4 Tips: Getting into Grad School

(originally posted 02/09 at wordpress)


by mae stephenson

I'm the kind of student who knew what I wanted to go to graduate school for long before I had decided on an undergraduate major. Maybe I've just always had lofty goals-- it's not common for my peers to be thinking of graduate school as certainly as I do. By my peers, I mean us lucky women who come from working class families with not a single college degree in our immediate family and get to pay for our education on our own. But with graduation coming up for me (crosses fingers, knocks on wood, and all that other stuff) at the end of summer, it's past time for me start setting goals on actually working toward getting into graduate school. So I recently sat down with one of my greatest mentors, who happens to be pursuing a doctoral degree, to have a talk about an action plan. Always one to try to share and not hoard knowledge, I've decided to write about what we came up with. Beware, some aspects of this plan might be pretty specific to my personal educational history and future goals, but I have a feeling at least some of it could be of benefit to the general graduate-degree-seeking public. Here goes:

First: Forge relationships with a variety of letter-of-recommendation-writing folks including faculty, staff (think student affairs, academic advisers, etc), community leaders, and mentors you've had for long periods of time.

Herstory: bell hooks

(originally posted 05/08 at wordpress)



by mae stephenson

bell hooks Born Gloria Jean Watkins on September 25, 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. bell hooks uses lowercase letters for her name to shift focus from the author to the ideas within her writing.

bell hooks is arguably one of the most important authors of our time. A self-described "Black woman intellectual, revolutionary activist," "cultural critic," and "advocate of feminism," hooks has authored over thirty books and dozens of articles focusing on the interconnectedness of race, class, and gender oppression and domination. She coined the phrase "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" to describe these intersections. She also writes with an important and somewhat unique emphasis on self-love. In her dedication to ending class oppression she uses a writing style accessible for people outside of Academia and makes appearances on television and radio programs. Some of her titles include Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, Where We Stand: Class Matters, Teaching to Transgress: Education As the Practice of Freedom, and The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. In addition, she's written a handful of children's books including Be Boy Buzz and Happy to be Nappy after having a difficult time finding children's books that didn't enforce patriarchal notions of boyhood and books that taught young black girls to be self-loving, respectively.

Thoughts of a Voluntary Object

(orginally posted 7/07 at wordpress)



by ideath

Lots of women in Portland get paid to take off their clothes. I've been doing it, myself, for about twelve years, on and off. When new acquaintances hear that I'm a nude model, it often elicits surprise, then