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

presentation went ok, my slides were sort of terrible and i spoke way too fast but what can ya do

now that i'm pushing 32 hours, it is time to sleep and I AM SO EXCITED

ala conference is in chicago next year, was trying to figure out if it was worth paying up for a student membership or even going

It doesn't hurt to pay for a student membership cause it's very cheap. I joined right before the ALA conference in DC. If it's in your hometown, you should definitely go. I think my employer paid for it, but it's still pretty cheap if you pay for it yourself. Lots of public-library employers are there and you can get through about 10 interviews a day. Even if you plan to stay in Chicago it can be an easy way to connect with Chicago Public and possibly other local libraries. (I got my job this way.)

i hope donna rouge got to sleep. sometimes at that point you suddenly can't make yourself go to bed!

i conked out immediately! got about 8 hours (and am about to get 8 more)

Kevin (from a few days ago, sorry), I'm a tenure-line faculty member in philosophy, closing in on tenure time (gulp). I should be fine (I've written a bunch and have a book contract but you never know), but I'm starting to get a weird eye twitch which I'm sure is caused by the near-constant stress. I have a book on grad school called Getting What You Came For that cites a study that the average grad student (and junior faculty member) experiences daily stress at a level higher than what's felt by those whose spouses have just died. My spouse is still alive so I can't say for sure, but I buy it.

I guess I need to get back to work. Which, to be fair, I would enjoy doing. But I am also enjoying lying in bed and contemplating a nap.

it would be helpful if on all those affirmative action cards they want you to fill out and return that there'd be a box to check for "grew up really fucking poor and am currently working two jobs that eat up most of my time so sorry if my application isn't perfect mr/s ivy league degreed department chair." it's almost enough to make one wonder what marx would think of the academic structure his most fervent contemporary american readers have established

isnt that what your personal statement is for

we send out job application letters, c.v.s, teaching philosophies, dissertation abstracts, and writing samples. you can work a sentence or two in there, but there's no personal statement per se in my field. which in the end is probably a good thing. i know a lot of people who'd be like, "fuck this system -- all the rich kids get the fellowships"

it's all about your letters, kamerad: ask your advisor to write about this. Letters get read; personal statements don't.

my advisor has made it clear over the years s/he (anonymity) could care less about my personal life and/or any attendant struggles i've overcome. fortunately the letter about my achievements is strong. my bone of contention is that we spend six+ years of our early adult lives immersed in marxism and marxian inflected thought. but then when the real world kicks in, all of a sudden it's class-blindness time. it's a pretty sad joke

i think it's pretty clear marx would find the relationship between the university and its graduate students appalling. i recognize the situation you're in, kamerad. at least you're almost done with this bullshit!

could care less

<Considers it; remembers "another think coming" thread; decides not to bother>

Could those of you in school say why you chose what you're studying

Psychology. MSc conversion course: ie "to enable [me] to build on the transferable skills ... attained in [my] previous undergraduate degree in a related subject and provide [me] with the necessary level of study ... acceptable to the British Psychological Society". Or so it says here. I'm doing it part-time while still working part-time as a hack.

and if it's working for you so far?

I think so. Early days yet. Ask me again once I start getting lab reports back :/

so true, horseshoe. and i'd wager the specter of marx would probably advise steering way the hell clear of graduate school unless you have family money. the thing is, if i had to do it all over again, i would. the experience of reading so intently for the past seven years has set my mind right

if i may be so bold, grimly fiendish, what is the "another think coming" thread?

Euler, thanx for the info! I appreciate it.

Concisely: Taking Sides: Another Thing Coming Vs Another Think Coming

thanks, aimless, though i'm afraid my expensively-gained exegetical skills aren't up to parsing g.f.'s <second thought>, unless it's aimed at questioning my "could care less" usage. in that case, i could care less; it's probably a british v. american english type deal

As any grad student should be able to explain, "I could care less" is the sarcastic version of "I could not possibly care less about this matter than I do at this very moment" (NB: when this construction originated, speakers were more verbose).

Due to the widespread use of the "I could care less" variant, the sarcasm it displayed when coined has been reduced to a vestigial appendage, barely noticeable, as with the human tail bone at the base of the spine. In ordinary converse, the two phrases are functionally equivalent.

well aimed

like i said

(^trick post^)

kamerad, you don't need to invoke Marx to make your point, which is that while academics are very liberal as a rule, they are not especially interested in subverting what they take to be a well-functioning meritocracy. I guess I don't think that's inconsistent. I am bothered by the tendency of my colleagues to work for salary maximization, to the extent that it affects the kinds of the topics they write about as well as their loyalties toward colleagues and students. But I understand that most people just want to get theirs. I just wish we were more like Socrates and less like Donald Trump.

unless it's aimed at questioning my "could care less" usage. in that case, i could care less; it's probably a british v. american english type deal

Got it in one, and -- that given -- nicely done, too.

In ordinary converse, the two phrases are functionally equivalent

I won't argue that, in the US, they probably are. Not much I can do about that; hey ho. I rep for US English over UK English almost all the time. It can't be perfect ;)

In the UK: "could care less" is still -- thankfully -- seen as an aberration.

I'm glad all the style guides I make up in my head to deal with work issues are limited to technical writing

euler, i appreciate your thoughtful post. i'm also aware that i'm complaining about the team i'm trying to join. i just wish the american academy did function as a meritocracy. it's always struck me as ironic that the more prestigious the school, the more free time you have to write your dissertation, and the less teaching you have to do. as for my own experience, my graduate school cohort is the most privileged group of people i've ever been involved with. many parents pay rent or outright buy homes for classmates by a factor that far exceeds anything i saw as an undergraduate, and forget about the equivalent for high school. while for the less fortunate, conference travel is prohibitively expensive, for others a plane ticket and hotel doesn't call for a second thought. the effort to get that first article published isn't as onerous when all you do is teach and don't have part time jobs besides to make ends meet. and there are the frustrating intangibles. for instance, schmoozing with professors is a lot easier if your backgrounds are similarly middle- and upper-middle class. none of this is taken into account in any substantive way (just theorized by people like walter benn michaels and michael berube), which wouldn't be so annoying if we weren't expected to absorb socialist thought, and spit it back out in our own work and (worst of all in this context) at our students

kamerad, how do you propose taking intangibles like the ones you're mentioning into account in hiring?

In my experience my graduate student colleagues were not overly privileged; none of them as far as I know received any money from parents. However, our stipends were substantial enough, and the town cheap enough, that some students bought homes on those stipends. It sounds like my economic experience in grad school was quite different from yours---had we held a job outside of our fellowships, we would have been kicked out of the program. I traveled a lot on my department's coin, thanks to an advisor with funding.

It's pretty awful that your advisor won't consider your personal details in writing your letters.

I have ambiguous feelings about the state of the meritocracy in academia, but I suspect being on the inside colors my views substantially. I find the herd mentality of so many academics silly---they write about what everybody else is writing about, pat each other on the back, and use that to boost their fortunes. I'm not saying it doesn't make financial sense, but it's disappointing. Whatever resentment I have toward my field (and I generally don't have much, just dirt on my shoulder) is that it doesn't reward risk-taking, but neither does our economy so I guess this is par for the course.

or instance, schmoozing with professors is a lot easier if your backgrounds are similarly middle- and upper-middle class

This is completely ridiculous. Either put a bit more work into learning about the academic interests of your colleagues, or learn some basic social skills. Socio-economic background has nothing to do with it.

Oh, come on. A similar non-academic/cultural background will obviously facilitate easier subsequent discussion; similarly, a perceived feeling of distance from that background will make it more difficult to put those "basic social skills" into action. And that's before we get anywhere near the social confidence that comes from wealth.

I don't think Kamerad's saying it's impossible; just that social background can give you a massive head start.

Yes, it's a 10m head start in a marathon.

Give me a break, we're not talking about shmoozing over wine and cheese during intermission at an opera. A simple "I liked your recent paper in Journal of XYZ" is fine, or if you haven't put in the effort to learn what your colleagues are working on, then a simple "what are you working on lately?" will do, because it's not as if academics need to be prodded into talking about their research.

But besides that, it's a lot easier to socialize with people in one's own age group, so personally I'd be less focused on finding common ground with older professors and spend more time making connections via their students instead. Academia is sensibly hierarchical in that way.

NTBT, you make a fair point. and it's in the cultural climate of the humanities not only to pretend that there's no substantive difference, but that there shouldn't be. in practice, though, it hasn't been my experience. i've made friends with the parents-bought-me-my-house-during-school crowd. hanging around them, and seeing what they've gotten away with, in terms of not having to hand in papers, or using one paper for two seminars, and so forth, was somewhat embittering. "what are you doing this winter break?" "temping." "how about you?" "hiking in south america." when schmoozing with professors, in-house or at conferences, temping is probably a less appealing topic of conversation than hiking in south america. but maybe i have a chip on my shoulder

kamerad, I can certainly sympathize with your complaints/critiques about academia. But your description of your advisor's reluctance to refer to personal struggle or overcoming in a letter might not be motivated by icky disinterest in you as a person and might instead be a purely-in-your-best-interests awareness of what kind of letter will get you a job. That might still be a sign of a problem in the field, but it might not be a sign of a problem in your advisor. Now that I'm on my first hiring committee, I have to point out that *anything* in a letter that looks like the letter writer is making an excuse for the candidate gets them put in the B pile pretty quickly. You're looking for someone who is unambiguously the best/smartest/most qualified. When you have 290 apps for one job and you only want to invite 10 people to the MLA you're looking for anything shaky in a letter in order to put that person aside. There are ways to point out "hard working" qualities that would be positive and would let the letter writer refer to outside employment, but generally speaking such references start to look like the blind date equivalent of "she's got a great personality".

i never once spoke with my adviser about putting anything in my letter, aside from asking him/her to write one for me. i'd already learned year ago, from awkward conversational tilts on my part toward the personal, that there wasn't any interest there beyond the writing i was producing. that's not my complaint. my complaint is that it's quite clearly the case that there's a relationship between a background of socioeconomic privilege and success in the academy. in any other profession, people would just say, "well, no duh." but in the humanities, at least, there is an agenda to teach social justice to undergraduates that is not extended to the training and hiring of new professors. how could this change? i have no idea. but maybe starting with asking questions about parental finances, not just race, would be a start

Of course, the root of the problem is funding, and if I had the choice between hiring a student or professor who afford regular trips to conferences and one who couldn't, I'd also hire the person who had money, i.e. was capable actually doing their job by disseminating research. In that case, simply asking about parental finances won't change anything.

Conferences aren't pay-as-you-go resorts, they're job duties, and therefore any dept who can't afford to let its people do their jobs should be asking itself why it exists in the first place. But yeah, I know, that doesn't solve the problem either.

"there's a relationship between a background of socioeconomic privilege and success in the academy"

kamerad, I've been trying to make it clear that I'm sympathetic with your situation, but the claim I just quoted seems hard to defend, and it's certainly likely to put a chip on your shoulder that isn't going to help you, practically. It's hard to defend: I work at the highest level of my specialization, and know my fellow workers pretty well. Few of them came from what you're construing as privilege. The ones I consider the most eminent, who are now my close friends (despite the thirty year age gap), come from working-class backgrounds, and like me, they're first-generation *college* students, not just grad students.

The most privileged people I know in academia are the children of academics: they definitely have a leg up on how the whole thing works. But it's not $$$, it's culture.

Actually, I want to say a bit more about culture. Learning to talk to colleagues isn't a trivial thing to learn, but if you want to succeed, you must learn to do it. My cultural learning curve in grad school was very steep: I'd never had feta cheese, or eaten Asian besides take-out Chinese, or been to Europe, or had wine besides Mad Dog, and so on. After one year of grad school, I'd done all of those (and by the end of grad school, lots more). To make it in academia, it helps to be able to fit in at academic social events, and that means being comfortable with and fluent in high culture. But this doesn't require having $$$$, and that's been one of the oddest lessons I've had to learn. Being able to navigate a conversation with a European fifty year old scholar, while just a 20-something grad student, is definitely doable even if, like me, you come from a low culture background. For one thing, you can talk shop. For another thing, you can show you know a little about their world, and can express curiosity.

I promise this is my last post for a while! But I'm very interested in this conversation.

grimly fiendish wrote of "the social confidence that comes from wealth". No doubt wealth does this, but it's not like it comes *directly* from wealth. It comes from the exposure to culture, manners, and education, that wealth brings. But you can get those things without wealth. I just don't yet understand how, exactly. I know that my undergrads, at a big state school in the midwest, don't generally have these, and it hurts them tremendously. They don't come to office hours, they don't come to colloquia, they don't come to department parties, and when they do, they don't know how to talk to a prof. That affects both how I think of them, and how they do when/if they move on in academia. Can these matters be taught? I think we're running up something that lots of nineteenth-century novels were interested in, but that I don't yet understand.

euler, your points are well noted, and i wouldn't want to refute them. there is a self-congratulatory spiral of resentfulness by which one can slouch and shrug one's way out of a job. in any profession. furthermore, it's horribly self-destructive to enroll in graduate school only to pull some bitter kid in the back of the class routine. what i'm getting at (and i'll stop ranting after this post) is the cognitive dissonance arising from reading, say, bourdieu/adorno/zizek in the context of discussing the depredations of western global hegemony, while the professor who assigns them is so aloof his/her behavior borders on snobbery. or say you take a course on l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poetry (which yes, might be a problem in and of itself), an aesthetic explicitly rooted in marxism, but you're only allowed to discuss class in the abstract, not class matters pertaining to yourself and the people in your seminar. upthread, you mentioned that you wished the set-up were less trump and more socrates; sometimes it's hard not to feel like you're caught in some update of plato's "euthyphro," in terms of the gap between the theory you learn (and are expected to express familiarly), the situation in which you're learning it, and the indifference toward your socioeconomic situation of the people assigning you the theory

kamerad, I understand what you're saying. It's not the same thing, but I love how the one colleague I have who calls himself a Marxist, micromanages his retirement fund and stock portfolio, selling short and so on. I love it = I think it's funny and ironic.

Langpo doesn't have an aesthetic rooted in Marxism, it has a justification (and perhaps comes from a scene) rooted in Marxism.

Not that that adds anything to the discussion, it's just something of an automatic reflex for me to say something like that when the issue comes up. Carry on.

i don't want to continue derailing this thing. just want to say "thanks" euler for your thoughtfulness. i bet this thread will be useful for people considering graduate school (my contributions notwithstanding)

Euler and kamerad's discussion is interesting, but for people thinking about grad school, it's worth noting that they're talking about an issue that either doesn't exist in my field or to which I am completely oblivious. I didn't recognize what you were talking about in my own experience. I went to state comprehensive and am doing PhD at Oxford, so it should be the kind of thing that would bother me, if it bothered anyone.

I don't doubt your concerns are real though. Perhaps I've been inoculated by four years as an undergrad here. Also, for good or ill, astronomers and physicists are probably less interested in the social skills that go along with being financially or culturally elite.

caek, I think you're right that these things probably matter less in the hard sciences. Although my grad work was in math in addition to philo and there was some of what I'm talking about in math, for instance the tendency of mathematicians at conferences to head for Asian food for dinner (which was jarring for me at first until I got familiar with things).

For instance I still dress like a mathematician (i.e. very badly), but philosophers are pretty fashionable (relative to academia) and so I feel out of place...fortunately as a logician (i.e. a little math, a little philo) I get away with it.

I get the feeling that the 5 sigma cool mathematicians are cooler than their equivalents in the hard sciences. You do get media-friendly/rock star physicists, but I would rarely call them cool. The most cosmopolitan/urban/stylish people at astronomy conferences are the ones in Hawaiian shirts.

Unrelated, but maybe tied in with kamerad's feelings, I do remember seeing culture shock among the American grad students I've met, both at meetings in Europe and in the U.S. when they're in a room full of European people. I guess this is tied up with wealth somehow. European students have an advantage here because they tend to know U.S. culture better, but this is not necessarily because they are particularly intellectual or well traveled.

That's interesting re. culture shock with Europeans. In my grad program in math, there were a lot of (eastern) Europeans, but this was in the mid 90s so they were...differently European than folks from e.g. the UK or France. I spend so much time in Europe (and to a lesser degree, Latin America) these days that I don't notice these things. I'm also generally at least twenty years younger than the average attendee at the conferences I go to, so I don't see young Americans in these situations often anymore.

I just marked a piece of work on which a student had written "lol" at the end of a brain-dump which he hoped contained the answer. I was sorely tempted to write "tl;dr".

grades: pissing me off

just got my first Bs of grad school (one b, one b+). i am depressed. mostly because the b+ is the class i worked hardest in, and the b prof gave me no constructive crit whatsoever.

have not even checked grades for past semester yet. maybe now i've plied myself with some gin i can deal with it?