stupid lazy grad students

I just went to a meeting of SLATE, the interdisciplinary group for Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education, which was one of the things that attracted me to Illinois. It was a complete repeat of the Linguistics department meeting: Students ask for faculty to be more proactive towards them. Faculty immediately respond by calling the students lazy for not taking initiative.

Your grad years are the most important. Take advantage of every second. No one will do anything for you. Soon you'll be professionals in the field and people will expect you to know everything. When we were grad students we initiated XYZ and no one held our hands.

I wasn't crazy about this message the first time around, from Linguistics, but at this meeting, I found out that SLATE does not even have a WORKING EMAIL LIST. At least 50% of the people on the list have already graduated, and many current students are not on the list. OK, when I signed up for SLATE, I filled out a form with all my personal information. Shouldn't those forms be used to... update the email list? So an organization with a paid grad assistant (who is not even a SLATE student) cannot maintain its email list, yet it expects me to take initiative to organize a series of workshops on statistics or bring in an outside speaker for a symposium.

I'm sure it doesn't help that SLATE is run by my sociolinguistics professor who assigned every chapter in the textbook EXCEPT the one on EDUCATION.

I am one of those people who goes to an inordinately large number of meetings and events. (My theory: it comes from being from a small town, where if everyone isn't personally involved in everything, nothing happens.) This year I spent approximately 6 hours on SLATE. I went to the fall reception, two talks, and this meeting today. If I wasn't at more meetings, it's because nothing else happened. Apparently that's my fault, for not taking initiative to invite people to do things over the nonexistant listserver.