what the fuck am i getting myself 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!

you want to make something real

i was there, the first time pedro costa decided 'fuck it, let's just let it run', i said to him 'don't do it that way, you'll never make a dime'

i sometimes wonder how much money ppl like him make

if he can afford to buy a lexus then perhaps he can say it was all worthwhile

someone who knows told me he's personally rich

he used to get money from the portuguese government i think, can't imagine that's still a goer

congrats oiler!

Congrats!

If I may, I'd like to ask anyone on ILX of the North American persuasion who went to grad school in the UK, if/how doing a degree there has limited/opened your experience for doing things afterward (in North America or wherever). (This is re: studying modern/contemporary art in London, so the fit is very solid).

I've heard schools (precisely which shools I don't know) are soon going to be phasing out physical copies of theses as well, giving you PDF's instead.

already, in the first half of the last decade, my doctoral university eliminated physical copies of the thesis in favor of PDFs.

trying to carve a 500 word supporting statement out of what seemed to me like an already pretty concise 1000 word supporting statement - AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

bullets and more bullets!

i can do 2000 to 1000, but 1000 to 500 is impossible for me. i start again, and (especially) forget my favourite sentences.

583 words! many tragic losses. and nowwwww for some german-style compound nouns, i guess?

drop in copious footnotes. they do not count as words, right?

Depends...one journal I'm writing a paper for at the moment insists that the bibliography contributes the word count ffs.

contributes to obv.

caek do u know

http://www.phy.bris.ac.uk/people/hussey_ne/portrait.jpg

i am a visiting fellow at bristol right now, but never met him. it's a big dept. (biggest in the uni, i think), and he does real physics not astronomy.

ah its cool cuz i just found him searching for NIGEL

haha

so after "contributing" (ie, whining a bunch) to this thread a couple years ago as a student, now i'm feeling the grad school experience from the other end - my fiancee is in grad school and i never see her anymore. she's doing landscape architecture so most of the tools she needs (drafting table, software, etc) are at school, and she always has huge projects every week and ends up coming home after 11pm most nights, then going straight to bed. tbh dealing with her grad school thing has been about 1000x worse than actually doing it myself! so fucking lonely. so for all of you who happen to have significant others, try make sure to try to make time for them every once in a while.

#hownottolive

wey I made it. RIP, 502 awesome words.

so, gf got into basically every phd program because she is v. v. smart

it seems like it's between 2-3 schools right now

the first one has A++ academic reputation in the subject...though when she visited she realized the department was basically a half dozen 70 year old white men. it's kinda far from where we live but *almost* within a doable commute. some people do it.

second one has a very good academic reputation (prob top 15? but there doesn't seem to be a standard ranking, not that there should be.) it's a very big department and slightly less selective, but has more profs doing the stuff she wants to do. they've had some people place very well recently (including a tenure track pos at school #1) but it also seems like something of a professional risk to not go to school w/ school #1's name. this school is very close and would make our personal lives much, much better.

school #3 has good ranking, good name, very close...but was her alma mater and she's been told by various people that it's generally bad form to go to the same place for grad school. she's visiting this one today.

am I a bad person for pushing for #2? this is a field where jobs prospects are pretty shitty. despite her visiting, researching etc. it seems strangely difficult to tell whether school #1 is really 'the best school'. I know grad school doesn't quite work like that, but at the very least it is the most selective w/ admissions.

is there a database somewhere w/ all tenure track placements?

from what you say, #2 sounds best. people saying don't do your phd at your undergrad school are right. big mistake by me. ranking or prestige of dept is a second order thing in determining career. it mostly goes on achievements, networking, letters of references, etc. (although letters of reference from more prestigious/famous schools/people are worth more, and are easier to come by if you're in a top dept. to begin with). in my field at least, people say it's very difficult to move up in prestige of department after your first postdoc, but i don't hear that said about the grad school—postdoc transition.

more profs doing the stuff she wants to do

*ding ding ding* this is the place to go. Seriously, you need people who can relate to you and your research or you're screwed.

However:

1) Never heard about it being bad form to continue at your alma mater, and I know that there are universities here that will offer you an extra grant if you do stay on. I'm guessing there might be a US/UK difference in this, though.

2) I'm terrible at thinking about this in career terms. I'm only doing a PhD because I love my subject - am hoping that somehow magically someone will come and teach me how to turn this into a career prospect, but I'm almost certainly doomed.

Seriously, you need people who can relate to you and your research or you're screwed.

this.

that's what I had gathered from my research. if she is gonna make this decision though, it's gonna be a pretty painful conversation w/ her mom.

there are still prestigious/famous people at #2 fwiw.

another problem: the only 2 profs who work in her field at school #1 were both on leave during the visiting day. that seems like a huge risk and I suggested that she get to know them online/via phone *very well* if she was gonna go with #1.

yeah i cant really emphasize enough how impt is to work in dept. where you are going to be valued/your research will be nurtured.

paying too much attn to rank/prestige of program is sorta pointless at least in the sciences, i feel, the work you do ends up counting for so much. there will be a different set of opportunities at a less selective school, but not necessarily a worse set of opportunities. & at least there is some evidence that ppl from school #2 can get jobs in the field, its not the end of the world.

yeah I mean there's good evidence! they didn't just get the last hot job (at #2) but her favorite young prof at #3 also went to #1. it's just so hard to get out of undergrad mentality where picking #2 over #1 would be sorta absurd, esp when #1 was offering you more money.

at the visit w/ #2 they buddied her w/ a 2nd year grad student who also picked #2 over #1. it's not an unheard of decision at this point.

there are 3 other quite good schools but she's not heavily considering them at this point. even if I didn't exist I don't think she would want to move far, but maybe that's not true.

er her favorite young prof went to #2

this number system is ridiculous sorry

and the last hot job was at #1 err

I did undergrad and phd at the same place (UC berkeley) but I went somewhere else for a second BA in between- the overlap hasn't hurt me- but I would second the feeling that it's important to have profs who actually work on what you want to work on and who can nurture your project (assuming it's a school with good placement prospects and you say it is)-

she refused to apply to berkeley because she didn't want to write an extra essay on how she would contribute to the school's diversity

I told her I would hold that against her forever (go bears)

that said, it would be a hard essay to write

it's just so hard to get out of undergrad mentality where picking #2 over #1 would be sorta absurd, esp when #1 was offering you more money.

This is so true, and I myself need to get out of this mindset, especially as I'm bound to be rejected by all the ivy's I applied to, and already have one good school with very appropriate people that has accepted me.

can't write much now but I'll get back to it later: if job sitch is shitty in the area then looking at job placement record is critical; data should be available online & if not she should ask about it, ask around about it too.

job sitch is quite shitty in this field. (fr3nch)

#2 included a placement list in their packet that looks pretty good tbh but I'm curious if they're only including the successes (which is possible cause it's a big program) or if that's everyone that graduated.

It will only be the successes, be certain of that.

yeah figured that, more curious *how* many non-successes there are.

the second * should be around many otherwise that sounds weird