Empty hotels bearing hearts. Photo credit: Isabel Wong
A couple of days ago, I conferenced with my poetry professor. We had met for the first time in class the day before. Despite our near-stranger relationship, we talked for an hour and a half.
According to my sister, I had never laughed so much during a call. Now, re-acclimating to gravity, the reality that I had work to do hit me. I had an email to write.
Emails, for me, are no simple affair. Despite the etiquette, the “Dear” at the beginning, the “Best” at the end, emails are pitted with writerly decisions. I am a very indecisive person, and this email’s conditions and stakes, I knew, could keep me up for weeks nibbling away at edits.
My task was to find a professor willing to advise me on my senior thesis. My Senior Seminar professor had suggested a few professors to contact. I had only ever met one of them and that was less than 24 hours prior.
While I genuinely want to work with this professor and am grateful the department supports and helps facilitate such relationships, the thought of essentially cold emailing a professor asking for a favor terrifies me. Factor in the time and labor involved with advising and it’s like asking someone to commit to running a marathon with me without knowing whether I even know how to run. Who would agree to that and for a virtual stranger no less?
I tried anyway, writing some, walking some, getting up to drink some water. I wrote a bit more, went to the bathroom, put on a bit of music. I wrote and stopped, wrote and stopped. While reaching for the words never grew much easier, the words I liked began to build up. Each time I returned to my chair I began another rehearsal. I didn’t perfect the performance in one leap. Instead, each brief burst of words addressed a concern of the previous run-through, helped bring my email into being.
This process of rehearsing reminded me a lot of the moments leading up to my call with my poetry professor. Similar to the email, the purpose of the call was to ask for a favor, and I spent some time before the call trying to figure out how to word my request.
While the email’s stakes were arguably greater than those of the call, the conditions and goals of the two meetings—for isn’t an email a type of asynchronous meeting?—were of the same nature: each asked a stranger for a favor. With such similar ends, I suppose it’s unsurprising how similar their means were as well.
After our hellos and how are yous, my poetry professor and I, naturally, began talking about the previous day’s class. I noted how much I had appreciated the writing exercise she’d selected, how generative I’d found it, how it led me to write differently. She shared how excited she was that students had been willing to not only discuss published poems but share their own poems as well.
Similarly, after the greeting, the hoping you are well, I mentioned in my email how I had found the professor’s line of questioning the previous day particularly engaging and eye opening. While this sentiment didn’t launch a 40-minute conversation about accessibility, authorship, and the practice of writing poetry during which my professor and I bonded over our anticlimactic experiences reading Crime and Punishment, it did serve as a transition from speaking about class to expressing research interests.
When conferencing with my poetry professor, I could respond in real time, weave together the ties between us right then and there. Over email, I was limited to what I knew about the professor and her research. Still, I tried to illustrate all the threads connecting us, sharing a bit about myself and my research interests in hopes of building a twine bridge sturdy enough to walk across. In case she wanted outside confirmation or more information, I directed her to my Senior Seminar advisor. It was kind of like telling the poetry professor about my previous poetry professor, whom she knew. Now she understood a bit more about me and my educational background and influences.
After I thanked my poetry professor for accepting my request and we addressed logistics, we talked for another 30 minutes, about poetry and collage and letting ideas stumble into you. As for the other professor, I sent her the beginning of a conversation. I hope for another 30 minutes more.