Instant noodles for brunch – 20 cents
Tall caramel macchiato – 3 dollars and 17 cents
First human contact at 4pm – priceless.
***
The past few days I’ve been plagued with a bad cold and recurring coughs. In between book requests to the good folks at the HLS library and recurrent coughing, I miraculously managed to finish two books and an article about the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray. As a side note, Murray used to teach at my university around fifty years ago before he became an ordained Jesuit priest. Anyway, I still have quite a few deadlines coming up for fellowship applications in particular and I am quite at a loss how to make sense of the overwhelming task before me. Slowly but surely, I am settling down on the topic of one particular chapter, my second case study about American influence on the formation of international norms about church and state. For the time being, I am focusing on Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Liberty or Dignitatis Humanae, i.e. it means John Courtney Murray or JCM from hereon will be my best friend for the long haul ahead. And I do mean long.
And I am also mulling over writing a post or submit an op-ed to the university newspaper about the vicissitudes of grad student life. I think the GSAS PhDs have it a bit better because they have all the institutional support that they can get. We, doctoral students in the professional schools on the other hand, being not under GSAS supervision, have only our schools to resort to. But HLS in particular isn’t so strong for this one. Though I suppose the grad student experience feature universal characteristics, chief of which is that it is a long and lonely marathon, I could use a bit more support from my institution. I feel like my social skills regress the longer I stay here. Is this what an academic future looks like?
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