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

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?

i don't know i prepped with wine and it's making me want to cry.

yeah i just checked mine. :(:(:(

blurghhhh

well...if it makes you feel better i got a B-. total bummerz. and i'm out of gin, too

b prof gave me a b- on the final grrrrrrrrrr. fuck him, he never "got" me all semester, why should my gpa suffer?

i'm trying to figure out why this was the case w/o actually e-mailing my professor. this was the class i had the hardest time grappling with content-wise, though, so it's probably best i do anyway.

man. so upset right now

commiseration <3

kjndfkjndsgf. thanks, tho. are you finished w/ yr program now?

thesis + one more class (a seminar, should be easy)

well that's a relief i guess (depending on how far you on thesis). i think next semester should be less of a hassle (three classes and an internship as opposed to five classes) so hopefully i'll have room to improve...

just sent maybe-more-defensive-than-it-ought-to-have-been e-mail to prof about grade

you ARE on

yeah, i wanna call prof and be like 'yo 4 classes and a 35-hour a week job is a lot, give me a fucking break!' but i don't think it would go over well.

thesis + one more class (a seminar, should be easy)

How did you pull that off? My last semester is going to be 4 classes (one of them is a seminar, should be easy) + thesis, despite trying my hardest to make my last semester an easy one.

i dunno, that's how they schedule my program! first semester was 5 classes + 20hr internship.

my program is constructed in such a way that i have almost zero leeway with classes (i.e. nearly everything i take is a "required" class) BUT since i also went to this school as an undergrad in a similar major, i get to jettison a class i already took as an UG in favor of another one i'm really looking forward to, so that's definitely something

xpost five and an internship? jesus

Damn, first semester sounds horrible but I guess it's paying off now. My program, on the other hand, is designed to be scheduled by the students themselves. Which explains why I fucked it up so badly!

sorta paying off. i almost lost my mind this(last) semester.

Serious question: are Bs in some way qualitatively worse in the US system? Only most dudes I know would be reasonably happy with a B- ... hell, I would. Indeed, we got told to pretty much expect Cs; As are "approaching publishable level".

I've only had one grade back so far and I was delighted with it; once we settle into the endless round of returned coursework, I'd be chuffed to fuck with a B average.

Yeah, a B in the UK is really not the equivalent of a B over there. I was at Georgetown for a year and was perfectly happy with straight B's because they translated to 2.1s when I came back to the UK but my friends would get really stressed if they even started dipping towards a B+.

Interesting. I know some people like that here, of course ... hmm. Desire for excellence or unhealthy and unrealistic competitive panic?

I guess the answer to that depends on which side of the pond you're on, too.

It's certainly very important for some people going on to certain post-undergrad stuff at the best schools (medical, law, etc.) to avoid B's. I think a lot of this is to do with the granularity of transcripts and grading in the U.S. compared to the U.K., where we reduce 3/4 years to either "1", "2:1", or "2:2", and we don't normally issue transcripts breaking down scores. If employers could see individual grades they might be taken more seriously here.

I get the impression that grade inflation is a problem at undergrad level in the U.S. while it's a problem at GCSE/A Level in the U.K.

When I asked Oxford for a transcript, which I need every time I apply for something outside the U.K., they send me a document with my grades with "THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD DOES NOT ISSUE TRANSCRIPTS" in bold at the top. Right.

Also stupid is how the grades are raw marks and it doesn't say what they are out of. I guess people assume I got 86% on undergrad astro, when I actually got 86/150, and 24% for lab work, when I actually got 24/24.

This probably gives an idea of how seriously individual grades are taken in the U.K.

You're dead right about the transcripts: I hadn't thought about it like that. I had the same thing trying to get mine from Edinburgh earlier this year (graduated 1997): there was no useful information on there at all. Mind, I think that's changed now: with the major Scottish universities at least, there's a huge move away from a finals-based system to one in which coursework is a major part, and I imagine that in itself will begin to shift the focus away from one overall result and on to individual grades.

That said: I'd still be happy with a load of Bs ;)