PhD. Asst Prof
@ursinusenglish
. Writing a book about domesticity & the war on terror. I know hundreds of Bollywood songs by heart. he/him. Views are my own.
I once had a student use ChatGPT for a paper and when I asked them about it, they said they used AI because they “couldn’t find any scholarly sources about The Great Gatsby.”
I made my summary assignment into an in-class open book quiz that students could write freehand without notes or laptops and they still managed to use AI to cheat. I’m getting terms appearing that don’t exist in the reading and full on quotations that aren’t in the text lol
Every time I teach from this book, I get a racist student eval at the end of the semester that says the book and I are anti-American for teaching about empire lol. That’s how I know the book is an effective pedagogical tool.
wtf is the point of having a tenure track job if you can’t even stand in solidarity w/ your students?? Like wtf are we even doing if we’re not helping them fight the good fight? Isn’t that what teaching is about? Taking what happens in the classroom and applying it to the world?
God in Heaven, hear my plea.
Please never let Scheana Shay be on Dancing with the Stars as punishment for her absurd behavior on
#PumpRules
.
Your faithful servant,
Jay
I got into my top choice for the PhD on a Wednesday. The Eng dept sent me health insurance packets, where to live, school demographics. I was hella excited. On Friday, I got an email from the asst grad director telling me my acceptance was sent by mistake & was for someone else.
This makes NO sense. Why would Bravo fire a fan fav and the new generation of
#RHOBH
? She, Garcelle, & Sutton are the best team to take on the annoying and racist Mean Girls.
To fire Crystal after Dorit made explicitly racist remakes throughout the season…shameful?!
Friends! Some personal news! I’m excited to share that I’m joining Ursinus College as an assistant professor of English in the fall! It’s been a long road, and I’m really lucky to have an amazing support system. 🙏🏾😃
Lol apparently it’s Grad Student Appreciation Week, which is hilarious bc if we were appreciated, we’d be paid a living wage. Making $20K/yr (often less than that) w/ the same load as TT faculty isn’t appreciation: it’s exploitation. And many of us aren’t paid from May-Aug.
Once again, PhD granting institutions should let alumni keep institutional access to digital library resources! It’s the very least they can do after not paying grad students a living wage for years!
Ariana has every reason to hate Tom… and i quite simply don’t understand the Tom apologists who throw shade at her for building healthy boundaries. He almost killed Maya!
#PumpRules
What makes
#RHOBH
so hard to watch every week is Kyle, Lisa, Dorit, and Erika’s inability to simply listen to Garcelle and Crystal. It’s infuriating and exhausting to see these white women demean and gaslight the only two women of color in the show’s history. It’s no longer fun.
Man, get rid of student evals altogether. It’s long past due. Once again, I got some racist shit in mine this semester. Apparently my WAR ON TERROR class had too many “political views” and I need to “focus on teaching English.” That’s just one of a few like this…1/2
one of the grad students asked if it's true that professors get a raise for every dissertation they chair, so i took them for a spin around the parking lot in my banged up dented honda
Just taught what feels like the worst class ever. And it’s all my fault. I’ve got too much going on. I was so flustered & scatterbrained that a student whispered, “Are you okay?” I feel so guilty that I’ve let my burnout leak into the classroom; it’s unfair to students.😞
FRIENDS! I passed comps! I am officially done the exam process of the PhD and now make the transition to writing the prospectus and diss. It feels AMAZING to be done with this part! Thank you all for your consistent support & kindness.
#AcademicTwitter
is awesome. Happy day! 🤗🙏🏾
I graduated! 🥳👨🏽🎓 I’m officially Dr. Jay Shelat! My dissertation director, Christian Moraru, hooded me. And my family is here to celebrate. I couldn’t be happier.
Being on the job market is worse than writing the dissertation. But doing both at the same time in the middle of a pandemic is a massively isolating turd cake.
Me: teach Anne Lamott's "Shitty First Drafts" almost every semester and tell students, "All drafts are shitty the first time, and even the second or third time. It's part of the process! Embrace it!"
Also me: "Wow, if this first draft isn't perfect, I'm gonna hate myself."
I finished Daniel Immerwahr’s brilliant HOW TO HIDE AN EMPIRE and can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s so well-written, teeming with suspense and shock that kept me turning the page. More importantly, it tells a history of the US that’s rarely heard: this nation is an empire.
Friends, these comments and retweets of support warm my heart. Thank you! This happened in 2017, and I'm in a PhD program now where I'm very happy. I defend my prospectus next week.😃
This isn't a common thing; it won't happen to you. Depts mostly have their shit together.
🎨Today, The King unveiled a new portrait by
@RealJonathanYeo
at Buckingham Palace. The painting - commissioned by The Draper’s Company - is the first official portrait to be completed since His Majesty’s Coronation. It will hang in Draper’s Hall in London.
Student evaluations came back, and while they're mostly really great (yay!), some are blatantly mean and/or stupid. Someone said I should take my excitement "down a notch." Another said I shouldn't expect students to do the reading... in a literature course. 😐
Finished formatting my diss. 😃 The table of contents for my dissertation, Ordering the Chaos: Family, Nation, and Terror in Post-9/11 Anglophone Fiction. It feels good to be done!
Just a reminder that it's awful/evil/heinous for search committees to ghost applicants. Not hearing back after a search has moved on is terrible. Search committees! PLEASE make sure with your HR depts that your job portals let applicants know about the status of their apps!
Flight attendant: Is there a doctor on this flight?
Dad: *nudging me* that should've been you
Me: Not now Dad
Dad: Not asking for a PhD student to help, are they?
Me: Dad, there's a medical emergency happening right now
Dad: Go and see if crying helps
Friends, I’m delighted to announce that I’ve signed a contract with the
@UMinnPress
for my book Domestic Denial: Terror, Race, and Home in Post-9/11!
@ThePennywark
is a dream to work with and I couldn’t be happier and more excited to publish with my dream press! 🥳
I spent $1000 applying to PhD progs bc the GRE was so expensive take (took the regular & the dumb, sexist, racist lit exam) & to send. The academic hill I’ll die on is this: the GRE is a scam. Depts should remove it from the app process. Also, don’t makes apps expensive. Duh!
This is absurd. What’s the point of the phd if prospective students are expected to be established scholars by the time they start? Illogical. Reminds me of someone I know who required their students have at least one peer reviewed article out BEFORE exams.
My jaws keep dropping as I go through 70 PhD applicant files. People w/ 2 coauthored papers & an interesting solo writing sample don’t even make it to the top 10 in my pile.
The level of knowledge, research experience & passion these kids bring to the table is just remarkable! 🤩
This is the very happy face of someone who’s officially finished year 3 of the PhD. It’s been a wild ride with teaching, exams, the prospectus, the first chapter, and COVID. Super relieved to be done with this year, and I’m so looking forward to year 4, whatever it may bring.🙌🏾🙏🏾
I often don’t realize I’m at a breaking point until the last minute when the dam is ready to bust. The dam burst today when I started sobbing during dinner. My parents calmed me down & reassured me. They’re the best. The PhD is hard but it’s nice to know I have great support.
What’s worse is that I let evals upset me. But they’re used in tenure and promotion materials. Evals are already biased against women and BIPOC scholars. This is even more challenging at a PWI. So frustrating having to navigate this shit every semester! 2/2
Friends, I won
@UNCG_ENG
’s James Evans Award for Graduate Service!! 🤗 It’s heartening to win, and I’m grateful to be in a such a wonderful department. I’m truly lucky. 🙏🏾
Can’t tell if I’m sad or just really tired. Either way, I cancelled class for a mental health day and immediately got kind emails of support from students. 😭🥺
Unlike Kyle, Crystal is more than willing to recognize her faults and grow from them. Especially as those faults relate to her brother. She’s one of my favorite Housewives
#RHOBH
It’s the first day of my last year of the
#PhD
. Here’s to a semester of conclusions and new beginnings. So stoked to meet my new students. Who knows what this semester will bring. Happy First Day of School!
I hate not being paid in the summer. No paycheck from the end of April to the end of August.😮💨😩 In what world do higher ed institutions think that’s sustainable?!
I hate this question. It’s rude and disservices those of us who taught during these really hard semesters. On top of that, it suggests that colleges shouldn’t have shifted online to save students, staff, and faculty from COVID.
Friends, I’m teaching a graphic narrative course in the Spring, and I need help picking texts! I know I’m teaching Persepolis Part I, Maus, and Understanding Comics.
I’d love suggestions for 2 or 3 more books, preferably by non-white and queer authors. Thanks!
Me to my students: Writing is a process. And you're always gonna be developing these skills. It's an ongoing thing.
Me to myself: WHY ISN'T THIS PERFECT THE MOMENT I WRITE IT
Between that 2-1 load tenured prof offering unsolicited publishing advice and that grifter K*aren K*lskey posting a video about how to do Zoom interview make-up,
#AcademicTwitter
is a hellscape today.
Writing a diss and working on job docs at the same time sucks because they're two profoundly isolating experiences, no matter how much support you have.
Imagine for five seconds, if Muslims or Hindus publicly prayed for a candidates victory like this. Like, what if I got all my fam and friends and had a pooja for Biden? You know what would have happened. This country’s racism is inextricably intertwined with religion.
What fucks me up is that despite bone-deep pandemic exhaustion, work continues to race at an absurd velocity. It’s so hard to keep up. It’s like being caught in a revolving door that spins faster every time you try to slip out.
@jshelat1
just won the Mary Ellis Gibson Award for Transnational or Postcolonial Scholarship for his essay "A Man in Search of Family: Kinshipand Decline in Michel Houellebecq’s Submission" forthcoming in Texas Journal of Literatureand Language, vol. 63, no. 3, 2021.
The worst thing about job market anxiety is how it permeates into everything. Reading for fun? "I would teach this book; I hope I get a job." Lesson planning? "This is so fun to teach; I hope I can teach it next year if I get a job." That looming worry about the future is awful.
Always fun to remember the time a professor wrote “You’re not fucking Emily Dickinson” on my paper after circling all the em dashes.
I’m not in any way angry about this. I thought it was hilarious. And she’s was right—I had 9 em dashes in two paragraphs.
Easily one of the worst things about the job market is applying to the same jobs your friends and colleagues are applying to. I just want everyone to get a well-paying and stable job without competition so we can chat about books with each other and our students all day. :(
My feet hurt so badly after I teach that I’m *this close* to wearing sneakers with dress clothes. My transformation into an Indian uncle is almost complete. I already walk with my hands behind my back and I press buttons at the gas station with my middle finger.
Everyone kept name dropping Foucault, and I had no idea what it meant, so I asked, “What is a Foucault?” I thought it was a literary device... I was so embarrassed that when I went home, I YouTubed a bunch of videos about him.
This is the worst my imposter syndrome has been in a really long time. I feel so stupid. Despite others telling me otherwise, I can't believe them. Writing a diss is so hard, & I keep comparing myself to others. I know I shouldn't but I can't help it. It's awful.
One way we can tell academia is hella broken is by how many documents each job asks for. It’s overwhelming to even think about let alone sit down and write, especially as I’m trying to finish the diss, publish articles, prep for the semester, and relax. IT’S TOO MUCH.
Hey, TT, secured academic line friends. Here’s a reminder to be kind to grad students who face financial precarity, especially in the summer. It’s hard.