Year Two Through
Year Two: I thought I’d made a terrible mistake. I thought I’d unwittingly abandoned history (my undergraduate degree) and thrown myself into a discipline I knew nothing about and could never know anything about because what even is German Studies? I grasped at literary straws and struggled to sort through new academic jargon ( see Year 1 of grad school). I was therefore elated to take a history class this past semester, to prove that maybe I had made the wrong choice in field. But taking that class actually made me feel happier in my chosen home of German Studies. Because that's what year 2 has felt like: home. It seemed that history in graduate school is a lot more historiography (at least in this course it was), or talking about what everyone has said about events, rather than exploring historical oddities and quirky personalities and events (not the analysis of events) that changed the world. But literature? The main chunk of German Studies I'm investing myself i