#from an empire you might know if i call it its post 1867 name | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

kaiserin-erzsebet · 8 months ago

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My academic hot take: There is a very real frustration in studying an "obscure" topic that increases the feeling of distance between you and "laymen" (aka anyone who isn't your advisor/someone studying the same thing.)

And I certainly don't begrudge people who have a more accessible or widely known topic. It's just a fact that the question "what is your dissertation about?" takes way longer to answer when you have to give a 101 lecture first (and you have to calculate whether the person asking is patient enough for that lecture)

#grad school stuff #and i do mean 'obscure' in quotation marks #i study a big european empire #and i still had someone with a PhD in a different subject ask why i was going to Austria to do my dissertation research #when i told me advisor he sighed and said “sometimes you have to call it the Austrian empire for people to understand”#my answer to what is your dissertation about:#a doomed emperor of a country you had no idea had two empires #from an empire you might know if i call it its post 1867 name #people who study the American civil war dont have this problem

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