Dear all,

Happy October!  I wanted to follow up our fantastic meeting and welcome-back party last Thursday with a brief note of thanks for a remarkable first month of the fall term.  The grass-roots energy that I witnessed at the meeting was inspiring, and I can’t wait to see what we, collectively, are able to do this year.  I’d like to thank Jared Champion for his excellent meeting summary (see the governance page).  Please mark your calendars for the following upcoming events:

Thursday, October 25th, at 6.00pm: AMNESP GSA Meeting (226 Bay State Road, Grad Student Lounge)

Finally, a note about the rewards of collective action.  In last week’s meeting I referenced an article by scholar Claire Potter, whose blog (“The Tenured Radical”) is hosted by The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Potter asks us to consider when competition–often considered a negative force in academia–might serve as a positive force for students and faculty alike.  An excerpt that has stuck with me since I first read the piece:

“Good competition results in people pushing each other to be better.  Good competition is when you look at a colleague who is publishing a lot and instead of making a list of the reasons you can’t, or don’t seem to want to, write, thinking instead that you are going to bring your game up just a notch.  Good competition is when you are interviewing for a job, you’re scared, you’ve heard all sorts of rumors about “what they really want” and you decide to go for broke and leave it all on the floor in your job talk. Good competition is when you have a writing group that is being supportive, but not just supportive – you are goading each other on to really finish something…Good competition is, when you are brainstorming with a group of colleagues, coming up with an idea that is just a little bit better, more original, and more viable, and is going to push the group harder.”

http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2012/04/when-is-competition-a-positive-force/

It’s my hope that this year our GSA will do just what Potter suggests–namely, to inspire all of us to work that much harder, both for personal gain and for the collective good.  When one of us does well from AMNESP, we *all* look good, because our program gains ground in the esteem of a wider community of scholars.  This has tangible benefits in terms of funding: as one professor recently put it to me, fellowship committees like to reward scholars who come from productive programs.  We’ve recently seen some great success on the part of our graduate student community; my hope is that we’ll all help each other to raise our game ever higher this year.

See you all soon, and my best wishes for a good month.

Casey