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

marginally enough iirc - but although i was better prepared the exam was way tougher this time around

glad to hear it. best of luck.

when d'you hear?

GET IN GET IN GET IN

van der vaart is a qualified MA

GET IN

end of month btw

cool

For darraghmac:

When the black herds of the rain were grazing,
In the gap of the pure cold wind
And the watery hazes of the hazel
Brought her into my mind,
I thought of the last honey by the water
That no hive can find.

Brightness was drenching through the branches
When she wandered again,
Turning sliver out of dark grasses
Where the skylark had lain,
And her voice coming softly over the meadow
Was the mist becoming rain.

I remember this being "definitely on the Leaving Cert" EVERY SINGLE YEAR. Eventually it did come up, I don't think I answered on it.

yeah it's about a cow. i didn't fancy the others that year so a kid from up the road that went to another school reckoned we should pool the different poets we'd covered and insisted i go over that one in partic. worked out well, i didn't drop a mark on paper 1.

tryint to recall now if poetry was paper 1 or not but anyways, ladies and gentlemen, that was austin clarke, with a poem about a cow.

I can't actually remember what poetry came up my year, I don't think I did that question (or did I?). Would have been Paper 2 anyway.

yeah paper 1 was composition now i think back.

dropped marks on paper 2, sorry austin ;_;

quality time management skills, me, time to work through the night trying to hammer my dissertation into something passable.

that frenzy, that's how shit gets done in the real world. embrace it.

I need to learn to work more at night. I'm old and sleepy

fuck the real world my man, with a philosophy masters my world is the dole queue.

You're in good company - I'm getting a Visual Arts MFA. I'll make something useless and you can think about it. We'll make a fortune

done. After 1.5 hours of sleep I've been rolling on adrenaline all day, and now that I have no use for it I feel like having a fight. Cahmereyou.

Okay, so. Pretty much decided to get a Film MFA, time to figure out how to do that.

I've enrolled as a non-matriculated student here in SLC, going to take a grad class or two. The plan, outside of school, is to move to SF in May 2012.

My undergrad GPA is pretty terrible (2.5), partially for stupid reasons that weren't really my fault, partially because I hadn't quite figured out how to do college until pretty late in the game, so I've got that to overcome.

I want the MFA before I turn 30. I'm 24 now, turn 25 at the end of the year. Seems like I've got a big ol' ball of stuff I need to put into motion, not sure what to do first. Any general or specific tips?

Hm, I don't really know about the American system, sorry to be of no help. What does that GPA translate to in UK degree terms? A third? A 2:2? If you're applying as a mature student they might be a bit more lenient with you if you can prove you are now motivated enough to exceed your previous standards.

Anyway, I am just checking in to state that I am now officially a PhD student. All enrolled and everything. And I kept seeing Fay Weldon wandering the halls today.

It's 2.5 on a 4.0 scale, 2 being a C, 3 being a B, etc. if that helps translate at all.

me too! exciiiiting.

i wandered by the library to get my card on the system and ended up having this two hour chat with the librarian where she demonstrated about ten different databases and then talked me through my research plan to see what kind of materials i'd be using and what she should try and order in. and then after i got home i found like three emails from her w/ links to stuff i might need! and books i might want to actually buy! It is a different world. I am feeling about 90% less 'what the fuck am i getting myself into with this etc' than i was yesterday.

uh, xpost

2.5 is somewhere in the Desmond range, I think my Desmond converted to something like that and I got into CMU based on good meeting with the program director, work experience and a kick ass personal statement.

nick, why do you want to do an mfa in film?

btw it's been two years (?!?!?!) so i'm goin in on this again.

think if i mention this in the library thread people will hit me with a bunch of depressing likelyhood-of-finding-employment statistics, but i'm readying applications to start at MLIS in 2011. re-reading old ILX personal statement threads, dreading receiving and reviewing transcripts, tracking down friendly professors, etc. kinda pessimistic about the competition for places this year though.

I thought there was no fucking way they would let a dope like me with my terrible track record into library school but I got in a-ok. I am sure you will have success getting accepted, schlump!

Cool ! yes u should get an MFA in film! Come to the dark side! OK so what schools u applying to?

Haha I love it that dude says "I want the MFA before I turn 30". I applaud your go-getterness, but personally not a day goes by when I am not glad of taking some time before starting mine. I graduate at the end of the year. I am 32 (and a half). What's the big deal? Think you're gonna die or go bald when you hit the 3-0? Well you might go bald but bald guys make good filmmakers

Also - I know you have made movies cuz you said it here before. What kind of movies are they? What do you want to make?

the quuestionsss

Why an MFA: Probably going to end up supplementing my fat independent filmmaker salary with teaching, which is something I genuinely love anyway. Also, I really do want to just learn more about film.

Schools: SFSU and and Cal Berkeley for now, really want to keep with the SF plan. Not applying till next year, though, have some SLC business and also want to clean my transcript up best I can between now and then.

Before 30: Oh, just an arbitrary goal. I mean, I've had a few years out of school and have a few more if all goes according to loose plan. Also my maternal grandfather has irrepressible hair, so I'll be just fine, thanks.

Kinds of movies: I haven't really focused, made a lot of doc and some narrative stuff as crew, some small NN/AG/exp stuff on my own, but haven't really been the main idea man on anything for a few years. (Experimented with not being a filmmaker for a year, made $40k, had health insurance, the works. Sucked.) That's also something I'll be doing in the next year, as I've got kind of a ready made crew out here right now.

Berkeley has a film program? I know it has a documentary program in the Journalism school, which looks pretty straight. And then they have their theory program. If they have a production program (an MFA?) I don't know anything about it.

SFSU has always seemed like a good choice to me. Don't know the faculty but an affordable school in an expensive city that seems to take its (probably massively underfunded) program somewhat seriously.

Don't look at Academy of Art University. It truly sucks.

Then there's the Art Institute and CCA, more of an experimental and art school respectively. the former is mad expensive but has beautiful campus. make sure to crash their events at least.

And SF is a great city to watch films in. I would stan for it anytime.

admrl yer at calarts right, did you have a film in that student showcase this year?

I got a friend in the program and I caught a couple

I thought there was no fucking way they would let a dope like me with my terrible track record into library school but I got in a-ok. I am sure you will have success getting accepted, schlump!

ha hey thank you abbott/t/t!, that is nice. i forget, are you in AZ? i am shooting to study in canada. i'm working on writing a personal statement that makes me sound like i'm bluntly aware of the reality of getting the qualification right now, mentioning that i wanna study pretty broadly within the programme to prep me for tangential career paths. i think this is a good (rootsy, recession-savy) approach. good luck re-schmoozing your profs.

Hi puff puff post,

I didn't, but I probably know your friend, or have at least heard of them!

hey so it turns out my shitty dissertation wasn't so shitty after all. By which I mean I tricked um with clever rhetoric and style.

awesome!

reading over the markers' comments now when a little tipsy my feeling is more 'yeaaaaaaaaah' than my previous 'oh god how have I tricked them so effectively and when are they going to catch me out'. so, yeaaaaaah. I still don't appreciate my friends extolling my alleged brilliance to everyone they see, though. (but God bless em. Especially the one who spent about ten hours editing my final product for me.)

(while it's certainly too early to ask, how is your work coming along, c sharp?)

aw, if friends can't be embarrassingly noisy about our supposed brilliance then who can! yr markers presumably know how to tell fancy tricks from decent ideas, you should probably trust them on this one.

it is-- going okay, i think? i am reading things and going 'this is an excellent and useful fact!' which is a really rare and good feeling. not 100% sure i know what i'm doing yet but i'm at least producing copious notes.

― ksh me thru the phone (c sharp major),

looooool

turns out my shitty dissertation wasn't so shitty after all

Awww! You didn't even know yer own strength.

http://lh6.ggpht.com/_riwnmjGkcQA/SE8k6FcysiI/AAAAAAAAAVM/HUol1mwPKOg/California+Disneyland+041.JPG

hooo lordy

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/

66k isn't bad dough

46. corvus_caurinus - November 14, 2010 at 08:03 pm
Well, it's clear from the article itself that our dear author is accustomed to being paid by the word.

ha

I worry about this stuff since I teach in the humanities & I've adjusted my writing assignments to try to avoid this, but it's not possible, so long as the writing is happening outside of class. I continually toy with the idea of having all writing, at the undergrad level at least, be done in class. I doubt that in my discipline, at my level, one of these guys could write at the grad level.

The flip side of all this is that the evaluation of students that matters happens independently of grading on assignments---it happens through dialogue, etc. This means that evaluation is ripe for prejudices, but you can't just rest on the written word anymore, I think, if you ever could.

some of the experiences I have had at uni make so much more sense after having read that article

don't have time to read it just now, but this is something that's interested me since I looked at the service that google mail ads was shoving at me (e-mailing yrself stuff for your dissertation? No need!). I think if I had money to blow mindlessly I'd try some of their more high-end products (high-end to the point of utter disbelief - you can get a 20,000 word masters thesis with 50 references to me in a week?) just out of interest.

yeah, I want to say that if these people can produce work that meets the so-called standards of a discipline, that just shows that the discipline is an abomination. But I'm only speaking at the grad level; everyone knows that attention to grading at the undergrad level is pretty, er, variable, and as I said yesterday, not the basis of the judgments on the part of faculty that really matter, i.e. for letters of recommendation.

I'm considering this seriously, either for a developmental psychology PhD or a school psychology program, but I think I've left it too late for the fall semester of 2011. I'd have to cram for the GRE in a single weekend in order to get the scores to the schools in time (I think), for a start. I'd have no serious problems with the verbal, but the quantitative is going to take some serious revision and practice.

I'm only just getting to know the US grad school system, so I fell like my best shot (at fit-to-advisor, financial aid, picking an appropriate school, choosing between dev psych and school psych, *everything*) is to wait till next year. On the other hand, just hammering out a few apps for the Dec 15th deadlines and seeing what happens is really tempting.