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

I had my first week of classes on Mon/Tue (Uni of Birmingham). It was pretty exciting!

so you feel okay about the leap?

Yeah so far. It probably helps that there are a lot of other people in the program without a background in geography and the department staff all seem pretty aware that people need to be eased into things. A couple of the assignments are unnerving but I imagine they won't be once I've properly ~settled in~ in a few weeks.

ha, i don't think i'd even realised geography was a relevant precursor to your degree. how are you finding the uni/being back at school/embarking on an exciting new chapter thing? it might eventually, in retrospect, be best to just be thrown in at the deep end, re: assignments, etc, idk.

I suppose the most expected precursor to the program is either geography or any sort of 'urban studies' type programs, but geog seems more widespread. Being back is GREAT, anyway. I get to find my way around a new huge library and learn new stuff and think about dissertation topics. In a way it still doesn't quite feel real. I go back to work tomorrow after almost a month off, and I guess maybe once my new routine of uni/uni/day off/work/work kicks in it'll feel more like a 'new chapter'.

Aaargh modular math, why are you so opaque.

Just submitted my NSF GRFP application. Next up, 13 variations on the same statement of purpose, $1000 of application fees, and then waiting.

gl

ty!

np!

I am on a faculty-meeting road trip. It is overwhelming.

Just took the GRE. The new score range is 130-170. Sooo, great verbal score (168, that's like just under 800 on the old scale), terrible math score (147, that's like just under a 500 on the old scale). No time to take it again now before applications are due, so will just have to see which of the ridiculously selective schools that I've put down could possibly live with someone so unbalanced...

wow, quick results! at least it's over.

Yeah, results on screen!

^^

congrats on the verbal score, excellent verbal scores are a lot less common than excellent math scores (for some reason). Plus the good news is that the more selective the school, the less likely they are to look at your GRE score and say "that's a dealbreaker".

The other good news is that now you get to focus on the non-bullshit parts of your application. I fired off my first app last night; just gotta personalize my statement of purpose a dozen more times…

silby, what kind of CS do you do?

I'm hoping to study complexity theory (and some related things); my experiences so far haven't been of a kind that I can claim that I do complexity theory yet (and my specific interests within complexity are more just "things I have read briefly about that excite me") but hopefully once I get more practice I will be able to. I'm also super interested in CS education reform and working on correcting demographic imbalances in the field etc. I'm also also interested in stuff like what intractability results suggest about human cognition. Planning on pursuing a teaching-centered academic career following the PhD. And by "planning" I obviously mean "gambling".

Silby, where are you getting the info re more selective schools being less picky on the GRE? I really hope you are right!

My brain. Mostly I think they are less likely to have a phase where they rank every applicant by GPA and GRE and drop the bottom .

what kind of programs are you applying for, ljubljana?

A mix of developmental psych, education and human development.

hmm would you have to know stats?

Yep! Afraid so...

aw :/

Hoping my weak ass GRE scores aren't going to hold me back this time around PhD applications, or that fact that I'm only 6 weeks into my MA (this makes supplying transcripts a real headache).

That said I'm loving my MA program here at UCL and would be perfectly content to hang around here for another 3-4 years.

copyright term on published bits of my thesis expired so i deposited it in a public archive today. reread bits of it. what a lot of rubbish! (also some great typos)

I misspelled "computer" in the paper I submitted based on my undergrad work; a reviewer noticed. Sent in my NSF application last week with the same typo because I copy-pasted that paragraph.

For what it's worth, last year I accidentally had "Columbia" in a statement I sent to NYU and they still accepted me.

I'm hoping to study complexity theory (and some related things); my experiences so far haven't been of a kind that I can claim that I do complexity theory yet (and my specific interests within complexity are more just "things I have read briefly about that excite me") but hopefully once I get more practice I will be able to. I'm also super interested in CS education reform and working on correcting demographic imbalances in the field etc. I'm also also interested in stuff like what intractability results suggest about human cognition. Planning on pursuing a teaching-centered academic career following the PhD. And by "planning" I obviously mean "gambling".

― whoop, up the butt it goes (silby), Tuesday, November 15, 2011 7:53 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

plz send me notifications of all u publicationz <3333333333333333333

Complexity theory is hardcore! I'm more of an applied guy (NLP), so probably don't have much in the way of advice to offer.

matt might has was seems like good advice for people doing technical subjects in a us-style grad program, esp. compsci

http://matt.might.net/articles/books-papers-materials-for-graduate-students/
http://matt.might.net/articles/how-to-apply-and-get-in-to-graduate-school-in-science-mathematics-engineering-or-computer-science/

etc.: http://matt.might.net/articles/

I have read those articles! I think some of the advice in the latter I willfully ignored out of boastful pride.

Xp to hoos: you are too much.

If I do manage to mold myself into a complexity theorist most of my publications will be impenetrably mathy. Sort of the nature of the gig.

I'm also super interested in CS education reform and working on correcting demographic imbalances in the field etc

I know you said on the other thread (whatever the other thread was) that ILX was not the place, but if you ever feel it is the place, I wd be interested to read abt both of these

also in other off-topic news I lolled the other day when I wanted to know the Japanese for "German" so I looked it up on English wikipedia and hit the Japanese link from the language sidebar and I reached a disambiguation page of which the only bit I could read was "Murray Gell-Mann"

well the short version of my inchoate ideas about that aspect of the field are basically

- Women are vastly underrepresented in computer science and related fields, to the point where departments that get up to ~40% women undergrads are at the vanguard of breaking down that boundary. This is terrible.
- Introductory programming classes are the only way to start your CS major in nearly all institutions. Programming is Hard™, from like a cognitive and education standpoint (this is my intuition not my rigorously researched belief), and intro programming classes don't capture the exciting and intellectually worthwhile aspects of the field (or even just of programming). Basically Intro to Java sucks and it needs to stop.
- The latter might have something to do with the former. (But obviously so does stereotype threat and different socialization practices for boys and girls that reach back into childhood and fuck me if I know what to do about that.)

Thanks silby! Basically as a female CS dropout I feel pretty conflicted about all this stuff.

(I know this isn't the level we're discussing, but I was just reading a bunch of young men students complaining here that their high school IT teachers failed them for doing something innovative/demanding, and I bummed myself out thinking I was the other side of that coin - I didn't push any boundaries, got good marks for basic stuff, and since I went to a girls' school nobody else I knew programmed in their spare time, so I mistook that for being able to do CS, which I have to be honest I have v little aptitude for - either the real world programming side or the super-theoretical mathmo side. Going to university and discovering that everyone else there had been hacking the Linux kernel nightly since they were 12 was a bit demoralising)

That is exactly the sort of cultural thing about CS that I think is really bad for the field and for students. It didn't do you any good to walk into a class and be way behind all the people who had been hacking since age 12 or whatever and have to compete with them for instructor attention. (And it really doesn't do the hardcore hackery types to be streamed into monolithic CS programs that are torn between academic and pre-professional goals etc.) I taught a class (which is to say I led an independent study to be technical but it functioned as a class) as basically my senior thesis project this spring and one of the women in the class was someone who had apparently walked into a programming class the previous semester and said "Seriously? I'm the only woman in here?"

3 apps done 10 to go by the way, holy crap

Whoa. I started off with a list of 10, am down to 5 now though.

My ugrad advisor who is my primary letter writer was very insistent on the "apply to lots of schools" part of the strategy. Hard to look at <10% selectivity and disagree.

oh god I don't even want to think about my possibly useless letter writers. They all have lovely things to say about me but I suspect none of them will express those things in a very convincing way.

hahahahaa this essay is terrible.

partly because I don't have a question for it yet. i do think i have a good idea as to how and why the criminological disciple has been comprehensively abandoned by political actors though. so that's something.

All 5 applications are in *deflated and having to return to real world of real work that suffered*

I have one that's not quite done, the rest went in in December. All my recs got finished though, that was pleasing.

Hey Quincie, did you post something somewhere about genetic counseling? I can't find it now.

finally mailed the last piddly thing off so I'm actually done applying now. adventure awaits.

tee hee : (

http://theamericanscholar.org/on-the-beach/

Have to say, that all hits pretty close to home...

I feel like there's enough blistering commentary about life in academia at this point that anyone who embarks on a PhD program and doesn't know how great the potential for demoralizing, dehumanizing suckiness is is not doing their due diligence.