It’s now two weeks until my UBC classes begin, and, with them, a new phase of my life. I realise also that as this happens the nature of this blog will change. Over the past few months I’ve thought about questions of identity and the shape of my life, sometimes through incidents that have happened to me or situations I have encountered, more often through books I have read. As I begin my master’s this blog will, I think, change a little in focus. It’ll be come something close to an auto-ethnography, describing my experience a student going back to study later in life, re-entering the research university in a very different role from that which I left eighteen months ago.

Writing such an auto-ethnography inevitably raises issues of confidentiality and naming. Clearly the general rules of counselling confidentiality apply, and within counselling situations I’ll only discuss my own reactions and learning processes, not details to do with the client. Outside of the counselling room, though, the situation is less clear. When I was teaching at NUS, one graduate student surreptitiously took photographs and recorded a short video of a colleague’s graduate class, which he then posted on Facebook.  The students were sat, seminar style, around a big table, and several were visible in the video, and yet they had not consented to the recording and were unaware it was being made. I felt uncomfortable about this: it’s a practice I certainly wouldn’t follow. Yet it is important to be able to discuss what happens in the classroom freely, both in terms of ideas exchanged and in terms of classroom dynamics, even if this potentially makes it possible to identify participants.

Solutions? Faculty have a fair amount of institutional power. I won’t name faculty directly because I think the focus should be on the social and institutional dynamics of the role, not the individual. But it will be possible, with a decent search engine, for anyone to find out who I’m referring to when I talk about the person, for instance, who is teaching my Ethics class this semester. I’ll try to write in such a way that individual fellow students in class are not identifiable to anyone outside the class. If anything is said in private or confidence I won’t repeat it without asking permission. I’ll also try to report what occurs or is said fairly, and I’ll emphasize that what is happening is my experience, and in my understanding – it’s necessarily partial.

So here we go. What has the experience of getting ready for graduate school been like, from the other side of the fence? One clear difference between my experience at NUS and my experience here is the level of preparation and extent of communication from the department and individual faculty members. At NUS, we were encouraged to have detailed module descriptions online a couple of months before the semester started. Students who wanted to read ahead or get a sense of workload could thus do so. Of course there were colleagues who didn’t get their descriptions up, but my sense was that the majority did so. At UBC, it’s now only two weeks to go before the semester starts. I’m taking three courses. Two of the are still listed as “tba” and I do not even know who will be teaching them. One does have an assigned professor, but no detailed course description or list of readings to be done or books to be purchased.

A second difference has been in communication with faculty members. At NUS I would always reply promptly to emails from a current or prospective student, even if simply to redirect them elsewhere. At UBC, I’ve had a number of emails to faculty go unanswered, even when they are on important topics: for instance, contacting an academic advisor to whom I have been assigned. I’d emphasize that this hasn’t always been the case –one faculty member was exceptionally helpful. I know the solution to unanswered emails, of course, through having experience of how the university works: make friends with the administrative staff, who will work as intermediaries and assure that a response is forthcoming. Yet this in turn introduces a gendered dynamic. Graduate students in counselling, and indeed practising counsellors, are, by a large majority, female. Active tenured faculty in the Counseling Psychology Program at UBC are, by a small majority, male. Administrative staff are by a large majority female. And so women staff work as a kind of affective glue in the department, filling in the cracks. I’ve seen this pattern in most of the academic departments I’ve worked in, but it’s disappointing to see this in a program that I thought might be uniquely aware of these issues.

I’m not yet sure what to make of these experiences. In the case of the lack of advance information on courses, is this a symptom of the growing numbers of sessional lecturers, often employed at the last minute on poor terms, juggling teaching and practice, who must then struggle desperately to produce a course outline on time and order books? Or am I idealising NUS, drawing narrowly on my own experiences? I certainly had colleagues who didn’t reply to emails, and who didn’t have material ready in advance – perhaps I, with my obsessive preparation and prompt responses, was the outlier? And for me, personally, it’s actually quite relaxing not to have to worry too much about reading in advance: I’ll deal with this on the first day of class.

Just now, sitting in the luxury of the Law Library at UBC, I’m interrupted by people talking behind me. I don’t turn round to look, but I can hear their voices distinctly. An older man, clearly a senior academic, who is asking a female library staff member to help him edit his syllabus to put it online. What he wants is pretty basic: he seems to be trying to cut and paste between Word documents, and is having problems with formatting. A sharply dressed younger man, who I take to be law lecturer, perhaps slightly embarrassed by this assertion of privilege, leaves his table in front of me to help. The member of staff from the library leaves, but the young lecturer is very patient. And then, having helped the senior faculty member, he introduces himself. He is a graduate student, in his second year. He met the older man two years ago, in an admission interview. The older man doesn’t remember him, but gives him his card. What just happened here? An act of kindness, or an attempt to ingratiate oneself, to join a network? Note to self, which is also  good ethnographic and reading practice: observe carefully, describe what is on the surface, wait a little before you interpret.