Carry on

I’m here listening to one of my favorite songs, and I think it fits really well with how this halfway point feels. There is something about Carry On Wayward Son that matches this moment of the semester. This middle of the road feeling is strange because it is not the excitement of the beginning anymore, but it is also not the relief of having reached the end. It is more like looking at myself and thinking, okay, now I can actually see better where I am, what changed, and what is still missing.

And if I claim to be a wise man, well it surely means that I don't know

If I'm being honest, I think the biggest thing this course has changed in me is the way I look at my own research. Before, I knew my project mattered to me. I knew I had a theme I cared about. But now I can see much more clearly how much I still need to deepen it. And I do not mean that in a hopeless way. I mean it in a very real way. This course made me realize how much epistemological grounding I still need, how much more carefully I need to work with bibliography, how much more intentional I need to be when I read and analyze. I do not think I had fully understood that before.

And that realization has been uncomfortable, but useful. Because once you notice that your foundation still needs work, you cannot pretend not to see it anymore. I think that is one of the biggest lessons I'm taking from this first half. Not just content, not just authors, but a different awareness of myself as a researcher. I can see better what my project still lacks, what kinds of references I need to pursue, how much I still need to grow, and even how important it is to expand my research beyond the references I was already used to. I have been trying to look more at international literature, trying to think of my research in English too, trying to make it able to circulate beyond my immediate context. That shift in thinking is very real for me.

Of course, part of me wishes I had more time to sit with all of this properly. We enter a master’s program knowing it demands a lot, but knowing that and actually living that are two very different things. So I think this halfway point also brought me a more honest view of my limits. I want to deepen more, I want to read more, I want to strengthen my theoretical basis more. I'm not where I want to be yet, but I'm moving.

There'll be peace when you are done

And then there is the PBL part, which, honestly, has been one of the best surprises of the semester for me. I really like the way we are working. Compared to other courses, this one feels much closer to what I imagined post graduate school would be. Everyone reads, everyone arrives with something to say, everyone has a slightly different interpretation, and then the room becomes a space where those perspectives start meeting each other. I like that a lot. I like that I don't have to sit through that old dynamic of waiting for someone to ask who actually did the reading. We just start from the assumption that we are all there, all involved, all bringing something to the table.

That has made the classes feel much more alive to me. I come in with my own reading, shaped by my experiences and by what caught my attention in the texts, and then suddenly I'm hearing five or six other ways of seeing the same material. Sometimes someone notices a detail I completely missed, sometimes a colleague makes a connection that changes the way I understood the text, sometimes I leave class feeling like we learned something that was not fully in the article itself, but came out of the discussion. And I think that is beautiful. It feels collective in the best sense.

At the same time, I do think I still need to improve when it comes to problematizing more deeply. I feel I am doing it more than I was in the first weeks, but not as much as I would like. A lot of the time, the difficulty is not that I don't want to question an author, it is that I still don't always feel I have enough theoretical basis to push back well. Sometimes I understand the argument, but I don't yet have enough confidence or enough knowledge to challenge it properly, so I end up accepting some things too quickly. But even this, to me, is already part of growth. At least now I know that what I need is not just more opinion, but more repertoire, more theory, more depth.

Though my eyes could see, I still was a blind man

And when I compare myself to the person I was in the first week of the course, I can already see movement. My theoretical repertoire has grown and my way of looking at my project has changed a lot. In fact, that is one of the reasons I'm rewriting it. Not because I want to erase everything and start over, but because now I can see the empty spaces better.

The portfolio has also become a very meaningful part of this process for me. I genuinely enjoy the idea of gathering everything there, because it feels like I'm not only recording what happened, but building a story of what this master’s experience is doing to me. I already wanted to have something like that before, so in that sense it connects with something I value personally. But what I have liked most is the way it makes me pay attention to the experience of the class. I take notes about what I felt, what struck me, what felt interesting, what made me think. Not just what was taught, but what moved inside me while the class was happening.

And I think that changed the way I viewed classes, because it stops being only technical learning and becomes something I live through more fully. Later, when I write, I get to revisit that moment and rethink it. So the portfolio, for me, is not just a requirement, it is part of the way I process what I'm learning. It helps me notice that I'm not just accumulating content.

So if I ask myself what I still need for the second half, I think the answer is very simple: I need more reading, more depth, more theoretical grounding, and more clarity about what I need to search for in order to grow stronger as a researcher. But I also think I need to trust the process a little more, because I'm already doing something important, which is paying attention, recognizing the gaps, and refusing to stay still in front of them.

Carry on, my wayward son