ABSTRACT
Ten years have now passed since my first year of graduate school at Carnegie Mellon, the time and events upon which "Conventions, Conversations, and the Writer" was based. Carol, Tom, and I created "Nate" to disguise my identity at that time and later as my program of study and professional life unfolded. As I will discuss, we were nervous about revealing the co-identity of researcher and research subject; we needed some of the conventional distance between researcher and participant in social science writing to analytically discuss 1 year out of someone's intellectual life. As I now reread, the narrative underlying this research report speaks back, and I appreciate again the ethos of Nate in his struggle to gain academic and professional fluency. Although our research is primarily an analysis of textual practice, the struggle of a writer to produce those texts is apparent. What is graduate school for many students but a struggle for identity, in a contested professional space defined by genre activity, quarrels over epistemology and method, and a search for affiliation? For me, graduate school was all of that plus an intense personal process of rendering oneself anew. I am proud of what I accomplished that year, and I prefer not to repeat the process.
