danieleWrites

How goes it in Zoomie Land? I was Navy, my spouse was Army for a while, 11B, LRRP, went to Desert Storm with the Big Red One, spent the rest of his career with the Arctic Light before cancer kept him from shipping out to SF Q school. He says to keep all of your sick call slips. Jungle rot is 10% from the VA, for example.

TakeruK, Mathcat, Vene, you're obviously not veterans, so: DROP! is an order to do pushups. It has many cultural meanings that movies like Private Benjamin, In the Army Now, or Full Metal Jacket, or anything involving boot camp or basic training can explain. It comes from the sensibility that pain will make you think. Someone needs to publish a drill sergeant quote of the day calendar. The weird thing. It's pretty simple. In the military, a person has two names: their rank and their last name. You call people who are equal to you or beneath you in rank by last name or by rank, occasionally by rank and last name. Even good friends call each other by last name. First name basis is weird. You call people above you in rank by rank and last name, or rank, or sir or ma'am. You do not call them by first name. Ever. Not even those who are colleagues. I had a very good friend in my class at A school (AIT) whose first name I knew, but could not use because he outranked me. Even when we were not in uniform, not on duty, and just hanging out with the group, he was "sarge" (multi-service post). It is not only simply not done, it is military law (see UCMJ articles 15, 89, 91, and 134). When a colleague with higher rank than me asks me to call her by her first name, it is weird. It's a perfectly normal military vet thing. The official term for it: cognitive dissonance. Believe it or not, universities are hierarchical in ways that are very similar to the military. While there is no law that requires a student call a professor by title, there's enough chikcenshit to enforce that cultural norm. Chickenshit is a military term, definition here: http://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2010/06/chickenshit-by-paul-fussell.html Vene, while I appreciate your rush to be offended on the part of graduate students everywhere, you're a PFC. You've never lived under the UCMJ panopticon.

I think the one thing I'd import from my Navy days is DROP! Some people could really use doing push ups. It's also very weird that one of my profs thinks of PhD students as colleagues, so we are to call her by her first name. It is, apparently, not Doctor.

Interesting argument that shows quite a bit about how people interpret ambiguous terms in different ways. Like "application fee" or "processing". I find myself pretty much leaning toward Justin123's point of view, which is that in exchange for his application fee, his application should have been evaluated by someone qualified to make the evaluation. I don't feel this is "entitlement" or "whiny" or someone complaining about not getting into a school or into a safety school. I think it's reasonable to expect service for payment. Had the university made it clear what the application fee was not to pay for evaluation of the application, I don't think Justin123 would have made this thread in the first place. But, to review: 1. The student paid the university an application fee. 2. The student submitted the application. What should the student then reasonably expect in exchange for the money spent on the application fee? 1. That the application will be reviewed by at least one person with the qualifications to evaluate the suitability of the student. or 2. That the application will be "processed", which has an ambiguous meaning that involves anything from full adcomm review to a low-paid office worker sorting applications into stacks based on predetermined criteria that he or she has absolutely no say in and, further, who possesses no qualifications for evaluating the suitability of the application in any event. He or she might even be a computer program. In other words, in exchange for the application fee, what responsibilities does the graduate school have and the individual program have in regards to that application? The essential disagreement seems to be this: 1. The application should be reviewed by the adcomm. vs. 2. The application should be processed, that is, put into the system by people not qualified to evaluate an applicant's suitability, where it will be available for review should the adcomm choose to review it. My belief is that in exchange for an application fee, each application should be evaluated at some point by someone qualified to evaluate the applicant's suitability. In this view, what the program did to some international applicants is unethical. Though, frankly, I would be shocked if there was a program on the planet that didn't believe that their only responsibility toward an application in exchange for an application fee was to have some low-wage peon put it in the system, if a computer program didn't already do that for them. Additionally, the OP's emailer is a PR moron. American business institutions have perfected the art of prevarication. S/he should be fired for being so honest.

Find out why your original research adviser dropped you. Make sure that's what happened, actually. "Stopped advising me" can mean a multitude of things. If you're still nominally this person's advisee, either find out how to change advisers and make it so, or find out how to get back on track with your research. Once you've got a clear reason why you've been dropped, figure out how to address whatever shortcomings got you dropped as an advisee. Then, go to your professor's office hours and ask him if he has any openings in his lab group and what you should do in order to become a part of it. Express your interest because he can't read your mind. The next step is to organize the rest of your academic career in line with the program's scheduling. You should have completed coursework after this many semesters, done reading/testing/whatever by this time, begun work on your diss by this time, and completed it by that time. Sketch out a basic time line with realistic goals to shoot for. Organize your research interests so you know what you have to do before you can start researching, what you should probably need to do while researching. Organize conference opportunities well in advance. Certain ones crop up every year, and you'll know that you have a shot at presenting your personal research, so find out when the submission deadlines usually are (look up last years, for example) and start planning. Organize the work you have already done that is complete or near complete in such a way that you can cobble together an abstract, poster, paper, whatever to submit to a conference. Look through your completed or near complete work and start planning on writing papers to submit for publication. What to do next? Take charge of your academic career, don't wait for things to happen to you. Sure, your undergrad GPA is going to bite you in some ways. But it's not what's keeping you from getting published, or from presenting, or from working in the labs. It might cause you funding problems, but that means looking for funding more creatively, where your undergrad GPA isn't as much a factor as your letters of recommendation and research proposals. If you aren't a member of your field's professional association(s), join. If you don't know how to organize yourself, find a self-help book or see if your library or school has academic help sessions (many universities do). If you're undermotivated, see the school counselor. Check into organizations like Toastmasters. It's not your adviser's job to lead you; it's your adviser's job to shepherd you, that is, to keep you in the pasture while you're wandering around, doing your own thing.

USA, here. I started out in computer science and collected F's to the point I was on academic probation when I switched majors to English with a soc minor (eventually switching to sociology with an English minor, and then getting a BA in English, too, 'cause I'm all why-quit-school that way). I'm in an English PhD program now. The only time I've ever had to explain what the heck happened during my freshman career was when they asked me why I was crazy enough to take calculus. In the US, programs often look at your GPA in your major first, then overall GPA. If your in-major GPA is stellar and your overall GPA isn't as stunning, the transcript clearly shows that one's ability to fail at Object Oriented Programming is unrelated to one's ability to be a rock star in literature.

I figured I'd be a scientist, sociology to be specific. Math and esoteric theory? What's not to love? Anyway, I was reading Marx in my junior year for a soc theory class and we were assigned to read Death of a Salesman in my Am. Lit survey class (I was minoring in English because I rather fancied myself a creative writer). The Gundrisse + Death of a Salesman = light bulb time. Fast forward to my poetry class, after getting my BA in soc and while chasing a BA in English, creative writing emphasis, and one of my many "discussions" with my prof about getting all didactic with my audience. Light bulb time again. I connected the rhetorics. Instead of chasing a PhD in soc, I'm getting it in English. Still into soc stuff, to the point where I pretty much consider what I'm doing the sociology of literature. Kind of Terry Eagleton-ish. So here I am. And I still have "discussions" with my former prof about didacticism and audience in poetics.

I have no idea about job prospects in your field, however, I would imagine that work involving climate change, conservation, water, or food will be turning into a growth industry soon. I do have some advice for you. Read the peer reviewed journals in your area(s) of interest. You should know what your basic research interests are so you can find a program that will help you do what you want to do. Reading the journals will show you what work is being done in your area(s) of interest, which will also give you some basic ideas about what's out there to research and what you might like to pursue, yourself.

I'm still getting letters from schools and I'm in my second year. I'm fielding email and snail mail from a variety of institutions, some of them quite prestigious, inviting me to join an MA program or other. None of them are in my actual field, either. Not that my BAs wouldn't get me into these other fields, but, seriously.

Check into auditing a bit. Some universities don't charge, or charge a minimal fee. Some universities charge full tuition price. If you're funded it may or may not cover the cost of auditing a class.

Rather than take the word of "usually said," do a little bit of research. Find out what sort of job placements recent grads from PSU have gotten. If that information isn't available on the program's website, you can email the department itself and ask. Find out about U of F, as well. You can also find out where their graduates have gone on to further their studies. PhD is different than getting a job since the criteria for acceptance into a program is different than the criteria for an offer of employment. Your scholarship will outweigh your school's credentials, generally speaking. People who have gone to unknown schools, poorly ranked, if ranked at all, have gotten into top flight programs based on their scholarship. I know of a woman who got a bachelor's in a school no one has heard of, went on to Harvard for a degree in law, and now pulls in six figures as an entertainment lawyer. Of course, this is a single, anecdotal instance. Considering your location, you might find it helpful to check into the Persian communities in which the cities that the schools are located. While they can't offer you much in terms of advice on which program will suit your career goals, they can offer you a lot of help in other ways. You can also check to see if the universities have Persian student associations, or Iranian student associations. The student associations can give you a lot of helpful information, as well.