by Carl Olsen

Several nights ago I attended an undergraduate InterVarsity meeting for the first time in the nearly six years that I’ve been here at UC Berkeley.

The Graduate Fellowship was invited to attend this meeting since our fearless leader (Carrie Bare) was giving a talk on Esther. We were told being there would encourage the undergrads and that afterwards we could connect with those in our disciplines.

Naturally I was excited about meeting all the budding Norse mythologists and reassuring them that, “Yes, you can pursue a career in Odin and Thor and still be a Christian!” And so I shook off the weariness of another week of teaching and dissertating and headed to campus.

It was a bit intimidating at first: picture an out of shape, slightly unkempt, absent-minded Ph.D. candidate in about the most obscure subject on campus, wading through a sea of sharp, fit, energetic students about a decade younger. But of course I was there to serve, not to flatter myself.

The room we met in reminded me of our old InterVarsity Large Group rooms. The tiered rows of desks, the movable chalkboards, the worship band spread out in a line along the front. Just like old times. We sang. We listened. We talked in small groups. We sang again. We ended.

Apparently there was some miscommunication, because there was no “meet the grad students” session after the talk was done. I wandered around a bit, wondering how to make contact but didn’t see anyone wearing anything even vaguely Nordic.

There were no co-eds breathlessly running up to me to tell me how much I reminded them of J.R.R Tolkien or C.S. Lewis or asking if my beard was real. Not even a baseball cap saying “Hermeneuts Rule!” So I did what I usually do when faced with a crowd of people who all know each other. I wandered in the background waiting to be noticed, chatted with some of the other misfits (i.e. grad students), and went home.

This is not to say that the undergrads were inhospitable (they did say hi), but being put in the position of an outsider made me all the more mindful of what I would have told any undergrads going on to grad school (excuse me while I get on my soap-box): Pursue Community! It is the lesson I’ve learned hardest since leaving Santa Barbara (though Heidegger and Ricoeur are pretty tough too).

When I started grad school, I put little effort into finding a campus fellowship — after all, my home church was nearby in Oakland, and I was an adult now (well, in a manner of speaking) — wasn’t I through with “student ministry”? And to be honest, I was pretty insecure at the start. Did I really belong? It was at least a year and a half before I attempted to connect with the fellowship at all (for only a few meetings), four years before I joined a small group, and only this year that I began attending Large Group regularly and building relationships with others in similar fields.

Actually, it’s mostly just this semester that I’ve been getting to know other humanities grads. Up until now I’ve been surrounded by Christians who are computer science people (both academic and professional) or in the hard sciences (lots of physics and bio-chem). Not that there is anything wrong with those people (they are some of my best friends), but it has been incredibly satisfying to find others who have had to work through the maze that is Critical Theory and for whom deconstruction isn’t a dirty word. And next year I leave them behind to research in Iceland.

I’ve no one to blame but myself. In any case, I am extremely grateful to those friends I’ve made, whether in the humanities or in fields that actually make money. They’ve been an enormous support to me in the midst of the considerable stresses of grad school, and I hope the next Norse mythologist will be more diligent in finding similar friends when they get started.