Forgotten Gratitude: It’s Hard to Remember to Say ‘Thanks’ When There’s a Paper Due Tomorrow

By MRI

In some ways, “Faculty Appreciation Day” may feel to the average student like a bit of an ironic observance. After all, I pay tuition and work hard in all my classes. Surely a ‘thank you’ for all this struggle and expense isn’t required as well! But if I stop and think about it, I have to admit that faculty members probably aren’t exactly getting paid buckets of cash to teach at Fuller. I have gathered over my time here that that Fuller is not a place populated chiefly by Professors who dream of nothing more than becoming wealthy and academically famous. Rather, our Faculty teach here because of their love for students, and their value for the profession of psychotherapeutic caregiving. Nevertheless, Faculty still may find themselves in the unenviable position of being the most easily identifiable representatives of the institution which is FTS. Allow me to include a little of my own ‘thick’ narrative to clarify.

I am a fifth year student in the clinical psychology program at FTS. This is tantamount to saying, “I am 26 years old, but don’t have a full time job. Instead, I spend most of my waking hours writing papers, doing mountains of reading, and wondering what normal adult life is like.” And I suspect normal adult life includes a grown-up-sized paycheck and a little free time. By most standards, I live a strange sort of life. It is in some ways terrifically rewarding and challenging, and in other ways interminably overworked and tired. The deadlines are endless, the bureaucracy can be daunting, and sometimes it feels like students are fighting the system.

And with all the exhaustion, frustration, and disappointment that are a natural part of graduate study, is it any wonder that our poor faculty bear a large portion of our suffering? After all, they are the ones we see daily—they make us come to class, read Levinas, and write twenty page papers on everything from non-reductive physicalism to the concept of heteroscedasticity (or something equally arcane). However, I have an inkling that most Fuller Faculty members have not chosen their profession because of sadistic tendencies. Rather, our Faculty are some of the most insightful, committed and caring people I have had the pleasure of meeting. I have had the privilege of being stretched and challenged in ways large and small throughout my time here. Everything from the type of clinician I am and will continue to become, to the type of spirituality I live out is indelibly marked by contact with our professors.

What I’m trying to say is that my gratitude for the impact Faculty members have on my life is regrettably overdue. I encourage us all to set aside our frustrations, with grad school life in general and the institutional life of Fuller in particular, and to find time to give some personalized, heart-felt words of thanks to the faculty persons who have meant something to each of us. After all, it’s not only we who must cope with them, but they who must cope with us, and since I’m uncertain who has the harder job, we may as well say thanks.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 11th, 2006 at 9:22 pm and is filed under From the nation of Indig. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.