Occasionally, graduate students will ask me if it's "OK" if they develop an idea from a previous paper into a new research project. Their tentativeness on this issue suggests that, perhaps, they've been somehow trained to think that their graduate program consists of a series of unrelated papers, with no organizing principle (personally chosen) allowed to interfere. On one level, the historical distribution requirements in an M.A. program like ours do seem, at first glance, to rule out any "continuity" between individual projects--but, of course, it's easily possible for a student to pursue a particular set of interests across even the most disparate of courses. The most successful M.A. students I've seen so far have been able to transform their Plans of Study from plug-n'-play requirements into a means to a larger end. It isn't necessary for them to bring the "end" with them into the program; rather, the "end" emerges as the students think about the relationships between courses, skills, theoretical approaches, and so forth. Our responsibility as instructors, then, includes encouraging students to see courses not as self-enclosed boxes, but, instead, as potentially open-ended.
More to the point, most of us develop projects out of questions raised, but unanswered, by yet other projects. My interest in didactic historical fiction grew out of my work on 18th- and 19th-c. histories of women. Similarly, the article I've just started researching----representations of Anne Boleyn in 20th-c. historical fiction--which has apparently no relationship at all to my usual output, emerges from the article on "Royal Lives" I wrote for this Companion. In other words, it's not just "OK" to see our individual projects as links in a larger chain--it's the way most of us go about our work.
I had the very unpleasant experience of being lucky enough to have my work simultaneously shaped by two seminars I was taking at the same time to such an extent that I ended up with one primary argument shaped with equal weight by texts read in both seminars. Now, normally this would have made me ecstatic; it means that I had a breadth of knowledge from all of those readings that I could negotiate as I made an argument which was very important to me (and which built on my MA essay).
I say "unfortunate" because the prof for one seminar refused to let me write on the same topic as I was writing on for the other seminar. I had to have clearly different arguments, despite the fact that both seminars had nearly equal weight in leading me to my main argument. Therefore, after a quarter of very intense intellectual engagement, I was left with empty hands for that seminar at the end of the quarter and had to throw something to together to appease this unfairly bureaucratic demand. Needless to say, I didn't do too well, and to add insult to injury, received very detailed comments about what, precisely, the problems were. Gee, you think?
Posted by: Mano | March 27, 2005 at 07:34 PM
One of my undergrad profs said it was cheating if I used research from one class for a project in another class. I wish he had thought your way.
Posted by: Susan | July 29, 2005 at 11:09 PM