening night may feel very strange. Opening night is Thursday, and I’m sorry I sometimes slip into theater lingo when discussing all of this, but honestly for me this whole process is vaguely reminiscent of prepping for a play. So I’ll also say “rehearsals” about the briefing, and if you are a real, live present or former theater person, I’m sorry if you don’t do likewise, and it doesn’t mean that I am not taking this seriously.  (I took plays plenty seriously too!)

So Thursday you will be assigned to your team with whom you’ll begin work on your Trial Round project, during which you’ll complete an analysis and deliver a recommendation to your “client”.  To do so, you’ll be using the mandate and data pack (collated materials gathered by a Lab group last spring) as well as your own, fresh set of eyes and skills.  You’re going from the class where you’ve been all term to this small group, with a Lab Assistant and faculty advisor, and you’ll not be in your big class again until the end of this process.  So in some ways it might suddenly feel like a whole new class.  You may feel discombobulated.  That is understandable, and not cause for panic.

2) You may feel anxiety about who will be in your group, what your project will be, what you will have to contribute to this process; all of the unknowns which will be answered quickly over the next few days.  For now: be open and begin making peace with the lack of control you will have over many parts of this process.  For some of us, myself included, that is a challenge.  Letting go of certain things, which I kind of did by the end of the Trial Round, enabled me to hit the ground running in the spring for Lab.  Use this as your space/time to get the kinks out and figure out how you work best in this very strange, and artificial, situation.  Believe me, having done so led to a much more productive and positive experience for me during the first, “live”, round of Lab.

3)  If your T.A./Lab Assistant uses lingo that sounds slightly different from that which you’ve been using in your class, no worries; it just means they probably took Policy Analysis from another professor.  Dirty little secret, and if you disagree FEEL FREE to throw down in the comments, but we’re all doing different versions of the same thing here.  Trial Round puts you, for the first time, into the position of learning what works best for you.  To accomplish that, you use these tools in TR, so that you can better accomplish the goal of helping your oh-so-real clients in the Spring.

4)  You have a GREAT group of TA/LA’s getting ready to work with you.   We are your first line of assistance and are eager to help you complete a succcessful, and hopefully even POSITIVE experience in the Trial Round.  

Finally, congrats to Laura and her group as rumor has it the Chase competition continues for our trusty New School team.   Bravo, all!

-Kristen

 

Registration

It’s only November but as students know, we’ve been registering for Spring semester this week. I’m kind of having trouble believing it really will be my last semester at Milano, but it’s also very exciting to think about what will come after. I am registered for 3 classes including my Advanced Seminar in Nonprofit Management which most students know as the PDR class. Even as a 4th semester student, I had numerous questions about classes,  professors, schedules, etc. so I’m sure many of you first year students do as well. Feel free to ask us if you have any burning questions. We love getting comments on the blog… it makes us feel like someone is reading… Happy November!

a kind of blue…

Last Saturday was the first (hopefully) annual Milano Cares Day, an event which dispatched teams, SWARMS, of us all over New York City in a volunteer effort to assist all sorts of nonprofit organizations with various needs.  There were projects working with seniors, local community development groups, and doing everything from talking to kids about career planning to gardening to a little data analysis here and there.  I hope you’ll forgive me, dear readers, for not doing justice to describing all of the different types of opportunities we had; suffice it to say there were an array of options, locations, and participants.  It was very well organized and clearly reflected a lot of care and attention, which allowed the rest of us to do the same in turn at each of our sites.

My group assembled at a community center which includes a day care in East New York (a neighborhood in Brooklyn) to do some painting.  After the inevitably long excursion from New Jersey, I arrived to find a bright, colorful and cheerful space that immediately made me wish we had Laura on hand for some excellent photography.  (I forgot my camera, but I’m not sure I would have done the place justice.) It is an award-winning facility on the basis of its design, and as I settled in with my tray of bright blue paint, I was also struck by the friendliness of the staff and the varied and interesting activities going on all day.  While we were painting, kids were coming and going to help work the farmer’s market outside, doing group activities, and in some cases dropping in just to see if they could pick up a paintbrush and chip in.  The day care where we focused our attention was filled with all sorts of miniature kiddie furniture and play areas, which are always kind of fascinating to me and even make me jealous.  Jealous? Yes. I was one of those precocious students who was skipped through kindergarten and never went to preschool, so I’m embarrassed to admit part of me wanted to go dig in to some of those toys to see what was what.  I resisted, because I’m an adult that would have been inappropriate.

We were very happy, at my site, to have been able to help a group in our community partly because the spirit behind this project does represent the best of Milano students, I think: we want to make the world a better place.  (I know the phrase “making a difference” has become ubiquitous during the last couple of years there, but I don’t want the phrase to become meaningless.)

The importance of places like this community center should not be underestimated: it is a group which emerged from within the neighborhood, offers interesting, environmentally positive (urban gardening!) programming, health education, and the day care center, part of which we helped to repaint.  Vibrant places which have safe, viable options for people to socialize and interact positively as a community are too rare in urban areas everywhere, and it was so gratifying to realize that we were helping to keep that going in some small way.  I want to find a way to help out there again at some point, which may be an indirect and great payoff for the day as well.  This is flirting with the topic of another potential post, so all I will mention here is that believe it or not, the ranks of the unemployed are so full in “the City” at the moment that I have gone to more than one volunteer orientation for a group only to be told, with my fellow (mostly unemployed) attendees, that “we’ll call you, but we don’t have any openings right now” for volunteer work.  Actually being able to really do something to help always feels good.

I know the day came amidst a busy part of our semester, but I have found that taking a “special day” like this once in awhile is a great reminder, really, about WHY you are spending the rest of your weekend working on memos, reading, and research.  Or, procrastinating, spending hours G-chatting, Facebooking, Skype-ing, catching up on Iron Chef, and then cleaning (you have to do that BEFORE homework, don’t you know?)  The point is, I’d highly recommend this to colleagues as a way to spend a Saturday.

Only one downside emerged, as I really did see blue spots everywhere on the way home–but then I put on some Miles Davis, added a glass of wine, and dozed off, having spent a very satisfying day.

-Kristen

Update on Community Development Practicum a.k.a. The Chase Class

Have we really been in class for 10 weeks now?? Time sure flies by when you’re having fun… or are too busy to even remember what day it is. The Chase class has hit full-steam, since we are turning our proposal over to the Parsons designers on Monday. We are now on official Draft #7 (but unofficially its more like 37). The Nena-New School blog talks about the project more eloquently than  I could right now, so check out the link: http://www.nena-newschool.com/ I’m really loving the project and learning all that I can about New Orleans, community development, grocery store initiatives, architectural terms, green building techniques, New Market Tax Credits and my teammates eating habits.

thoughts from a student in exile (a/k/a, New Jersey)

I guess we’re back to business as usual at The New School—at least in some quarters.  I’ll come back to that in a moment.  Also? I am so excited to hear more from Laura as she works on the NOLA project. Kudos!

I had some shuffling to do thus far this fall term.  First, the shuffling because when you’re unemployed the nanosecond your student loan check arrives is truly an ecstatic moment for which words fail (paying rent never felt so satisfying, which I suppose is sad).  Second, more pertinent to this blog, shuffling my fall schedule.  I am plugging along on requirements, being a part-time student, and this fall I had doubled up on those courses.  However, I found out about a course which also fits a requirement (my international course) while being an area of genuine interest and enthusiasm: Green Jobs.  I told a friend about this course and she laughed (“SO trendy”, I believe she said) but truthfully, this is a trend I am thrilled to finally see happening.  The course is offered through the New School’s graduate program in International Affairs (that’s GPIA, acronym lovers) and is interesting, a seminar, oh—and also allows me to do some individual research!  Sold.  I have put off another required course until later on in my program, and am geeking out on climate change statistics and UNEP reports as we speak.

Now, to another matter, but it is one of much concern to me.  DISCLAIMER:  This is a moment when I cannot state clearly enough that what you read here is my opinion, so if you take issue, take it up with me, as my co-bloggers are not responsible. Also, I hate to break it to some folks, but according to friends who are now professors near and far, some of this can be extrapolated to apply to various schools, lest any of you come down with a case of The Smugness.

One of the truly special elements of academic institutions, particularly in the relatively anti-intellectual United States, is the creation of space, boundaried in place and philosophy, where open inquiry and rigorous engagement with ideas is protected, celebrated, and held as a cherished value.  My former discipline, Women’s/Gender/Feminist Studies, is the keeper of much early feminist history, for example—now it may be integrated into some undergraduate courses, but that was not always so.  What happened?  A tremendous amount of rigorous thinking, questioning, open debate and conversation challenging the then-status quo occurred both outside AND inside of “the academy”. Room to question, to challenge with information, to think hard together, is a special quality of universities that I will not take for granted.

It concerns me to hear, therefore, that today there was an invited speaker at Milano (former Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge) and some students felt that the best way to express their disagreement with his work, professional history, and/or values, was to disrupt the public presentation where we, the students, had the opportunity to directly engage him in dialogue about that very work.  From what I gather, the whole event was scrapped after disruptions were too noisy to allow for conversation of any kind. In some respects I feel I am overstepping a personal rule in writing about an event I did not attend, but the internet fallout has certainly been instructive.  People were still talking about it at the end of classes twelve hours later.

Don’t misunderstand me. I spent a great deal of time wearing out shoes protesting the Iraq War and other activities conducted by the most recent Bush Administration.  But if we do not come to grips with the events, as onerous and disturbing and dishonorable as many of us feel they were, of the past few years, I fear that we will lose whatever insights into ourselves as a nation that could be gleaned from that conversation.  How did this all happen?  You might think you have a quick answer to that, but I challenge you to think harder.  Do you really know?  I’m exhausted from trying to figure it out, but I think it is imperative that we do.  Only listening to those with whom we agree is not the way towards a true education.  I wish it were, because it would be so much easier and less upsetting.  If there is anything I have learned, over so many years in higher education, it is that there is no greater challenge—or painful privilege—than defending the right to free speech for those whose ideas you most detest.

Do I wish that we had another speaker on offer?  Absolutely.  How likely does that feel now?

What kind of student do you want to be? What kind of university do you want to attend?  I continue to say, claim that for yourself, but for me, the day I learned to do so with humility and respect was the first day I may have truly become a learner. How will we ever learn from each other if all we do is gather in a room and scream at one another?  We can keep on doing it, and I would be naïve if I did not suspect that it might keep on happening.  But this much I know: no one will really learn much of anything.  What an expensive waste of all of our time and money it would be, and what a mockery of what should be such a special space that we will not always be able to occupy, in any sense of that word.

Here is hoping for a more respectful–and enlightening–October.

Kristen

New School, New Orleans & NENA

Today is the start of the 4th week of the Fall semester and my 3rd here at Milano. This time last year I was having anxiety about how I would  ever finish all of my readings for Making a Difference and if I could even understand Economics. Man, am I glad that is all over! There are many things I know now as a Second Year student, that I wish I knew last year, but this post won’t be about those things. It won’t be about advice for where to find study spots in the 13th St. building or how students can navigate the  stacks of reading assignments. Today, I’m writing about New Orleans.

My favorite class this semester (and possibly all of grad school so far) is the Chase Community Development Practicum. This class is a joint venture between architecture and design students from Parsons and 6 Milano students. Our client this fall is the Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association (NENA), which serves the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans, LA. NENA’s mission is to empower residents to return to their community and transform the neighborhood.

Starting from Day One, we have been going at full speed. Not only are we working with an actual client in a real-world setting, but we only have until the end of October to prepare a 25 page proposal for a real estate development. This has been my first client-based class, and I’m taking in all that I can. In early September we spent a weekend in New Orleans researching the community, talking with local development leaders and our clients. For more info on this project, and to see our progress throughout the semester, check out the great blog that our Parsons teammates have created: http://www.nena-newschool.com/

Orientation Week

Welcome to all of the incoming Milano students!

I was lucky enough to help out this week with new student orientation. Thanks to many of my fellow classmates (Tanya, Johanna, Julian, Rachel, Galina, Amy, Eugene, Tushar, Steve, Marie, Eric, Shana, Sally, Evelyn, Analia, Dania, Bryan, Christine, Ritu, Helen, Vicki and others) all new students who were in town were able to get an proper welcome to Milano and New York City. I enjoyed meeting two new students at our Dutch Treat lunch at Artichoke Pizza (woo-hoo to Jimmy and Ilana!) and many other students at our informal happy hour. My favorite event of the week was the Student-to-Student potluck dinner. For this event many of the continuing students mentioned above cooked and prepared delicious food for a potluck dinner held at 65 5th Avenue on the 7th floor. It was wonderful to chat with all students (new and old) while enjoying home cooked German  potato salad, summer bean/corn salad, chocolate chip cookies and generous amounts of beans and rice! The event was so successful that many of the attendees trickled over to Bar 13 to continue getting to know each other and catch up. I am happy to say that I was inspired by these fun events and truly look forward to the beginning of the semester!

it’s time to get this party started!

…would be what some MIGHT say about the beginning of a new school year.  I’m interrupting my electronic “unplugged” week today to do a bit of housekeeping here and there, but will largely be offline for the rest of the last week of summer vacation.  One reason I opted for this “unplugged” week is that I am still old-school enough to have felt quite an adjustment in the amount of time I was spending online as I began Milano a year ago.  I was used to spending all day on the computer thanks to my former jobs, but back then, after a quick check of the email and perhaps a blog post or two of my own, my laptop stayed quiet and cool in the corner while I went about my business of being fabulous in the City.

Last August, all that changed.  I do have a point to this post, which is the special welcome to the subset of readers out there who are nontraditional graduate students.  By this I really mean: starting grad school in at least your late-twenties.  Your peers are largely settled into their careers, maybe purchasing houses, living very sexy lives as international aid workers somewhere, or in some way doing things that say “AHA! I HAVE IT FIGURED OUT!”.

You decided that perhaps you didn’t, or at the least, you’d need another MS on the ol’ diploma wall to round out the space, and so as of this week, here you are.  Welcome!  Yes, it is going to feel weird.  At the risk of rambling, I’m getting to some practical tips momentarily, but for the benefit of my other readers out there who are not tail-end Gen Xers (we who were born in the mid 70s salute you!), I read a piece yesterday in the Times which included a really terrific summation of who WE are, in certain terms:

I’m part of the Peter Pan-ish Gen-X final trickle–and what do WE know about growing up? My friends are still broke, say “whatever” too much…are still deferring college loans and saying everything is the new something-else, including the 30s, which are the new 20s.  The economy is in crisis, and they don’t care; they have become Zen about debt, having been impoverished, if trust-fund-less, since they got out of college at the beginning of the millenium, a time of tragedy and war and turmoil, their entire 20s devoured by someone they refer to only by a twangy iteration of his middle initial.”

That is me.  W ate  my first MA, which was in Women’s Studies, and my colleagues and I had to watch the sickening, systematic deconstruction of nearly every organization for which we were planning to work in 2002, by which time some of us had nothing to look forward to except years of deferments and jobs temping.  I have paid my dues in the area of post-grad frustration, believe me. 

Now, back to Milano, and some tips for my new colleagues well-versed, at last, in good vino and about to rediscover the joys of $3 Chuck. 

1. Grad school is difficult, and I suggest that you decide for yourself right now to take on the work, to take on the challenge, to accept that you are going to make mistakes, that there will be failures, but you will only get back as much as you put in.  In yoga we learn that it is through our active engagement, through pushing ourselves to our limits to play on and explore our edge, that we achieve the most growth.  That may perhaps sound too hippy-dippy for words, but that’s what got me through my first year, in a nutshell.  Embrace this challenge.
2. If you have not, go ahead, bite the bullet, and sign up for Facebook.  After the deluge of hellos from your almost-forgotten high school compadres subsides, you’ll soon be adding a steady stream of hip Milanoites to your roster of friends, and occasionally you’ll want to know when a study group or a happy hour goes on, so get over any resistance issues you’re having and join.  Oversharing is NOT required.  I joined a year ago this week and I’m still here.
3. Blackboard is an online system you’ll access through your “mynewschool” site, and on which will be all sorts of goodies for your courses, from the syllabus, to some of your assignments, to message boards, and every course you have will use it. You’ll automatically be in it, but take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the features.  Since it’s been endemic since the early 00s (my first MA was just starting to use it back in ‘02), there will be plenty of people to help you figure it all out.
4. How many group projects did they tell you you’d have this coming year?  Triple it.  Milano is well-known, rightly so, for what may feel like neverending group work. You may, in fact, come to rue the day that in your interview you said you enjoyed working in teams.  (I’ll be honest: I did!)  If so, that “enjoyment” will be pushed to its threshold, particularly those of you in Policy Lab (about which a whole different post of unsolicited advice will come in late December).  I found that ferociously protecting some form of time to sit, quietly, alone, uninterrupted was the tonic for too much togetherness.  If you have kids, I just don’t even know what to tell you about that since I understand that mommies don’t even get to pee alone.
5. Grad school, in some ways, is just not fun.  I’m sorry, and I struggled for the best and fairest way to put this, but during my first grad program, I was just about the most irritated, upset, forlorn, despairing person who felt like this potentially AMAZING experience was just being RUINED, ruined, I tell you, by: administrators, some of the faculty, Things They Told Me that turned out not to be true, etc., prompting my brilliant graduate program director to sit me down and say something that changed my life, and here it is (ahem): “GRADUATE. SCHOOL. DOES. SUCK”.  It just does.  Star faculty member gets some grant = adios, megapopular class, and hola, hundreds of po’d old and new students whose secret dreams of getting to be someone cool’s research assistant just got dashed.  Cue some sort of protest! Or, “Why do we teach XYZ this way??  This is a PROGRESSIVE program!”.  Yes, well, the problem is that The Man still speaks capitalism here in the U.S., and if you don’t learn how to speak some very basic version of “The Man”, your degree and career will have the shelf life of a bad pop-culture joke (to wit: Anne Heche, Britney’s baldness, Miley Cyrus).  Sometimes you are going to have to eat some lima beans.  You might not ever have to again, but trust me, you’ll be much more upset down the line if it turns out that your dream job has the fairly reasonable expectation that you can speak well using terms of reference that, problematic as they are, are in fact the discourse of your profession.  This is a PROFESSIONAL grad school, meaning that we are here to be professionalized.  That is, at times, about as much fun as it sounds.  (Blech).  The older you are when you start Milano, on some level the more logical this all feels, which is actually one GREAT perk to being an older student: it takes so much more to get upset about at this point.
6. Balancing work AND grad school well is a full-body, exhausting, tightrope walk.  Sometimes you really WILL have to stay late at your job, and even be enjoying it if you’re working somewhere that you like; then you’ll roll into class a half an hour late to get a grimace from your professor, discover you’re behind in the reading by a week, and feel thoroughly frustrated at your lack of progress in the course.  OR, sometimes, you will be up late (late for us 30somethings being, oh, 1 a.m.), and parsing your phrasing in a memo to be JUST RIGHT for your big policy presentation tomorrow, but then you oversleep, roll in late to work, get a grimace from your boss, chug burnt bad coffee to stay awake for the next 5 hours of meetings, and be half-dead with exhaustion by the time you finally get to DO your big presentation that evening at Milano.  These are both true scenarios.  Please do the best you can to practice the art of self-forgiveness.  You will be much happier for it.
7. Some of your friends “out there” are not going to “get” this.  Some of them haven’t been in school since the new millenium was coming in a few years and OMG maybe our computers would all DIE.  So your anecdotes about how amazing and different school is this time, how much more fulfilling, how YOUNG some of your colleagues will seem to you (get this: “they” say “sick” or “ill” now, as a GOOD THING!!!) are not going to be all that fascinating to your pals, as supportive as they might be.  That being said, no better group of people will exist to keep you sane.  Having a group of friends outside of Milano is actually really important to get more out of it.
8. If you see something, say something.  Claim your education, as Adrienne Rich once said.  If you have questions, if you’re concerned about how long/short a timeframe is, if you just plain screwed up your assignment and need help, get in touch with your professor, and present your opinion or concern.  Don’t let things stew.  You don’t have to follow the herd on this, either; if your problem sounds “different” from others, don’t let that stop you.  Different students have different needs, and you may actually find that your concerns as an older, part-time student, are not really going to be best-served through something like student government.  (For one, it might not even occur to you to go that route).  That is ok, as long as you feel like you have expressed your opinion or asked your question appropriately.
9. Relish this.  Relish the moments that you have when your “job” is to read something, think critically about it, talk to people whom I know you will largely find to be smart, capable, interesting colleagues, wear flip-flops, use your student I.D. to go to MoMA for free, get discounts to Carnegie Hall and the opera, just once, go to happy hour and sing bad karoake.  Enjoy the chance to repeat what can be great about being a student: the sense of possibility, new opportunities, and most of all, new people whom you will meet.

Have fun, and I hope to meet you soon!

-Kristen

Winding Down

For those of you counting down the days until the Fall semester starts, there are 13 days. Lucky ol’ 13. Somehow I feel like I’m already behind in my classes though… I have intermittently been working on some “summer assignments” but I’ve been busy interning full-time at a nonprofit consulting firm until recently. Two of my client-based classes this semester require some pre-class readings which I am more than happy to do. Since I enjoy reading about social entrepreneurs and ways to change the world anyway, it hardly seems like work. However, now that I realize there are less than two weeks left of summer, I need to start transitioning from my sun-drenched mind to the colorful leaves of the coming autumn.

I recently spent a few weeks back in my home state of Iowa, which was the perfect end to a summer working in the city. In my two weeks in the Hawkeye state I sat around many a fire pit roasting marshmallows, jet skied on Lake Rathbun, rode a tandem bicycle, drove a 1940’s tractor with no power steering, bailed hay with my grandfather, swam in pools and lakes, visited a Danish winery in Elk Horn, Iowa, went to an actual haunted house, enjoyed a beautiful wedding, photographed the green, rolling hills of The Heartland, counted the stars in the sky and spent time with family and friends that have been missed over the past year (a special shout-out to my special BFF Brendon Persaud!). Coming back to the noisy, gritty, enormous city took only a few minutes for me to overcome. Once I returned, I realized how much I have accomplished and been inspired by over the past year at Milano. I can’t wait to start the next (and final) year!

shameless teaser post: antici…pation

Forgive that Rocky Horror Picture Show reference, please, although if you’re not familiar owing to youth or if campy midnight audience-participation films are not your cup of tea, I apologize.  I know my casual American pop-culture references might make for some undesired confusion, but the fact that I speak in these metaphors actually types me quite specifically within a certain segment of Gen X.  Yes, Gen X: this is my only, but so well-meant, shout-out to any other entering part-time (or even full-time) students from my infamously lazy (according to the regular liberal media) cohort.  Welcome!  If you haven’t been in school for awhile, I’ll have some special words for you soon.

Special words for all, indeed, are forthcoming as we kick off our second year at Milano, hopefully wiser, and certainly more savvy about what words of wisdom we’re going to offer our future/new colleagues.

In the meantime, enjoy the next couple of weeks, and if you are in the process of moving to New York, remember some rain gear, as we are largely underwater this summer.  Naturally on or about August 31, the clouds will part and the heavens will shoot down sunbeams.  Just remember, you heard it here first.

-KD