Small Confession

Although I exude the pretense of being a die hard intellectual, committed to a career in academia or some kind of job involving the literary, I have to admit, my dream job looks something more like this.
This is Scott Schuman of the Sartorialist blog (for those few who may not know who he is by now). He is one of the most influential (if not most) street-fashion photographers, mainly shooting in New York but also internationally in fashion epicenters such as Milan and Paris.
Although there are a few photographers that generate half as much buzz as he (notably his girlfriend Garance Dore`[that accent is suppose to go over the -e-, I've forgotten the keyboard stroke in order to make it do that :/]), he still reigns supreme.
Seriously, you travel around the world, and take pictures of well dressed individuals (not to vilify or simplify what he does, he has a great eye for aesthetics, thus why he, out of a sea of fashion bloggers, is prominent). That sounds almost as great as Anthony Bourdain's job with his show No Reservations (the only reason that I put his higher is because even more than clothes I love to eat...no wait, I'm not sure about this one, I'll have to get back to you on it).
Is there a job I can have where I travel around the world and eat great food, take fashion photos, and still have time to write (like fiction write)? I think that no human could sustain with that kind of lifestyle. I think I would explode with happiness if that's all I ever did.
O, by the way, Scott just published a book of his favorite photos (he came to Dallas for his book tour, which I couldn't make it to! Ahhh!!) which is one my long list of books to buy. It looks like it would be a great coffee table book for sure.

Dinner at Eight essay

I've just run into this sight called Wordle. I often look at a blog called ProfHacker that post "Tips & Tutorials for higher ed." Mostly a bunch of professors contributing to a conversation about pedagogy and productivity (at least that is what their word clout suggest). The application creates word clouts that according to the blogger, could be utilized for textual analysis. Just finishing my essay for one of my English classes I decided to give it a try.

Can you guess what the topic was about? (Click for larger view)
Well this essay is one of the major reasons I haven't posted lately (sorry) among other things (laziness, lack of motivation, and all those other nasty words and terms).
Hopefully next week I'll have an interview with some new people that are outside of academia??? :O I know!
Until then.

Interview with Sean McCarthy

For my latest interview I met up with Sean McCarthy, my graduate mentor, for a quick interview over what it is like to be a graduate student and to gain some insights into the experience.
Sean is currently teaching a class at UT called writing in digital environments that, as the name suggest, explores ideas in and around writing in the internet age. His research area is also focused on the same subject. Besides teaching the aforementioned course, he is also the assistant director of the Digital Writing and Research Lab and just last month won the DIIA Graduate Student Instructor Award.
Sean has done and seen many things and lived quite a life before landing here at the University of Texas here in Austin. After getting his undergraduate and masters degree at the National University of Ireland, Galway in 1994 he got certified in ESL and taught in Australia for a year. When he got back to Dublin he got a job at a academic publishing company writing abstracts for academic journals but growing weary of the tediousness of the job after a year and a half went on to get a job at the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) were he taught business communications. He did this on and off for three years, taking a year of in the middle to work on an online start-up company that developed online educational resources for K-12. After the online company and while still working at the DIT, he attained a 40,000 euro grant to make a documentary with a friend on Irish culture and history and the Irish language. Getting restless with his career up to this point, in 2003 he saved up some money and sold his car and traveled the world for a year, eight months in Asia and about two months in Australia and to Minneapolis to meet a friend that was currently undertaking a Ph.D program and then he had an epiphany. He saw graduate school as a good opportunity to keep on traveling but to make it more of an intellectually invigorating experience. He then started applying to graduate schools and got accepted into Tulane University but after Hurricane Katrina was placed here at the University of Texas where he's enrolled in the doctoral program. Like I mentioned before, Sean has done quite a bit and if you get to know him at all you will quickly find that he is ambitious and will take on as many projects as any human can handle.
I apologize for teasing out his career history for such an extent but I just wanted to make the point that graduate school isn't the next logical step after ones undergraduate degree. In a later question to Sean, asking him to give advice to potential graduate students, he said to wait at least a year. He's not the first one to tell me this for everybody, and I mean everybody that I've spoken to about graduate school has given me the exact same advice. Graduate school is an expensive endeavor and from what I hear more than a little rigorous. When asked what a day in the life of a graduate student is like, Sean simply replied, "busy." I can attest to this for I have about a thirty minute to an hour slot with him on Mondays after his class. I've heard/read horror stories from people who have gone to graduate school and either quit or finished only to learn that their Ph.D wasn't necessary for their career. Not to say that you shouldn't go to graduate school, because by all means if anything you gain immense amounts of knowledge and meet great people in fields you are interested in but as I'm learning through this experience with IE, it's a decision that should be well informed and well thought out.
There was more on my conversation with Sean but these were the major point really that I wanted to point out for this post. If time, and my knowledge allows, I may put up the audio file from our conversation sometime soon.