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

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

I wish I could recall which author I am citing, but said author pointed out to me what my own limited experience says is largely true, that being a college professor slowly poisons your personality as a result of decades of exposure to shallow, malleable, inexperienced youths, who you may easily crush in intellectual debate. The slow accumulation of contempt for them eventually turns you into a monster.

I'm doing better than I have in ages...

I wish I could recall which author I am citing, but said author pointed out to me what my own limited experience says is largely true, that being a college professor slowly poisons your personality as a result of decades of exposure to shallow, malleable, inexperienced youths, who you may easily crush in intellectual debate. The slow accumulation of contempt for them eventually turns you into a monster.

Student evaluations can make you pretty resentful, although they matter less the further along you get. Otherwise, I don't really see why this should be more true of professors than of high school teachers or other teachers or authority figures. If anything, professors constantly have all of their work critiqued and reviewed by other elite specialists in their field.

i now want to go back to school and study music composition some day.

I defended a PhD in this field last year if you have any questions. I'm not sure how enthusiastically I could recommend it tbh but it depends on a number of factors (what level you're looking to study at, what you're hoping to get out it, how you go about studying the subject, what your existing skillset is).

I am in groupwork hell until the end of June. I guess these things are supposed to mimic real-life working environments, except in my experience they never, ever do. None of the professional team-based projects I've done were as shambolic as having to work with a bunch of 21-year-olds who are either arrogant, useless, or insecure. Or maybe I just have good coworkers..?

(okay maybe I am being a bit mean about my various groupmates; I am just a curmudgeon who dislikes having to do groupwork)

this is sort of at a tangent to yr post but semi-relevant: are most people on the course straight out of undergrad degrees? I'm sure it depends, course by course, but I always wonder what the mix of continuing study/returning to study would be.

Hooray, rejected! At least I have heard from one of my programs now.

man that sux

Yeah just feeds my paranoia of course; one rejection isn't so bad but it's the only program I've heard from so far so right now I'm at 100% rejections!

Broken thinking of course.

when i was applying i got rejected a lot, it was p shitty, idk if really learned anything from it except that i preferred getting things to not getting them

statistically nobody has gotten into grad school, ever

^^ otm

schlump: yes, most of them are straight from undergrad, aside from maybe... 10 people? out of 45ish?

Yay, I just signed up for a 7AM class, kill me now.