Summer In the City

The campus seems almost eerily empty this time of year. Students are on holidays, staff members away on research, conferencing and working from home, and even the number of postgrads around seems smaller than usual. Especially on days where the sun is shining but the temperature is moderate, it's easy to convince yourself that everyone is off at the beach or somewhere equally salubrious.

Summer at the university for me always foregrounds the transition between academic life as an undergraduate and as a postgraduate research student. The absence of teaching and other demands on your time, the general quietness, even the air-conditioning, encourages me to see this as a time to get down to work. And this has been reasonably true for me - the two chapters that I think are close to done were finished in the summer period last year. On the other hand, idealising this quiet space of time enables excuses to be made when the normal rhythms of semester-time return, and for you to become pettily resentful of noisy undergraduates encroaching on the previously calm campus.

It's also hard to resist the logic of 'well, if everyone else is on holidays, it won't matter if I play around on the internet for a bit' and other forms of procrastination. (This blog is reflexive practice, people, it isn't procrastination - really!) I'm attempting to combat this logic by working a relatively strict schedule, with defined work times and no work times. When the library is open is work time, when it isn't - no work. While I'm not totally sticking to this in practice, I'm hoping to get enough work done that I can take a week off in December with a relatively clear conscience. Summer away from the city - that sounds like a plan.