dr. t

I don't - if I need scratch paper I get it from Amazon. However, if you check out Bob Slate's in Harvard Square, you will at least find items with a quality that matches the price.

If that's the case, can we use the right gender pronouns (and the person's actual name), please? I agree, this is a narrative that is convenient for a lot of people. So what?

Reeealy good practice for life after graduation, though.

Assuming a stipend of $28k means you have at most $1000/mo to spend on rent, your options are likely Watertown, Medford, Chelsea (higher crime rates), Revere (higher crime rates), Dorchester (crime rates vary depending on area). Even then, you're scraping the bottom of the barrel. Flexibility in pet policy varies widely; most seem willing to allow cats for a deposit (~$300).

People bitching about Caitlyn Jenner. Trans awareness is good.

Landed an apartment. Moving up from 1BR to 3BR for essentially the same rent. Goodbye, Boston housing market, and don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.

Even more extreme: whether or not you think you will get in should have no bearing whatsoever on your selection of schools.

Oh, so it's *your* fault.

So, are grades supposed to be an absolute or relative measure of academic achievement?

I'm 99.999999999999999% sure he is.

Graduation!

I don't see any harm in starting to prepare your papers for publication, but I wouldn't rush through it. Edit, read more, modify them as you see fit this summer. Submit abstracts to conferences for the coming year. Read more and improve your technical skills. Workshop them with peers and get feedback from your adviser. If all goes well, submit next summer. There's no reason to hesitate if you're ready, but make sure you're ready. The learning curve for grad school is quite steep. I know my own work is substantially improved at the end of my MA, and I am much happier with the paper I held on to for a year than I would have been if I submitted it.

1) No. The economic effect is indirect, and much of it is governed by political determinations rather than economic ones. 2) The funds available to the department are dependent on the funding structure. That's the point.

Fortunately, I said that the science stipends are higher 1) because more of the funding is external and 2) that funding goes through a PI rather than the university administration.

Seratim: First: Admissions information is readily available from the program websites of many departments. I know of no comprehensive survey. Second, first: Yep. That doesn't help your point any. Second, second: And? Third: Yes.

Some advisers still think it's 1965

That there are general rules which govern economic interactions does not mean that you've correctly understood or applied them.

Outline: to sketch, state in vague details. Not to be confused with "explain". Admissions: The fact that any demand on the other side of the labor market is negated by the 5-10% admissions rate for any decent program "has nothing to do with it really"? Are you sure about that? The traditional economic model states that salaries go up when there isn't enough labor to meet industry demand. If PhD programs are only taking 1 in 10 applicants, does that really look like a labor shortage that's driving up salaries to you? Really? If STEM PhD programs really had that great an impact on earnings potential (they don't, the studies I've seen show a 3% increase in earnings power from an MA to a PhD), wouldn't prospective students be more willing to eat a lower salary for a few years in order to reap the rewards. We already see plenty of people taking internships, paid or, more often, not, for exactly that reason. Funding Structure: The largest grant the NEH can award is $400,000. This is at least an order of magnitude smaller than the start-up costs for your standard STEM lab. Consequently, stipends for the humanities are decided on and paid out by the institution. Institutions are, as we all know, coming under increased budgetary pressure and are in any case heavily bureaucratic. Grants in STEM are a relatively small part of the large grants administered by the PI or similar. As a consequence, adding a few thousand dollars to a STEM stipend is significantly easier to do than the same operation in the humanities.

It seems that close reading may be a technical skill more difficult to acquire than you realize. I made no such statement. I said that the kind of market forces you describe do not apply to GRADUATE STIPENDS. I have previously outlined my reasons why this is true: 1) funding structures, 2) a highly competitive admissions process.

I think I actually have a pretty good grasp on your experiences; you've given quite a lot of information, willingly or not, in your time here. My assessment stands. All these arguments about market forces make perfect sense for the job market. I have yet to see any compelling argument that they should apply to graduate stipends. Quite the opposite, in fact.

It is a curious thing, how you can state that you don't care about others, bash an entire discipline (and, by extension, several others) in which you have no experience or knowledge, and then accuse me of being snide and condescending. Hilarious. Why would it be because of demand in the field? Are the acceptance rates of top graduate programs in the sciences much higher than those in the humanities? Is there a desperate, unmet need for graduate lab assistants driving up salaries? Not as far as I can see. The difference in pay is the source of the funding for the stipends.

I don't know how to debate this. There is literally nothing I can say except that you're wrong and you need to gain some experience outside of what you already "know".

That doesn't stop you from being wrong. What exactly do you think those English grad students are doing during their 8-year programs?

Yeah, you've made that abundantly clear.

As someone who has had experience in both STEM and the Humanities, you're buying wholesale into a pernicious myth. The skill sets are different; there is no "greater learning curve", one discipline is not "less skilled" than another. It was not somehow easier for me to master Latin than it was for me to understand differential equations.