Jamie Rand: Blog Post 6

Through the past few modules of this course, the course material has addressed different sides of your identity here at Virginia Tech: student, teacher, independent scholar, and research collaborator. Which of these identities do you most associate yourself with? Feel most comfortable with? Or do you think that separating these identities out is a false dichotomy?

Of the four options, I associate myself most with being a student (the stack of books next to me and the list of assignments to complete this weekend speak well to that fact). Also, since I've been one form of student or another for the last twenty-five years or so, I'd probably have to say that it's the one I'm most comfortable with.
You mention that it may be a false dichotomy, splitting those identities, and I have to agree with that. In my (admittedly limited) experience with post-graduate academia, I've come to think that all four of those occupations (for lack of a better term) overlap. As a student, I'm learning how to teach; as a teacher, I'll be learning from my students; as an independent scholar I'll be doing research for my personal work that I share with others, and as a collaborative researcher I'm like the fat kid who's the last picked for dodgeball. Which is my way of saying I'm not very good at it and no one wants me on their team.

Honestly, the "identity" of academia doesn't much figure in to what I do as a fiction writer. Most of my day is spent alone staring at a screen and trying to figure out what comes next in my story. If it demands that I write about something I don't know much about (and stories are slave-drivers that way, I'll tell you what), I hop online or I go to the library to do some research. But the research I do is scrawled notes surrounded by questions marks (?? old sisal ropes--soaked in kerosene to keep them flexible, can i use this???) and it's likely stuff no one will ever really want to read.

My point, through, is that I think of myself as a writer first, not as anything else. The student/researcher/teacher/scholar identification is secondary. Is that a bad thing? Absolutely not. What it means to me is that I have more resources now than I ever have to help my writing--I'm surrounded by people who know more about how to write and do research concerning that writing than I do or ever will. It means any research I actually end up doing can have some depth to it, not this mile-wide-inch-deep stuff you get from Wikipedia or Google.