I recently had a student reach out to me because they were thinking of applying to grad school and they wanted to learn about the process and hear what my experience had been so far. These types of moments are always exciting to me, because I love school so much and I’m always willing to try to bring someone else into the fold. Since she hadn’t had tonnes of experience in speaking with faculty members, this was one of the main processes she had questions about. Who should I talk to? How do I start? How do I get a letter of reference? What if they don’t want to do something for me? This made me think about the following:
I think that an integral part of the university experience is having a professor that you have a personal conflict with. It’s unfortunate that it’s true, but you form weirdly personal relationships with professors when you’ve been taking their classes for four years and by the end of your program, you know them on a first name basis, and they have a weirdly intimate knowledge of you as a person through reading the work that you submit to them. When you get to know people that well, it’s natural that there will be a few who you don’t vibe with and vice-versa.
I had a professor multiple times in my undergrad who seemed to just not get me at all. Most of my peers didn’t have as much of a problem as I did, but my learning and writing style just didn’t fit with her teaching style at all. I did badly in her classes and there were times where it was hard for me to not believe she wasn’t being vindictive. I had multiple interactions with her that I, now someone with university teaching experience, think were handled badly and borderline unprofessionally. Maybe our conflict wasn’t as bad as it seemed at the time, but I think that you should learn to be compassionate when you are the one who has all the power in a relationship.
One of the things that other students and I loved to laugh about was that she had an accent that would sometimes disappear while she was lecturing. I don’t know specifics about her story, but I do know that a lot of it came off as phony and that I wasn’t the only who thought so. In particular, my Salvadoran classmate found her accent pretty silly.
At the end of my first semester as a master’s student, the Art History department had a party at the house of one of the professors. The hosts rented a karaoke machine and we all had a few drinky-poos over the course of the night, blurring the lines of professional decorum. Everyone’s karaoke performances got more and more ridiculous as the night went on and it was fun.
At one point, one of the students chose Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ la Vida Loca” and put my arch nemesis on the spot to perform it. She was a quiet person in groups but couldn’t back down because of how many people were there, and instead got up and did it. Her performance of the song was a train wreck and it was clear that she didn’t know a lot of the words that were in it. As she butchered the song and struggled through the Spanish lyrics, I had to leave the room because I was beginning to laugh really hard.
This wasn’t the end of our relationship and there was much bigger conflicts that happened down the line, and even some cordial interactions to go with them. It felt so good to be vindicated that night. In general, I get along with people easily and am a non-confrontational person, so whenever I do conflict with people, it seems all the more intense to me. Might seem shitty, but boy does it rock to your enemies lose.
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