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

huh, I forgot I posted that! That's ILXing at half past three in the morning for ya. Anyway I am a 1st class fuckup and didn't realise that I had to have not only the application, but also my transcript etc to them by today's deadline in order to be considered for scholarships, ooops. So I am now doubling my fun by both trying to weasel out of it and by deciding I didn't want to go there anyway and getting in touch with more other places. #yaycognitivedissonance

(I did, however, submit a journal paper today, which I thought was pretty good and so will be annoyed if it's not accepted. Although I'll MLA style you. Not only did it take me forever to convert, but my personal custom citation style is also way better and more appropriate for the material.)

Argh I ordered this transcript six weeks ago and the university just sen it out now, one day *after* the deadline for getting things out. They charged my credit card for it way back then so I'd assumed they'd sent it! I hope this does not fuck me over.

I was accepted to this same university as a grad student before. The grad school itself has my official transcripts already. They sent copies of them to the Ed. dept. I am applying to – and they have seen my transcripts already and said I have the right kind of credits to be a good fit for the program. I just think, in this kind of a situation, they are looking for any excuse *not* to accept me. And this seems like it could definitely qualify.

Oh shit I feel so dumb right now for just *assuming* that things would work. I emailed the applications person a (calm) email when I found out – we'll see what she says...

oyy, good luck with that. My own stupidity fucking me over I can accept, happens all the time, but bureaucratic messes fucking you over, innnnfuriating.

got my viva/defence on friday. strangely not nervous? how much preparation should i really do for this? trying to read my thesis through and think of potential questions they will ask. any tips from doctor people?

What field are you in?

applied maths i suppose

doctoral defense? at that point in a math-y area the questions should only be: what are you going to do next? Either you showed what you claimed to show or you didn't, & if it's the latter you'd never have made it this far.

Xposts: If it can be taken as any comfort, the application-gone-astray-in-the-mail I alluded to upthread got accepted and considered well past the deadline. Schools may not care if something like a transcript arrives a little past the date (that's a lot to ride on a "may", though), given that it's out of your hands; otherwise if you can show you ordered it in a timely manner, and demonstrate that to them, that might not be a bad either either.

xxxp, in physics they generally open with asking you to summarize your thesis in ~ten minutes, which is obviously a bit silly, but if you do it with confidence its a good start. and its surprisingly difficult to do if you haven't thought about it in advance. so maybe prep that.

despite my stupidity my application worked out okay. It is good to see universities not go too far into obsessive bureaucracy when it comes to more or less arbitrary deadlines.

euler: my thesis contains some experimental work and also some maths which is probably far from rigorous in the eyes of a pure maths person. my internal examiner is a hardcore algebra dude (who has experience in computer hardware implementation of algorithms which is v relevant to my work) who might ask me whether i could make things more rigorous ("have you really shown what you claimed to show in full generality?" etc) - this is a bit worrying. the other examiner is from industry and is likely to skip over the maths and ask about the more experimental stuff. as far as 'next steps' goes i'm not worried since i've carried on working on this stuff for the last few months and have loads i can say.

caek: at my university i've never heard of anyone being asked to do something like this might double check though because that sounds like something worth preparing if it could happen :-/

the algebra guy used to be my tutor many years ago as an undergrad and i remember going to him with various problems and he would always manage to reformulate the question into an algebra problem somehow. worried he is going to ask whether i've noticed all the group structures underlying my work oh god.

it's worth just spending a couple of minutes thinking about, i think. it's really easy if you have like 90 seconds to think about it, but surprisingly difficult if you get asked it cold.

worried he is going to ask whether i've noticed all the group structures underlying my work oh god.
not sure if this will be reassuring or not, but here's C.S. Peirce circa 1882:

When it was done and I was correcting the last proof, it suddenly occurred to me that it was after all nothing but Cayley's theory of matrices which appeared when I was a boy. However, I took a copy of it to the great algebraist Sylvester. He read it, and said very disdainfully — Why it is nothing but my umbral notation. I felt squelched and never sent out the copies. But I was a little comforted later by finding that what Sylvester called "my umbral notation" had first been published in 1693 by another man of some talent named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Being able to summarize your work quickly is really important & useful, so it's not time wasted even if it doesn't come up at your defense.

My defense began with me giving a twenty-minute lecture on the thesis, which I'd prepped ahead of time with slides; it was the normal thing to do.

Is it cool to talk to this algebraist before your defense? In my department that was totally standard, a pre-defense interview of both sides if you will. That's where the real work got done, ultimately; the defense itself was more of a celebration.

haha that's a great great quote - cheers.

mathematicians is biters etc

xp

btw the umbral calculus is rad & I expect to write a paper about it in the next few years

yes ppl i've spoken with who did their defense in the states talk about this presentation but that's def. not the case in the UK (at my uni at least)

i don't think we do 'pre-defense' interviews or anything but i've had a chat with the external guy so might be worth having a brief conversation next week.

fucking hell, after spending forever stressing over that application I have very quickly received a "no soz" on the basis of them not being able to identify a suitable academic supervisor. This after getting in touch with the person I wanted to study with, him saying "hm area X sounds interesting but I have reservations about area Y because I know little about it", and me going to a lot of effort to stress that 1. it's really about area X with area Y as a kind of supplementary thing and 2. quite literally no one is a specialist in both, or even really a specialist in X and dabbler in Y, so it's the specialism in X I need and I'm set up to work around the rest. RAAAH.

I guess instead of sulking I should try to find (more) other options.

general advice/rfi/me grinding my gears: i published a review in a journal published by edinburgh uni press, so not a small outfit, and they're saying they'll only send a pdf! no free copy! get a 40% authors' discount

is this a thing, and if so, when did it become so?

they're attributing it to the_current_climate

but i did a review for some other journal within the last year and got a 'free' copy

obviously no-one questions the whole 'not getting paid' bit...

never signed a contract for it neither, which was odd

by "copy" do yo u mean a physical copy? how long was the article? like if it's monograph length that seems a bit lame, but free offprints stopped being a thing for science articles 5+ years ago.

From the one journal I've ever had an article in, I got a year's subscription.

more typical now not to receive free copies for reviews, i think?

sending copies to reviewers (even in pdf, though that makes it a little easier) is labor-intensive, and i guess unlike proper articles there's not as much expectation that the author might want copies to distribute.

by "copy" do yo u mean a physical copy?

ya-hah

how long was the article? like if it's monograph length that seems a bit lame, but free offprints stopped being a thing for science articles 5+ years ago.

it was like 2,500wds

i got free offprints *and* a free copy for a review for a blackwell/wiley (iirc) journal last summer

sending copies to reviewers (even in pdf, though that makes it a little easier) is labor-intensive

ehhh not really... well, compared to writing an article that someone is getting paid to publish

problem is too many desperados willing to put up with this shit

i have never even seen a physical copy of any of my articles, other than ones i've printed myself. apparently libraries have them. live in the now, man.

I stopped getting free paper offprints maybe two or three years ago (I publish in the sciences & in the humanities). Now I get PDFs. I don't care b/c I have stacks of paper offprints that just waste space, b/c who wants them? I just post my articles on my webpage anyway.

dudes really?

imo it doesn't exist till you have it in your hands

I've seen a few paper copies of my articles recently when I've been traveling & visiting libraries, which is cool, but I'd rather someone else store it than me.

may as well post this here: learned recently that I got the big T. in the humanities, at a research university. so from my pov its death has been overhyped.

still kinda numb about it. Every big step feels like nothing once I cross it.

well done!

I've seen a few paper copies of my articles recently when I've been traveling & visiting libraries, which is cool, but I'd rather someone else store it than me.

― Euler, Wednesday, February 16, 2011 7:25 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

yeah, pieces of paper... s0 hard to find space for

yeah yeah yeah...but 50 paper offprints per article adds up pretty quickly, and whilst maybe having a couple on hand to send to dinosaurs is useful, the others just collect dust in my already-cluttered office.

Wow, congrats Euler! Such things are far off for me...

whoa congrats euler!

^^

congratulations euler!

dudes really?

imo it doesn't exist till you have it in your hands

― for all the fucked-up children of this world we give you 1p3 (history mayne), Wednesday, February 16, 2011 7:22 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

rip humanities.

congratulations!

do u guys all have sweet lives as academics getting articles published

Thanks! Contrary to what yahoos think, it's not like you coast after this: you then work to get promoted again & preferably to find a hotter job. But those further challenges are pretty far from this thread so I'll shut up about them.

The oddest part of the t track is that you'll need people to write letters for your promotion, & you don't get to pick these people...so it's super critical to get to know lots of people. This is not a professor for the loner, but I suppose that's well-known since you have to teach...I guess I didn't realize how important professional socializing was until pretty late in the game; fortunately it's something I love to do & that I'm good at, so it was no stretch; but it's worth keeping that in mind as you wonder what the fuck you're getting yourself into with this grad school stuff.

Thanks! Contrary to what yahoos think, it's not like you coast after this: you then work to get promoted again & preferably to find a hotter job. But those further challenges are pretty far from this thread so I'll shut up about them.

haha yes, i like that line about winning the pie-eating contest where first prize is more pie.

xp my life is pretty sweet aside from the fact that my family qualifies as a low-income household; but that'll change with my promotion. And getting flown around the world to give talks on someone else's dime is def. sweet.

It's easy to say all this now, though; a couple of years ago when the economy was crashing & I knew my t clock was running out, things didn't seem so sweet. And working 7 days a week for the last, er, 15+ years, hasn't been that awesome. My friends who've entered industry after doctoral work tell me that it's nice to have weekends free. I wouldn't know! But such is the price of (intellectual) freedom.

7 days a week!?

"Professional socializing" is my main academic talent, I feel.

his is not a professor for the loner, but I suppose that's well-known since you have to teach...I guess I didn't realize how important professional socializing was until pretty late in the game; fortunately it's something I love to do & that I'm good at, so it was no stretch;

I rather wish someone had said that to me.....

Not a loner, exactly, and I like teaching and all, but the socialising is a strain - bluntly, I find I have little, apart from our subject, in common with my peers, and I'd (much) rather be at the football than eating bad food at a conference dinner.

Ah, well.....

yeah I mean "days off" is a concept that's pretty foreign to me; if you get into this, you'd better love it more than anything, because if you want to make it (to the biggish time at least) it's going to take all your time & focus. When things are going well I think this is a great thing, but when you have to cancel holidays because you have an article or talk that needs to be finished, or when someone flies you to another continent & you spend the whole trip in your hotel rushing to finish something up, then giving your talk & going home, it's not so great. Not to mention when you can't see how to solve a problem that needs to be solved...

Professional socializing is an awesome talent to have, though b/c of my personal background I feel pretty Vampire-Weekend-y when I do it a lot of the time, & then eventually at home you're a tourist; I mean it obviously beats work where you have to lift things or get shot at but this life has its costs too.

yeah sonofstan I'd recommend trying to find people with whom the socializing is less of a strain---this is gonna sound a little dickish but even as a grad student I had way more fun hanging with the profs than with other grad students b/c grad students can kinda be all over the place wrt focus & intensity, whereas with the profs I felt more at home...and after a bit of hanging with them it quickly got the point where I could more closely ~~be myself~~...also I worried that the grad students I'd be hanging with were gonna end up out of the profession soon & so why should I bother getting to know them, when I could instead cultivate relationships that could last. I know, it's kinda dickish, but it's worked for me...both in the sense of being comfortable having fun at meetings & the like, & (obv.) with getting professional support as I've gone on.

congrats, Euler!

euler otm re: grad students

rip humanities.

― caek, Wednesday, February 16, 2011 9:54 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

imo paper has a longer lifespan than computer gizmos

i do write internet-only stuff too!