First Year Of Graduate School Research Articles

Notes from the Second Generation

Notes from tbe Second Generation NOTES FROM mE SECOND GENERATION by Beth S. Wenger Beth S. Wenger received her Ph.D. from Yale University and now teaches modern and American Jewish history at the University of Pennsylvania. During the 1995-96 academic year, she will be a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University's Center for the Study ofAmerican Religion. Her articles have appeared in AmerlcanJewisb History and the Journal of Women's History. A forthcoming book, New YorkJews and tbe Great Depression, will be published by Yale University Press. 93 In 1987, while I was in my first year of graduate school, an article in the New York Times Sunday magazine declared that feminist criticism, "once a sort of illicit half sister in the academic world," had "assumed a respectable place in the family order.,,1 For me and for most of my colleagues in graduate school, such firm proclamations seemed plausible. I had studied women's history in college and participated in graduate seminars that usually included some discussion of gender. I belong to a generation of teachers and scholars that did not pioneer but rather inherited a new arena of academic inquiry. To be sure, we were legacies to an emerging, not a fully defined, intellectual diScipline. In a span of only two decades, women's history has progressed through at least two distinct stages. What began as an effort to provide new information about women and reclaim women's experience for the historical record has evolved into a more complex consideration of the role of gender in shaping categories of knowledge, tradition, and power. The enormous conceptual growth in women's history informed the intellectual initiation lElizabeth Kolbert, "Literary Feminism Comes of Age," New York Times Magazine, 6 (December 1987): 110. 94 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 of my generation ofscholars. Yet, having arrived in the academy during the second stage in the development of women's studies, having benefited from female teachers as role models, and having had access to a growing body of scholarly literature about women, we have not yet fulfilled the optimistic predictions announced so confidently in the New York Times. Feminist scholarship has indeed become part of academic discourse, but its relationship to other disciplines and its impact upon the master narratives ofhistory remain inconsistent, often contested, and in the worst cases, even non-existent. Few fields have been slower to integrate gender analysis than Jewish Studies. A traditionally text-based area of inquiry, centered on intellectual rather than social history, and lacking a rigorous theoretical approach, Jewish Studies has lagged noticeably behind other fields in aclq'lOwledging gender studies as a legitimate enterprise. Nevertheless, in my own diScipline ofJewish history, there has recently been a remarkable increase in works about Jewish women. From studies of Jewish women in the ancient world through works that address the differing gendered experiences ofJewish modernity, the last ten years have witnessed an enormous production of Jewish feminist scholarship.2 The literature of Jewish women's history has certainly increased at a rapid pace, but I am not convinced that Jewish historians have taken significant steps toward integrating gender as a category of analysis. How much have gender perspectives transformed our writing and teaching ofJewish history? Do our students leave our courses with an understanding ofgender as integral or rather as marginal to Jewish experience? While our knowledge ofJewish women's lives continues to grow, how much is that knowledge changing the ways we conceive and present Jewish history? While space does not permit a thorough exploration of these issues, I want to raise a few of my greatest concerns about the current status ofgender studies within Jewish history. 'The list of such works would be fur too lengthy to reproduce here. See, for example, the recent anthology in Jewish women's history which contains essays covering the biblical period through twentieth-century America. Judith Baskin, ed.,Jewish Women in Historical Perspective (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991). Notes from the Second Generation Women as an Objectified Category 95 During the last year, I have attended two Jewish history conferences, both organized by leading male scholars, which made conscious attempts to include papers about...

Discovery of Self

Teachers have often used logs in social work education to promote students' integration of academic learning with experience in other areas of their lives. This paper describes one use of logs whereby students reflect on their experiences in field placements and in the classroom during their first year in graduate school. As part of practice seminars facilitated by professors and field instructors, the logs are a forum for facilitators to encourage, highlight and augment students' learning about themselves and their relationships with school, supervisors and clients.

Reflexivity and alvin gouldner: The coming crisisin 1990

My initial reading of The Coming Crisis occurred in my first year of graduate school (1971). One year earlier I had read Friedrich's, A Sociology of Sociology. I was particularly taken with the Friedrichs's volume because of its discussion of the prophetic strain in sociology. It seemed to me then, and still does, to be an important and attractive part of sociology. Gouldner's book, unlike Friedrichs's, seemed to raise a ruckus among faculty (perhaps this interpretation is exagger ated because it was my first year of graduate school when every intellectual disagreement is an important one) who had read it even among those who had not. The graduate students I knew were fascinated, appalled, and some applauded the book. Part of the effect of the Gouldner book was to place political discussions of the discipline in the forefront of graduate student consciousness. However, I remained unconvinced of the overall thesis of The Coming Crisis. I had com pleted a study of early American sociology {The Sociology of Knowledge in America, 1883-1915). My reading of early American sociology and particularly that of Albion Small's writing had suggested that at the turn of the century Amer

Managing the Internship Application Experience

Applying for internship always takes a great deal of time and is often emotionally draining as well. It seems reasonable to prepare for and organize this "transition experience " as much as possible. Students can usefully begin preparations in the first year of graduate school. A time line of activities for preparing internship applications is suggested and a decision grid for ranking sites is described.

Social support and stress during the first year of graduate school.

Social support and stress during the first year of graduate school.

Social support and stress during the first year of graduate school.

Social support and stress during the first year of graduate school.

The Elements of Identification with an Occupation

ONE of the major problems to which social psychologists are now addressing themselves is the process of identification and the nature and functioning of identity in conduct. These concepts are of strategic importance in any theory which attempts to relate the self and its workings to an ongoing social structure. As Foote 1 and Strauss 2 have pointed out, individuals identify themselves-answer the question "Who am I?" -in terms of the names and categories current in the groups in which they participate. By applying these labels to themselves they learn who they are and how they ought to behave, acquire a self and a set of perspectives in terms of which their conduct is shaped. It appears theoretically useful to break the concept of identification down into its components, both for comparative purposes and in order to provide finer tools for the analysis of specific problems of social structure and personal development. This paper is an attempt to provide such a breakdown for one type of identification, that of a man with his work. Its purpose is to discover, by comparing three groups of persons about to enter the work world, some of the threads from which the fabric of occupational identification is woven. The data on which this paper is based were gathered in the course of a study of the genesis of identification with an occupation in students doing graduate work in physiology, philosophy, and mechanical engineering. Graduate students were chosen for study not only because they were convenient but, more importantly, because of the central character of graduate school in developing professional identifications. Interviews lasting from one-half to two hours were tape recorded with students ranging from first year in graduate school to those about to receive the Ph.D.3 While identifications are not so clearly defined in the first year as they become later, the consistency of our findings indicates that the process is already well started at that time. The interviews were conducted informally. Qu stions were asked only to clarify points or to introduce some area in which information was desired that the interviewee had not spontaneously discussed in answer to the initial question: "How did you happen to get into. . ..?" Comparison of the three groups suggested four major elements of work identification: (1) occupational title, and associated ideology; (2) commitment to task; (3) commitment to particular organizations or institutional positions; and (4) significance for one's position in the larger society. In what follows we present brief discussions of each of these variables and comparisons of the physiologists, philosophers, and mechanical engineers 4 to illustrate their dimensions and