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

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.

you dont know til you know

Everyone believes it will be different for them...pretty standard operating procedure for homo sapiens ime.

True as that may be, but writing the 10 zillionth article about the decripitude of academia feels kind of like trolling at this point.

I really appreciate them coming around every so often, as I live with a very successful academic and am constantly being tempted to give it a shot; its good to be reminded that under no circumstances should I do that.

tbf, this guy got on at the ground floor xp

I guess I too have been surrounded by successful academics (of the 7 postdocs I worked with last year, 5 got jobs in the first half of 2011 alone, while the other two still have another year of that postdoc left to look). In any case, reading these is like, "OK, what do you want me to do? just drop out and fuck off to the beach?" I'd be happy if there was an article every week about pressuring/protesting academic institutions that would possibly offer something more than a war report. I don't see how bleakness for the sake of bleakness is only going to do anything but reproduce a failing system?

getting everyone to talk about the situation honestly and openly is necessary before any real changes can be made

Eh, it's obviously not news but I just thought it captured something of the ambient stress around non-permanent academia and the freedom that might come (as well as all the bad things) with being told once and for all that you're not good enough, go do something else.

i'm at least a year away from applying & probably more but i really wanna go to grad school :(

finally gonna have grad students of my own starting in the fall (a new, terrific job in a new town, yay) & gotta come to grips with "what am I doing to / for these folks"

getting everyone to talk about the situation honestly and openly is necessary before any real changes can be made

― iatee, Sunday, January 15, 2012 8:40 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

This certainly stands true, but what's to be said that hasn't already been in the many dozen articles that have been published over the last few years.

congrats dude. still in the same part of the country?

This certainly stands true, but what's to be said that hasn't already been in the many dozen articles that have been published over the last few years.

I'm not a grad student but I do live vicariously through my gf who is, and I can say that for sure the types of things that deresiewicz says aren't things that can be talked about in the open w/ professors and to a certain extent even other students in her program.

there's no shortage of non-specific bitching, but there is certainly a kind of taboo about really calling it.

wow i made this thread in 2008! grad school was kind of ok but i ended up not going into the kind of stuff i was studying for work because my life would have been a living hell. i now want to go back to school and study music composition some day.

joining the Big Ten, leaving the Big 12

can't believe they're giving the penn state coaching gig to a philosopher

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i37uttMA6Mc

could someone please post links to the canonical works on academia sucking

http://chronicle.com/article/So-You-Want-to-Go-to-Grad/45239
http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846
http://www.thenation.com/article/160410/faulty-towers-crisis-higher-education?page=full

also

http://www.futurama-area.de/LiH/OComics/16.gif

all those links have been posted at some point or another in this thread, probably more than what iatee listed

among all this cheer, how are those of us who are in grad school doing? what the fuck have we gotten ourselves into? for me, i spent last semester drowning in teaching duties, i'm hoping this semester will be easier on that front so i can maybe get some of my own work done and hey even maybe even pass my end of year assessment.

i kinda like the courses im TAing this semester. it helps that one of them is a stats course i could do in my sleep

otherwise i still kinda feel like im constantly assembling the most complicated piece of IKEA furniture possible w/o any instructions