what the fuck am i getting myself into with this grad school stuff

Yes, that's my plan. It's just kind of spirit-crushing.

You can retake the GRE once a calendar month and up to 5 times a year, but at $170 a pop I'd rather not. Studying helps, despite what ETS says.

The maths is conceptually not that hard so just practice practice practice at it.

Hey gbx what made you choose Minnesota? How many schools did you apply to? I'm applying to med schools now and I'm increasingly convinced my chances of getting in are about 0.

It is almost a universal thing after sending in your AMCAS to start worrying that your application will get laughed at and nobody will let you into into their medical school. At the risk of sounding all self-helpy, this is totally the wrong attitude, especially since you are going to have state and re-state the reasons why you should get in over and over again once you start getting secondaries back. You need a ton of positive motivation to slog through the 15th or 20th time you have to write 250 words detailing your research experiences or complete an 800-character box about an extracurricular activity that had significant meaning to you.

it's so ridiculous that you have to take GREs for graduate school.

Hey gbx what made you choose Minnesota? How many schools did you apply to? I'm applying to med schools now and I'm increasingly convinced my chances of getting in are about 0.

-- Lamp, Wednesday, 30 July 2008 16:19 (Yesterday) Link

they let me in

i mean, it's also where i grew up, it was one of my top pics, and MPLS is awesome. BUT, it's also the only school that accepted me (I applied to 15). not to be debbie downer or anything.

I am scrambling to finish a paper that is due at 2am Saturday (basically late Friday night) because I procrastinated all day yesterday and this afternoon. This is dudder than heck.

That's a weird time for a paper to be due.

No kidding. His last assignment had a similar due date. I hate it, because it assures that procrastinators like myself are going to have horrible, lonely Friday nights, because there's no way we'll bust our asses this hard on Thursday night.

hahaha, I like this professor's style.

I have a feeling he's passing down the pain from his own grad time.

Well, I have to give him credit. Originally, the due date was Friday, 2am (AKA late Thursday night). But their was a classroom uproar among a group of non-procrastinators, a collection of people I can't understand. They DEMANDED that the due date be changed to late Friday night instead. The prof put it to a vote. By a near unanimous vote, everyone chose to delay it to where it is now. In the other corner, the only other person who voted to keep the due date on late Thursday night, a Thai man with a lazy eye who I've never heard speak out loud, made eye contact with me and I felt like we had a little "moment".

God this paper is driving me nutz.

GET OFF OF ILX

just got my student aid refund the other day, so it's good to know i'm not gonna starve for the next four months

also i am another sucker doing grad work on a friday night so yr not alone, Z S

I got off ILX for an hour and got a good amount of work done. It's nearly over now. To reward myself...I'm gonna get back on ILX for a minute.

Two weeks done, and I am completely digging it. But it has been reasonably smooth sailing so far, and there are choppy seas ahead...

I am happy about one thing, though. The other day I got into a class with David P1m3ntel. For the last 35 years straight, he's had a year-long class where a group of 10-12 students get together and write a paper with him. Each year, it's been published my a major peer-reviewed journal, often by Nature or Science. This year we're writing on the sustainable population of Earth in 100 years, with no fossil fuels. It may prove to be controversial. But it's cool to think that in May, unless my colossal bad luck manages to ruin everything for the first time in 35 years, I'll have my shabby name out there in a peer-reviewed journal (probably for the only time in my life, but hey)!

It may prove to be controversial.

You might want to remove the part about how only members of ILX and your class will survive.

I am scrambling to finish a paper that is due at 2am Saturday (basically late Friday night) COB tomorrow because I procrastinated all day yesterday and my boss dropped the task on me this afternoon. This is dudder than heck.

welcome to the working week already

Shit, I've gotta stop putting fake smartass working titles at the top. Just now, I almost submitted a paper titled "The Worst Paper Ever: My Paper"

when the share drive fails and your 0900 briefing summary winds up retaining your placeholder bullets (e.g. BADMINTON, MARIO KART, CURLING) instead of the actual stuff you spent an hour or so updating, you are allowed to complain

What if I told you that my share drive is failing right now, and my 0900 is in shambles?

Shit though, this title should just be titled "What the fuck am I getting myself into?", and opened up to all

THIS TITLE SHOULD JUST BE TITLED

alright I'm going to bed now

Two weeks done, and I am completely digging it. But it has been reasonably smooth sailing so far, and there are choppy seas ahead...

― Casuistry, Saturday, September 20, 2008 3:58 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

what degree you getting?

sailing

periscope engineer

give me a ping, vasily. one ping only

Medieval studies is the correct answer, but sailing is the better answer.

took only four weeks to go from bushy-eyed optimism to "wtf i am not cut out for this shit"

It never, ever gets better! It only gets worse! haha!

http://www.theminorthirds.com/ilx/latin_homework.jpg

Home: transcribe the first half of that.

"Homework"! Not "Home".

awesome. i am drafting theater plans. not an architect. not a designer. unpacking my dad's drawing board and t square from like 1954 or something. i am just going to laugh at everything from now on.

casuistry is studying.......elvish?

Looks like Greek to me.

srsly i just freaked out over a 5-page paper, and this is the "easy semester"

It's Latin. Those are Roman characters. Those characters evolved into the ones you're reading on the screen in this sentence right now, basically.

I thought I ID'd some lambdas, pis, deltas, and taus, but it seems not.

this is my 'easy' semester and i feel like i am working harder than ever. wtf.
xpost

The pis (the last letter on the first line, say, before the final dash-like-thing) are "a"s. The lambdas (big hooked thing towards the end of line 2) are "b"s. The deltas and taus are "d"s and "t"s.

When was that written, Casuistry, and by whom?

Well, the text is a speech by Claudius, 1st c., but that copy is apparently from a few centuries later, 4th-6th c. That's all the info I have, since it is a homework assignment and all.

Sorry, my bad. It's perhaps a little earlier than that.

WELL JEEZ

I know. It's as if I should be in a class learning how to figure this out.

that is pretty awesome.

yeh. at least the stuff i'm toiling over ... or, rather, meant to be toiling over but not actually reading because, y'know, it's the weekend and really, i'm just going to get up early on monday morning and FUCKING BLITZ IT is in english.

at least, it claims to be.