In the British nursery rhyme, Thursday’s child has far to go. Akan speakers assign names based on the day of birth: a girl born on Thursday is Yaa. Yaa is the name of a female deity and also of an Asante cultural hero, Yaa Asantewaa, who led the final Asante revolt against the British.

When I was young, I thought that “far to go” was a pretty lame—what? fortune? Anyway, I would have much rather been “fair of face”, “full of grace” or even “loving and giving”. My travels to Ghana, where you can often tell the day a person was born by their name and which is far from my home left me reflecting once again on that invocation from my childhood. I didn’t draw any exciting conclusions, just thought about it, and that I had, indeed, come far.

Now, again, I find myself reflecting on this scrap of rhyme, bit of memory. This year has marked a lull in my enthusiastic pursuit of academic goals. It has become difficult to maintain the excitement that brought me to grad school and that focused me so intently on the project that I have set for myself.

I’m still committed to my project, but I realize what makes people leap from project to project, what makes people take forever to write their thesis. Graduate work, in particular the PhD, is far to go.

There are, in every project, points at which the effort to sustain the project is disproportionate with the satisfaction that one is currently deriving from it. In an anthro PhD, I think that period may be most of the second year: classes are over or ending, intellectual demands are increasing, and yet you still have nothing that the discipline takes seriously as academic work, that is, fieldwork.

As my fieldwork approaches, I’m finding that my excitement is returning, although with considerable trepidation as I contemplate a year removed from friends and family. And I’m very glad to see it, because it is a welcome companion on my journey.

Filed under: academics thesis