Planning and chatting about bold requests fosters a sense of community and makes us feel we’re not alone in our struggles-one of our core goals as feminist student researchers. The social aspect of bold requests is one of its key advantages we could certainly make bold requests alone, but it’s more fun to share. We celebrate that request, no matter the outcome. When we make bold requests, we can’t wait to tell each other.
Additionally, it’s also useful to practice bold requests with other PhD friends. Bold requests can make you feel accomplished and proactive. It is all too easy as a graduate student to isolate yourself and quietly despair that you’re not good enough, not smart enough, can’t write well enough, etc. Bold requests have helped us to shift our thinking from “we could never do that” to “let’s try it and see what happens.” They’re like an antidote-or perhaps a multivitamin-for imposter syndrome. However, although they entail action, bold requests are more than that-they are an ethos. Sometimes the requests result in us getting what we want (what we really really want), and sometimes they do not. If we don’t dream big now, we mused, when will we? Sometimes it’s a bit rough and tumble, and you encounter bullies (among other obstacles), but there is also a sort of freedom to graduate school. Graduate school is a bit like playing in the sandbox on a huge playground for us. We both realised the luxury and privilege we had to be in the position of novice researchers. Neither of us can remember exactly how “bold requests” came about, but at some point, we came up with the name and the general idea that we should be bold and ask for things we want-things that may be outside our comfort zones. Here, we explain what a bold request is, what might stop one from making a bold request, and some examples of the bold requests we’ve made (and what happened). One way that we’ve attempted this is through “bold requests”. Both first-in-our-family graduate students, and lovers of learning, we were motivated to make the most of our experiences as graduate students. We are PhD students in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada who began our MA theses together in 2015. You can follow her on Twitter or on LinkedIn: She is currently working on a critical analysis of sexual harassment policy in Canada. Lisa’s research is in how language normalizes sexual harassment, especially in the hospitality industry. Her PhD research currently focuses on the writing that she and other doctoral students do for their degrees. I have them all memorized and would rather delete my character then ever join those cesspools of depravity.Do you have trouble asking for what you really want? This post is by Brittany Amell and Lisa Armstrong, who are both PhD students in the School of Linguistics and Language Studies at Carleton University, Canada.īrittany’s research interests include the research, theory and pedagogy of teaching writing (particularly doctoral writing), and how these areas intersect with and take up calls for a more inclusive academy. I’ve even been messaged multiple times by the same guilds, lol.
Anybody whos ever messaged guildless people with their spam should seriously reconsider their life choices. Or even better, do people enjoy having phonecalls from some shameless company trying to coerce you into buying useless substandard products? Nope.Īnd for the same reason people dislike those sort of predatory behaviours, we dislike guilds where they use some mass spam addon to try to get people to join their substandard guilds. People who thinks it cool to spam guild invites to every single person not in a guild must be really detached from how normal people function.ĭoes anybody like being jumped on the street by crazies trying to peddle some useless product you don’t need and didn’t ask for? Nope. I can relate, I think it’s usefull though in the sense that I get an overview of guilds I would never join, for any reason.