danieleWrites

I don't have a problem with it, but I can see why it's annoying. It's slang at worst and jargon at best, which makes it too informal for professional communication. "Best" does not express the full thought, leaving the reader to choose a completed thought for themselves. Best wishes? Best of luck? Best Buy? What? Frankly, it's lazy, but academia does have its own version of corporatespeak.

I teach comp and literature. I start the semester by telling them flat out that if I can't read it, it's wrong. If a name isn't on it, it's not turned in. No latesies. The university isn't high school. People go to college for career prep. If they filled out a job app illegibly, it's hitting the trash. If they write phone messages, memos, any written whatsawhoosies illegibly, they can count on getting canned. If they don't put their name on their own work, they won't credit for what they do, nor the raises and promotions that come with such work. I am not an employer, but it is my duty to assign grades to work turned in by adults. If an adult is irresponsible enough to turn in work that is illegible or without a name on it, then the adult ought to be prepared to face the consequences. It is not my duty to support the failure of a basic skill that should have been learned in elementary school. Of course, I do reiterate the can't-read-it-it's-wrong policy every time I assign something to be handwritten and I do give ample time for people who have developed a habit of writing illegibly to write more slowly. There is no excuse for illegible handwriting. I don't mean bad handwriting (hate it, but if I can read it, whatevs); I mean illegible. Illegible handwriting is a choice, not something people are stuck with. If a person has trouble with legibility, they should set aside some time to practice. If it's a learning disability issue, that's a completely different story and requires the use of the student disability office (whatever name it has on whatever campus).

I'm with the fuzzylogician on this one. Though, my social media use is purely public. I never put anything on social media that I don't want my dream someday-employer or my great aunt to ever put eyes on. I keep hoping that FB will go the way of myspace, so I can ditch it, too, but no luck so far. If I used FB for more personal things that required the use of privacy settings, I wouldn't link it. It's pretty simple. If you don't want some people seeing what you put up on social media, don't link to that social media. For me, that translates directly into: don't put it on social media. Once you've placed something online, it's always online. Someone will eventually see something they weren't supposed to.

Most every university has some sort of free counseling service. You're getting beat down and that would depress anyone. Add homesickness and isolation to that and you're going to feel awful. Find your Uni's counselor, make an appointment, and they will help you deal with being overwhelmed. Being depressed makes it more difficult to do anything at all. Stress is killer. Staying in a lab and spinning your wheels doing the same thing over and over isn't going to help. You do need to get out of the lab, even if it's nothing more than to spend 30 minutes walking around campus briskly. Treat yourself to something you enjoy that has nothing to do with school. Get a book or a magazine and spend some time at a coffee shop drinking a latte and reading for pleasure. Make yourself a promise that you will not think about anything that has to do with school, your future, or home. Focus on the book. Now, it's easy for introverts to get sucked into escapism, which is why I suggest making an appointment with yourself someplace out. It's very easy to get stuck in the habit of lounging on the bed and practicing escapism. While it would be great if you could join a club or some other activity with people involved, you don't have to be a joiner to get out of the lab. Learn to play golf. Take a yoga class. Draw. Do whatever you enjoy doing. I suppose the whole point is moderation. You have to take care of your mental health. Everyone gets stressed. Everyone fails. Everyone feels isolated as some point. The key is to breaking that cycle before you need outside intervention. Universities also have programs for students who feel that they may be academically in trouble. If not, speak with your PI. If nothing else, it might help him to know that you are suffering from some severe homesickness and that you feel incredibly isolated, so it's very difficult for you to focus and you feel like you're at the end of your rope still halfway down the cliff. You don't have to give him all of the details, but letting your advisers and faculty know that you're in a rough patch and trying your best to work your way out of it without slacking off is a good way to help them help you. I found it very painful, as a teacher, to deal with a student that came to me near the end of the semester to explain that she or he hadn't been involved in the class out of laziness, but out of a genuine problem. Particularly a problem I could have helped out with. Before you quit, talk to someone about you problems. What you're feeling and going through is not unusual. It happens to a lot of people. That's why universities have student services. If your uni's website can't direct you, check with the student health center.

OTW has a lot of academic backing. They run a peer-reviewed media studies journal: http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc You can look through the PhDs on the board for the journal. It's a pretty good guess they'll be supportive/interested in fandom related work. If nothing else, you can find one to send an email to asking for help.

Some jobs require 2 weeks notice, some require 30. Check the papers you signed/hiring packet for whatever the rules are. If you are required to give no more than 2 weeks notice, then that's what you should do. You can leave on a good note without divulging details too early. If you want to give it earlier than 2 weeks, don't give it earlier than 4 weeks. if they hire someone to replace you in the first week, you might find yourself off the schedule. You can maintain a good reputation with the employer by doing your best at work every day that you are at work. Don't let short-timer's disease get to you! And don't gossip. Your employer should hear about your resignation from you, not the water cooler talk.

Well, I got my MA in poetry writing. I'm starting my PhD in literature in the fall. One of my LOR profs talked about professorship and broke it down into two categories: generalists and specialists. Big universities want specialists because they have a lot of faculty. Small universities want generalists because they don't have the budget for several tech writers, several creative writers, several linguistics, several comp/rhet, several Brit Lit, several Am Lit, and so on. I'm not on the hunt for a job (yet), so I don't know how accurate this is. However, it makes a lot of sense, logically speaking. That, and I watched two search committees hire people at my rinky dink U and they were both generalists. One is Brit Lit and one is Creative Writing, but the Brit Lit guy teaches tech writing and the CW guy teaches Am Lit.

When I was having similar problems, I made an appointment with everyone on my committee, not just the adviser. I told them that I wanted to make sure that I understood and had adequately addressed their concerns before submitting. They didn't read the whole revision, but they were able to tell me what they were looking for, which I was then able to deal with. It saved me a lot of time because I didn't have to wait for them to read, discuss, and give feedback. I got immediate feedback at their convenience (hence appointment). Of course, mine was a book of poetry so the revision process meant that I had to argue over piece of punctuation and every word choice because changes didn't just alter the clarity and quality of the writing, it also altered my work. The biggest hold up on my thesis was my use of em dashes. However, individual meetings with the committee helped me get the thing one without adding a semester. Of course, your school might be different and your adviser might not take so kindly to you doing an end run around him.

I got my credit card through Upromise. The rewards: 1% of my purchases go to pay off student loans. Of course, my monthly netflix bill only gives me 8 cents a month, but hey, it's 8 cents I don't have to pay. When looking for a credit card, it's not just about having one at the local bank. It's about how much interest you're charged, annual fees, what comes with it. My local grocery (part of the Kroger chain) has a credit card that offers massive discounts on fuel at Kroger gas pumps. That does me no good because I knock a dime to fifteen cents off just be crossing the state line. So, shop around. I think Consumer Reports does a regular credit card comparison check.

I did my UG in a small Div II university (7,100 average total enrollment). One of the Gen Ed requirements gives students a choice between Intro to Sociology or Intro to Women's Studies. I took both because my first degree is in sociology. Anyway, the course had an enrollment of 30 and 11 of those spots were taken by men. Only two were left after the first week and only one stayed the course. I'm pretty sure it's because his girlfriend was involved. Women's studies is very uncomfortable for men, I think. It examines patriarchy and finds it abusive. It points out male privilege, privilege that many men took for granted as normal or a right, something everyone experiences. When they're forced to see the opposite point of view, it feels like a personal attack, perhaps even an examination of all the ways in which men are bullies and women are victims of that bullying. I also think that it's says a lot about your women's studies professors that they did not alienate you. I've been in a few classes that were either specifically women's studies or were run as if they were feminist studies. There was a lack of sensitivity to the men in the class; there was a sense that there was an expectation that men would just have to suck it up and get what it feels like to be the second class citizen for a change, that as beneficiaries of systemic privilege, they had no room to complain about feeling disenfranchised, powerless, and devalued. I think that's wrong because it just serves to alienate men from the subject---not women's studies, but the subject itself. It alienates men from embracing the feminism they already participate in. (Few men believe in unequal pay anymore, or that women should not work, or should not participate in all parts of civil life.) There is a place for anyone in women's studies. I don't think a field of study can be legitimate if there is a restriction on who can study it based on gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or social status. I also think that there's a lack of men in women's studies because of that sense of alienation men get from the very beginning. I also think that women's studies would be a stronger discipline if it did have men in it on a broader scale. Men are fully capable of understanding, researching, and adding knowledge to the field. Women's studies should no more be a female privilege than any other field should be a male privilege. Maybe that makes me weird or wrong in some people's eyes, but there is (should) be a place for men in women's studies. Women's studies instructors need to develop a method of teaching the subject without alienating men from it. There's a difference from making people uncomfortable (good teaching should challenge beliefs) and making people feel that the curriculum finds personal fault with them and that everyone in class blames them for things they have no control over. Full disclosure: I characterize myself as a humanist, but that still means I'm a feminist. I'm also a masculinist. It's telling that spellcheck doesn't recognize the term masculinist, but it picks out feminist just fine. The key is that neither gender should have hegemony.

I got my adjunct position by taking my CV to the department itself. Of course, I graduated from the department. Call the department secretary (if they still are lucky enough to have one with all of the budget cuts these days!) and find out how they do their hiring. S/he'll help you figure it out. While HR can help, you can save time by going straight through the department.

I've TA'd for two years and been an adjunct for 2. I teach English. First rule: Follow the explicit dress code for the department. Second rule: Follow the implicit dress code for the department. There is a culture and you can only figure it out by noticing what other professors wear. Everything else is just personal tastes and ideas. I've worn blue jeans, t-shirts, and running shoes nearly every day of class that I've taught. I haven't had any discipline or respect problems. While credibility does begin with appearance, it doesn't stay with it. We've all had professors that looked the part, but were pretty much a complete waste of time. We've all had professors that didn't look the part, but were awesome. My rules: be hygienic, know your stuff, be prepared, and respect the students first. The one thing that I've done that has gotten me instant respect, a respect that I can continue to build on, is telling the class at the outset that I set an alarm so that class will never run over. English professors have a nasty, nasty, nasty habit of thinking they can use the student's time between classes to finish the lecture/discussion. I promised students that I would respect their time, and that I would expect them to respect mine. It works; and it's as simple as that.

I took notes on paper for a long time and have a filing cabinet full of course notes. I plan on shifting the relevant notes to OneNote or EverNote (I haven't picked the platform yet) and leave the rest on paper. The key for me was maintaining organization. I finally ditched the spiral bound five subject notebooks for 8.5" x 11" legal pads to write on because they're slimmer, easier to deal with, and I could file my notes in a manila folder as the semester went along rather than fight with inserting handouts, returned tests/quizzes, and so on at the end of the semester when I filed them away for later. I kept the folders in a desktop filing thingy. I also had a pre-indexed filing system, so at the end of the semester, I could just stick the work from a completed course in the appropriate space in a filing cabinet. Pre-organizing things before starting out saves headaches. Of course, I figured out my filing system after I'd used 5 subject notebooks, and ended spending a week or so after one semester re-organizing because of the pile of notebooks that were difficult to work with. One thing I did that really helped was put a list of all work worth points on the manila folder itself, the number of points each piece was worth, and then when I got the work back, how many points I'd earned. A few seconds witha calculator and I knew what my grade was, aside from any participation points. Some professors use the university's learning suite to track grades, but some don't. My first couple of semesters as a TA, I went with the traditional paper gradebook and the most common question was "what's my grade?" When I used Angel and then Canvas (changeovers suck) to track grades, they quit asking. Of course, they never came to office hours to ask, they always did it at the end of class when I didn't have time to add up a row of numbers.

It's cheaper to ship in an open trailer than a closed one. You've seen them on the road, a semi pulling a trailer that has two rows of cars, one on top of the other. The damage is usually little to nothing. An exposed car will have weather elements, bugs, and whatever rocks that get kicked up by the drive tires on the semi and aren't deflected by the flaps. The difference between a broker and a company is the difference between who pays for the guy in the seat of the semi. A company has a fleet and that company pays the drivers, or subcontracts to another company that does it. A broker offers the job up and companies/owner-operators take the job. The broker is a middle man who can sometimes swing a better deal, but sometimes not. Logistics is very competitive right now. I don't know if you're more likely to get a better driver from a broker or a company. Most of that would depend on price and insurance, I would think. Shop around for price and make sure they're insured. The other consideration will be delivery time. However, it's Seattle. Washington in the summer is for bicyclists. They have a metric ton of public transit. While I wouldn't move to one of the midwestern states without a car (no public transportation at all around K-State!), if there were other options for transit, and I was to be there for a few months, I would leave the car behind. We're talking a thousand or more to transport the thing. But that's me and not everyone else!

I don't know if this is effective for others, but it did work for me. For me, the GRE wasn't about knowing the things I needed to know to answer the question correctly, but knowing how to beat the test. The GRE is mostly fail as a test, in my opinion. It does not measure what it purports to measure. It's basically just a handy metric used to thing the application pile down to something more manageable. I did have to know the words and math to succeed in the test, but I also had to know the logic behind the test. The first time I took it, I was so discouraged that I thought I might as well get a job flipping burgers because that was all I was good for. I got a GRE book, Kaplan, and read it. I started with the definitions of words and the explanations of formulae. Big mistake. I should have started with the logic of the question. The only thing the GRE really measures is your ability to take the GRE. That means that the focus of my preparations was on taking the GRE. I read the "how to take the GRE" section in every guide I could get my hands on. My local university's library stocks most of them and my public library did and inter-library loan for one of them for me. Yeah, I did some word games focused on GRE vocab and I did some math flash card, but most of my effort was studying how to take the test. It worked because I finally rocked it. It also helped me to think of the GRE properly. That it doesn't measure my knowledge or intelligence, and that a not-quite-up-to-snuff score can be overcome by a statement of purpose, writing sample, and letters of recommendation. I declawed it by putting it in its place. What will work for you, or others, I couldn't say. Everyone's brain is different!

I worked during my MA and I had to choose between sleep and work (both school and paycheck) far too often. If you can do it without working, I recomend that. A person can only do so much in one day.

I'm a writer, creative and academic. I've noticed a strong correlation between "writer's block" or "muse" issues and stress. The more stress, pressure, and expectations you (and others) pile on yourself, the more difficult it is to write. I'm particuarly used to opening up a word processor document, typing away, and watching satisfactory prose make its way across the page. Sometimes, though, it changes from pleasure to chore and the only thing I read on the screen is an unspooled fishing line of syntax. I forget how to spell words like "their" and doubt every comma placement. That's me, of course. I have no idea what your writing is like, beyond what I see here. You express yourself clearly and your prose is relatively clean and pleasurable. It seems to me that it's less that you can't write and more that you doubt that you can write. There are some easy-peasy ideas to fix ailing text, but I don't know what to do for ailing confidence. I never believe anyone when they tell me that I'm smart and I'm great and I'll do fantastic. All I know is that the 25 page essays that were always due at the end of the semester were more difficult to push out than the baby was all those years ago. Sometimes, you just have to give yourself permission to suck. Write the essay. When you don't know what to write, fake it. Write until you've reached the end of the essay (not the end of your patience, because you've probably left that behind). Then put it away for a day, three if you can do it. Then come back and revise. That's the key to good writing: revise. Yeah, I'm in English. We revise. A lot. And then some. Hit up your writing center for some face-to-face help, too. Book rec: William Zinnser's On Writing Well. I love it more than I do Strunk & White. Though, Strunk & White is still da bomb.

It's very cool to see that I'm not the only one! *5* kids?! Wow, I totally admire both your stamina and your time management skills. I have the one and he was pretty easy to keep up with. I'm aiming at a smaller institution for a job. They're more into generalists, so while I'll get the degree in literature, I will be coming out of the other end with a bunch of comp/rhet, tech writing, and linguistics courses. My MA is in creative writing, so I doubt I'll do more.

I'd pick Japanese: manga fan. I'd also like to watch Great Teacher Onizuka in Japanese, without a translation. I'm picking German, tho', because I'm a Marxist (not a political Marxist, but a sociologist Marxist and literary Marxist) and Marx was German. Most of the big philosophy was in German. I'm not terribly interested in German literature, though I do love Rammstein. The band, not the city. I prefer Japanese literature. I will learn Japanese, just not for the PhD. The Navy got me pretty fluent in Korean in a year, and they say Korean is a lot harder than Japanese. So, yeah.

But am I a rarified beast? I'm starting on my PhD at the same time my son is starting on his BA. Most of the people in my MA cohort weren't born when I got my high school diploma. I remember research before the Internet, though I have no idea how I lived in a world without google. No, really. I can live happily without a microwave, without cellular service, without bar code scanners, without DVDs and CDs, but no search engines or wifi really sucked in retrospect. Sometimes, I feel like I'm going to be that old lady at my MA graduation ceremony, the one who got a standing ovation and a write up in the paper because she got her degree as an old lady. Of course, she was not only 88, but a really nice woman. I'm 41 and, well, nice is usually used ironically. I hope I'll be done way before I turn 88. It seems like I've been at this education thing forever. I like being older. I don't get the kind of guff from students that most of my cohort did. I don't know if that was age or just me. I have some insight into Raymond Carver because I remember the 70s. Too bad I'm not fond of Carver. I also saw Star Wars, opening night, in the theater. I was 8, but what the heck, right? Billy Idol videos make perfect sense because I grew up under the threat of global thermonuclear destruction. Degree-seeking at this age is fun. Anyone else starting out later in life? Do you think we'll have problems keeping up at recess?

I think that defining "cutting edge" is kind of like defining "short story" without using the word short or its synonyms. Everyone does is differently, and when sufficiently drunk, can get into a fist fight about it. Literature isn't like computer science, where there is a definite, clear limit to technological advancement and anything that pushes that limit is "cutting edge." Literature isn't limited by the progress already made and cutting edge can be something brand new in the middle of 100 year old theories. The Lion King was cutting edge for its time. It pushed limits and turned into a wild success. It just mined something a few centuries old to do it. It's less important to get into the idea of doing something new, or ground-breaking, in the field and more about seeing the old thing in a different way. It's finding your niche. Someone already said that, though.