danieleWrites

I have a seizure disorder that didn't come under control until after I'd gotten my MA. My undergrad GPA sucked rocks for PhD stuff and my MA GPA was good enough, but meh. Absenteeism was a huge problem for me. I decided not to address the epilepsy thing directly because (the USA at least) it's one of those things covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act and puts reviewers in an icky position of trying to find this information non-prejudicial while still be prejudiced about it. I didn't ask my recommenders to discuss it for me, even in a roundabout fashion, but when I supplied a bunch of materials for their use (samples of writing I did in their classes, CV, some class discussion memory-joggers, etc.) I gave them blanket permission to mention the seizure disorder if they felt it was necessary, along with a line that took me quite a while to write, that they could include in their letter, that indicated they had my permission to mention the seizure disorder if they felt it was necessary. When I applied for my MA, I went to the professors I was interested in working with and had a conversation with them about my seizure disorder. I didn't do that with my PhD simply because I didn't have the time. Otherwise, I would have opened a conversation about the trials of being a good student with epilepsy, introducing my health issue in a conversation where we could spend time talking about it. I did not mention my ADHD as it was not relevant. My professors discover that at the beginning of each semester.

I have an emergency fund, savings, in an accessible savings account that basically earns no interest (savings accounts never do). I've got my stuff in a few mutual funds and an index fund. Nothing really fancy, but they consistently perform better than inflation. I've read a ton of Marx, too, enough to know that until the revolution happens, we're in a capitalist economy so sticking money in jar for later is the same thing as losing money. $100 this year is worth $98 next year is worth $96 next year is worth $70 in ten years is worth $40 in 20 years. When the revolution happens, money won't mean anything anyway.

I like Book Antigua for stuff printed on paper. I go for serif fonts, so if it's getting sent electronically, and not a .pdf, I put it in Times New Roman. Boring, but there's rarely an occasion where TNR is inappropriate.

Last week, I was doing a lesson in my composition class on how to analyze rhetoric and used myself as a model. I wore hiking hoses, jeans with the bottoms ripped (I'm short, the pants are not), and faded from use, and a white tee shirt (one of a five pack, available in the Big Box Store of Doom for 7 bucks). We got a lot of mileage about what kind of assumptions and "common sense" we get from wardrobe. I wear math-geek tee shirts a lot, too, which is funny for an English teacher.

Though this is obviously too late for Francophile's original post. Still. I'm in literature. Look at the admissions requirements for the universities you're interested in. About three years ago, the baseline was looking like a 3.5 for an MA looking to get into a PhD. Some programs had no minimum GPA listed. Some had a super high GPA listed. I was surprised that some big names had a lower GPA. A high GPA is always a good idea because the lower GPA numbers can keep you out of programs of interest. However, it's not insurmountable. While I totally get the whole GPA for grad school ambitions thing, it can turn counterproductive. It's easy to get so into requirements for other programs and lose focus on the requirements for the current program. Yeah, a straight B average puts you at the downward slope of the bell curve for grad school. Start up a group with the grads in your classes, even the PhD students, if possible. Offer to trade papers for peer review and do your best to peer review confidently. If your professors aren't going to help you with drafts, then turn to your classmates, who are in the same position. As a foreign language student, the writing center won't be much help, but your cohort might be able to help. You might find them needing the same help you need. When I was an MA (English), my biggest obstacle was that there weren't enough critical articles assigned as part of the courses. There were very few, actually. I didn't get critical article assignments until I got into seminar courses where undergraduates are not welcome. Some profs give more articles than others. Some don't give any. This is an impediment because I did not think to go out and read them for myself, so I did not learn to read critical articles in lit as an MA student, so I could not write critical articles (the papers we turn in for class should be the first draft of a critical article) that met the conventions. It meant lower grades and a lot of frustration. One thing I learned as a creative writer, what you read regularly is what you're going to put out regularly. Read crap poetry, write crap poetry. It seems to work that way for academic writing. If you don't read academic research writing, you're not going to absorb the conventions of the genre, and you're not going to put out writing that meets those conventions. So, my advice: get help from your fellow students by doing peer reviews. Read critical articles in the field to see what the conventions are. Pick one to use as an model for your own papers. If you're writing a comparison of two poems through a feminist theory lens, then find a paper that compares two poems through a feminist theory lens and use it to develop ideas for organization, use of theory, use of critical articles, and so on. Do what your profs do: read the journals in your field of interest. Not cover to cover (who has that kind of time?), but the articles in your research interest. If the current issue doesn't have one, look at past issues. This will help you build your knowledge base as well as help you learn the conventions to write better papers.

I'm not sure. For my MA, I had to take three comprehensive exams in three sub-fields of my field (British literature, American literature, and creative writing). We had extensive reading lists that the exam questions would be derived from. We would be given three questions for each exam, which would use two to six of the many, many works on the list, and we would choose one question. We had three hours to write a complete, comprehensive essay that would answer the question. Incomplete essays would fail. We could only use the word processor on the computer in the computer lab, pencils, and paper. Everything we wrote had to come straight from the brain. It was torture. You will always feel as if you're not ready, even after you've actually gotten word that you passed. You'll wonder how you managed to fool them into thinking you have any clue. To be clear, I don't know anything about your exam, or what written quals would be like in biology. At all. I'm assuming that from the word "written," it's an essay exam rather than short answers and multiple choice. As someone with no real experience in your field, but someone with a lot of reading in pedagogy in several fields, I find that essay exams with a lot of information tend to be either synthesis or comparison. That means that you do not need to know every bit of information. Instead, you need to know the important bits of information so you can work the various bits from different sources together. On a practical level, this means that instead of trying to memorize important things separate from each other, you try to understand how things relate to each other. For example, if you've already thought about (and here's my ignorance shining brightly) how photosynthesis and is connected to the idea of carbon sinks, you don't have to try to work out the connection when faced with it on an exam. Even better, the average person remembers things better when its understood in a context, and even better in multiple contexts. When I was getting my master's, I went to the DGS and asked him to be the faculty adviser for a comprehensive exam study group. I wanted to make it formal because I wanted to use him as a resource. I wanted him to give me copies of past questions. I wanted him to give me copies of past, successful exam answers. I wanted him to come to a scheduled group meeting and give a talk on how to pass the exam. Because each exam had at least three readers who would either pass or fail it, I wanted to arrange for the readers to come to a group meeting and give a talk on how to pass the exam. Not only was I able to get those resources, I was able to get permission to create a group within the university's learning management suite (Angel at that time, it would be Blackboard now) to create a respository for the resources and a discussion forum for the group to ask questions of each other, and more importantly, to ask questions that the guest speakers at the group meetings could answer. I have no idea if you can get the person responsible for your quals to share those kinds of resources or not, but I found that to be extremely helpful in guiding my study. Knowing the basic logic of these questions, in advance, allowed me plan a method to prepare.

My department and the grad student group schedules socializing events around literature stuff. We have a symposium every month (in this case, symposium is code for going to a local microbrewery, sit around, drink beer, and argue about some pre-arranged literarcy criticism chapter or article.) Some departments have reading groups. I plan to start one in mine next semester (because I dropped the ball for starting it this semester). I took a class last spring that mixed grads and undergrads, and the undergrads had exams. The grads had a free day, so we all decided to meet on exam day and sit around to discuss the papers we were writing. It was a blast. Part of being a grad student is loving your research. I don't want to go see some band play Friday night 'cause I can read rhetoricians! My spouse pooh-poohs this plan on a regular basis. Anyway, the point is that there are two kinds of socializing with your fellows: academics-free (which is totally necessary) and with academics. Next time you're in the halls near the lab, go get a coffee with someone and talk about theory. Make it a regular event and invite more people to join you. Debate is a great motivator for understanding and expanding knowledge. Find out what your recreation center has available. Play an intramural sport (my rec has quidditch and ballroom dancing as intramural sports, so it's not all rugby and dodgeball). LARP. Hike. Volunteer. Join an activist club. I'm an introvert (INTJ, actually), so socializing is my idea of the eighth circle of hell, at least until I'm actually doing it (with a limited number of people). I find that when I've joined a group that depends on my participation, I will always choose to do that instead of choosing to hibernate on the couch with a book. It gets me out and doing non-academic socializing. If it's a a non-team situation, it's hit and miss about whether or not I'll choose to socialize over reading. Introverts unite! (Separately, in your own homes.)

For me, there's something of a blurred line between academic work and leisure. I read theory for funsies. I try to pick courses where the assigned readings are interesting so I'm getting relaxation mileage out of work. My hourly workload varies from week to week. My first semester, my workload was insane because I decided to write The Paper That Ate My Life. I ended up reading about 50 books, in addition to the three books that were the source of the paper and about a dozen or so articles. While I did work smart, the focus of my paper was a stupid, stupid choice. However, I did get a fabulous paper out of it. So, yay for me. 80 hours is too many for me and I cannot put that much time on my academics in addition to my teaching load, job, and family responsibilities. I take the minimum number of classes required for the semester and I prioritize the amount of effort I do for the assigned work in classes based on where it will advance me educationally and professionally. For example, I will read every assigned work, but the ones that are not relevant to my research plans? I won't annotate, and will likely skim tropes. I will focus on finding the bones of the story, situating important characters, and marking two or three passages I found particularly interesting or important. For works that I will use in papers, I will read every word, annotate, take notes, and follow patterns with outside research because I will use those to develop a paper. So, this week, my class workload is super heavy because I'm reading one of those books right now. Last week, not so much. I schedule like crazy. I am running three gmail accounts (my U uses gmail as its student email account provider) for academic/professional, personal, and household (I do the family paperwork); and three different calendars to track my time. I schedule my weeks: 10:00 to 12:00, my butt on couch, reading seminar book. 12:00 to 12:20, reheat leftovers, stretch, set up at kitchen table, text son to make sure he did his homework. 12:20 to 1:20, at kitchen table, eating and reading seminar book. And so on. I do this so my android phone shows me my paln for the day, and, more importantly, it also shows up on my spouse's android so he knows when he can't talk to me. I track tasks on a paper calendar in a dayrunner that has tabbed sections where I keep track of papers, projects, and whatnot. The hour or so a week I spend with my organizer is the best investment I've made for myself. Just being organized has freed up hours to do things like hit the gym and take off the first semester 15. I schedule time for leisure and sleep. There are no assigned readings in my favorite manga. Go figure.

I use a 10" tablet for my work, but bring my 17" laptop when I have scheduled conferences with students and need to have two people clearly see multiple documents on a screen. I would assume that my needs != someone else's needs. Mostly, for me, it's about battery life and recharging ability. My laptop has about two hours between plug ins. The tablet can go all day.

My major tends to slide on and off of the "worst degrees to get, ever!!" lists. I think it spends its time off that list because of the assumption that one can always spend a couple of semesters picking up a BSEd to go with that English BA. English MAs can find work in schools. But, I'm hanging out in what a lot of people think as "a waste of time" and "a waste of money" and "useless degree" because it doesn't have "any real world skills" to get some "ROI". I'm still doing it. Moreover, I'm doing work that has people in my field tilting their head and wondering WTF?! because it don't look like literature papers. Still, I believe that my research interest has larger social value, so I'm pursuing it. That said, my research interest is flexible. My dissertation, should it happen the way I envision (I can already hear future cries of "more close reading!") rather than what my professors usually write, will have a variety of "skills" on display: survey creation, quantitative social science methods, qualitative work, linguistics, blah blah blah. Should search committees read my writing samples and stare at me via Skype with the same horror my current professoriate uses, I can trot my happy self on down to a variety of non-academic places and push the literature stuff aside and focus on how it shows I can solve problems with my mad mixed methods skillz. This doesn't have to be an either-or situation. Sure, your little known corner of your field might be full of chirping crickets rather than professional interest. But does it have to be that way? What theories, methods, or work is pretty shiny right now? Are there ways you can bring the shiny in your field together with your interest? Instead of looking at the oh-so-rural by itself, contextualize it in a larger fashion. Rural issues tend to crop up in some urban settings. A food desert (no grocery stores) isn't just a high poverty urban problem. It's also a high poverty rural problem. For example. Be creative with your thinking.

I'll add my voice to the you-did-the-right-thing chorus. I would also suggest that you, at the least, look at your university's grad school website to see the minimum requirements for international students in terms of speaking English. Now, not every student that doesn't speak English well is an international student. I've had to wade through a composition class with an American citizen that spoke poor English. She would not have been able to pass the TOESL enough to be admitted into the university. At any rate, this will give you an idea of the baseline that the university expects regarding the use of English. To an extent. A TOESL score isn't necessarily an easy to understand indicator for people who never have to deal with the TOESL. The next step would be to email your supervisor for guidance should something of this nature happen to you in the future. If nothing else, you will have a paper trail, as it were, should the student or a future student complain about your handling of this or a similar situation.

You are not overthinking this. A good adviser is important. You are not saying that this professor is a bad person. You are saying that you don't think this professor is the right fit for your future work. Not every professor is good at teaching. The university has run on the mastery method since the inception of university education, and in most fields, it still does. A professor is qualified to teach because s/he has mastered the field in some way, not because s/he has had any training in pedagogy. Some fields have pedagogy courses, but these vary in scope from program to program, school to school. Even in composition studies, in which pedagogy is half of the field's work, some programs have no pedagogy training available. So you ask a very important question: when it is time for me too choose my PI, which is the best fit? Now, there are ways that you can nudge people into working with you, but it's not your job to teach a professor how to be a mentor/adviser/teacher/whatever. It's his job to teach you. From my unlearned perspective (I'm not in physics), this seems to be an important decision for you to make. I would suggest that you use your usual process for working through multiple options to find the one the best suits you.

I forgot to mention: Mary Soliday's "Reading Student Writing with Anthropologists: Stance and Judgment in College Writing", College Composition and Communication 56.1, Sept 2004, is a real eye opener. It examines how graduate students in anthropology assess and judge undergraduate papers. It's different than what comp TAs do. Rarely will we teach English majors.

Nancy Sommers wrote "Responding to Student Writing" in College Composition and Communication 33.2, May 1982. Summer Smith wrote "The Genre of the End Comment: Conventions in Teacher Responses to Student Writing" in College Composition and Communication 48.2, May 1997. What got me the most was Joseph M. Williams' "The Phenomenology of Error" in College Composition and Communication 32.2, May 1981 (http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/schaffner/Williams%20Error.pdf) William Irmscher put out an interesting chapter, Evaluation (chapter 13) in the book Teaching Expository Writing, 1979. I also like Patrick Slattery's "Using Conferences to Help Students Write Multiple Source Papers" in here: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED357365.pdf I have students read Valerie Krishna's "Syntax of Error" when I run into those that have trouble with convoluted syntax (http://wac.colostate.edu/jbw/v1n1/krishna.pdf) I believe that written English fluency is acquired the same way as spoken English fluency. A semester's worth of grammar and mechanics squeezed in when possible isn't going to help students that aren't motivated to practice it on their own. I do point out grammar and mechanics and I do grade with them in mind, but I refer them to the writing center if they need a lot of help with it so they can get used to going to the writing center to have their rough drafts proof read. They will not have a comp teacher for every class they have to write papers in. For some with a lot of trouble and the motivation to do something about it, I have them read a few opinion articles of their interest on one of the major newspapers (like New York Times), and come to my office hours once a week to discuss it. We diagram sentences. It's fun. I care about this stuff and I emphasize how important good presentation is (particularly with grammar, mechanics, and word choices) not only because of ethos but also because people to tend to judge a person's intelligence and education based on use of language. Bad spelling = you're stupid in our culture. Still, there's only so much a comp teacher can do that 12 years of school hasn't already done. Anyway, the primary reason why I do not put much focus on rules of writing is that students come into college, and into paper writing as well, with the assumption that there is a correct way to do things and an uncorrect way to do things. They focus too much on correctness and fail to grasp that correct is based on the rhetorical situation, not on a specific set of unchanging rules. Language rules shift over time, and shift depending on audience. This is particularly important because certain "rules" in the English discipline are not only not the rules in other fields, but are incorrect. For example, in English, we would never use "The purpose of this paper is to...." as the first sentence. We are taught that the "rule" is that all papers must have a hook, and that is in the first few sentences. However, in other disciplines, particularly the sciences, you will find a statistically significant number of peer-reviewed, published articles that start with phrases exactly like those or similar to. So, I don't want to reinforce the idea that there is a correct way of using language based on rules. There are two parts of assessment in a paper that makes comp courses challenging in ways that no other course has to deal with: content and form. I assess both. Like everyone else, I start with and focus on the global. A good paper has good, holistic logic, both in content and form. (This is why I never allow students to write about polarized subjects: you get someone else's talking points. Nor do I allow them to write about religion because they can't practice the kind of holistic logic that academic rigor demands. Not that they pick topics anyway, I'm not an expressivist.) The central idea must be expressed, there must be supporting points that develop the paper in a logical fashion, and these must be supported with evidence, and they must all be linked with solid logic, and they must all be accurate. This is why I pick topics, I can't judge the accuracy of content in baseball, so I can't assess a proper grade. The next step of assessment is the middle sized stuff, mostly in sections or paragraphs. One of our texts uses the phrase "sections of thought" which I like.; It has a main point (which acts like a thesis statement for that segment of the paper), might have subpoints, has evidence, and has analysis. All of this works together with holistic logic. I sort of transition, in my thinking of the paper, from the global to the regional, with organization. The global paper should have each section of though organized in the best fashion for the purpose of the paper and its intended audience (for my class, the discourse community--reference, James Paul Gee---is always peers in an undergraduate composition program). The last step of my assessment is local stuff. Sentences, transitions, word choice, grammar, punctuation, documentation style (I use APA since it does a better job of transfering to the majority of other styles than MLA, and our rules book doesn't have a strong enough section on Chicago). When it comes to error, I will highlight error when I catch it (all my papers are submitted online so I can grade via word processor). If an error is made more than three times, I will explain it. I will explain no more than one consecutive error per page of text. So if the paper is three pages long, I will explain three broken rules errors. I don't want them to shift focus from the holistic paper to correct/incorrect. Correct papers are the ones that use logic and language that best fits the rhetorical situation. You want to have students scream against anarchy? Have them read Williams' Phenomenology of Error. Form and content have equal footing for me. An A paper has excellent form and excellent content. If I don't notice an error, the error does not exist. I have grammatical pet peeves, but I do not use them for assessment. One of my profs will knock off a point for ending a sentence in a preposition. I do point these idiomatic usages out so that they are aware that these choices can negatively affect ethos. However, so can using "in which" in the wrong rhetorical situation. I had a student in an automotive major tell me his prof thought the phrase "in which" or "to whom" meant stuck up. I told him that this reaction showed that you can never really predict the preferences of everyone in your intended audience and should do your best to use the language of the discourse community because that will be the most widely accepted. As for commenting on papers? Smith's work on the end comment has been my guide, along with Slattery's suggestions about commenting. Ask questions rather than write imperatives. Example: Why did you choose a personal anecdote to support you point? Consider the rhetorical situation when you select evidence. Sometimes an anecdote is the best choice. Considering your audience and the discourse community you're working with, what do you think in this case? I like Slattery's suggestions because I tend to see my role as a comp teacher to teach them to comment on their own drafts the way I would comment on their drafts if I were not asking questions instead. I have my students turn in rough drafts (no points for rough drafts, so no immediate penalty if they don't turn one in), and I comment on them. I have conferences after rough drafts are done (I give myself a weekend to make preliminary comments, then add more as we conference) and then give them 5 to 7 days to turn in their graded draft. I don't comment on graded drafts. I have a rubric that I use and I copy and paste a few relevant points from my rubric into the final draft to explain why they got the grade they got. I don't comment extensively on rough drafts in my preliminary work because they will only pay attention to so much. If it's too marked up, they'll ignore most of it and I've wasted my time. If it's not marked up enough, they'll assume they did fine and turn in the rough draft as a final draft. It's why I put a few annotations per page and do the bulk of commenting in conference. I also have my students workshop drafts. It's a guided workshop. I have them read the whole thing without commenting. Then I stop class and we discuss what global issues are (I have my rubric up on the media screen) for a few minutes, and then I have them go through and comment on global issues. I direct them to write at least two questions from the who, what, where, why, when, how categories, and to make at least one comment about something they liked about the whole paper and one critique. Then we stop and discuss the regional issues, followed by a time for them to comment on regional issues. Then we do local issues. Finally, we get out the handbook and check APA. The workshop is ostensibly to give them more feedback on their work, but it also teaches them how I assess a paper, and it teaches them how to assess their own work in a systematic manner.

Many schools offer intensive 5 week courses to fulfill the phd reading requirement. Spanish is, frankly, the easiest language to use for this in the US. There are many places that offer intensive 5 week courses to fulfill the phd reading requirement that you can take online and will be accepted by many programs. Check to see if your university offers one. The online university attached to the University of Wisconsin system offers a reading course in German for just over 1,000 to everyone in the country, for example. I think they have one in Spanish.

I wasn't a stay at home mom between undergrad and grad, but I did go back to school as an older person with a kid and a husband. On the day I walked for my master's degree, an 87 year old woman walked for her bachelors; she had a 40 year, child rearing & clerical job hiatus between starting school and finishing it. SAHMs have every bit as much right to pursue their dream as anyone else. Actually, I dislike the notion of SAHM simply because it makes an irrelevant social distinction for valuation. It implies that the woman (never the man), didn't do anything but change diapers and wipe up snot when she wasn't watching her stories or making overly elaborate plans for someone's first birthday party. That, unfortunately, is an obstacle women always seem to have to address in any application process. Education has a use-by date when it comes to research. If you haven't been doing anything in your field for a few years, find some creative ways to discuss how you actually have been doing things in your field. A person trying to get into an agriculture program can discuss experiments she ran (likely unknowingly) with her backyard tomato plants. Volunteer work related to the field can be used. Create a fresh writing sample that includes research published in the past year (or update an old piece of work with new research). The writing sample will show, beyond anything else, that you are current in the field if you have a hiatus in your resume. This varies from field to field, of course. Research in computers is out of date in a year or two; research in English literature takes a lot longer to stale (like a decade). The fact that you owned a small business for a while can make inroads. Grad students tend to be of the traditional sort, straight from high school to undergrad to grad with, at most, a gap year somewhere. You have outside experience, particularly with industry, that you can use to apply to your future plans in some fashion. There is often a way to use the many things that go into running a business to talk about future interests, even if they don't really coincide. I think that going after your dreams is almost always a good idea. (The almost caveat is for dreams of things like marrying Prince Harry or being the first person to own a live unicorn.)

So you're basing your decision on US News & World Report's choices? Or Princeton Reviews? Forbes? (US News says Princeton is the top school; Forbes says Williams College is the top school, Money says Babson College, the last time Washington Monthly published a ranking, the top school was UC San Diego). Do some research about ranking systems first. You might find out that ranking is pretty much one small metric for use in making college choices. You might find that the graduate student body's collective ability to take the GRE makes up about 1/3 of the ranking system. So how does the GRE factor into your value system? Can quantitative data accurately describe qualitative circumstances? Yeah, a tricky question for computer science. I would suggest you begin with Lloyd Thacker's book College Unranked: Ending the College Admissions Frenzy. Full disclosure: I'm virulently against college ranking systems because they have become an oversized tool in the data set. It's rather like deciding not to purchase a tool set because the hammer wasn't designed by someone from MIT. What you're really discussing is prestige. Is your school prestigious enough for you? Your answer is no. It's not ranked, ergo it doesn't have prestige. Why is it not ranked? Schools are opting out of ranking systems because they acknowledge that ranking systems pretty much suck. Schools near the top of the list aren't necessarily top ranked because of quality; there are enough that are top ranked because of advertising and gaming the system to make the metric's value questionable. Rankings should be a guide, but they should not be an important guide in making school choices. The better approach to prestige is to look at what you're doing in your program. Are you getting published in places that have prestige in your field? Are you presenting at conferences or other events where the movers and shakers in your field are attending? Are you doing good research in the field that people in your field will take notice of? Prestige matters (the places rankings have in prestige isn't as much as the names--if Harvard was never ranked again, it would still have more prestige than the top ranked school), but all the prestige in the world cannot make up for quality work. None of us can make your decision for you (stay in an unranked place where you're productive and happy, or gamble on getting into a ranked school where you may or may not be happy and may or may not be able to carry out the research you want to do with, at minimum, the career results you currently have). Rank is obviously very important to you while I obviously hold it in contempt. I think, what it boils down to, is an evaluation of your value system (not just in what makes a good school) followed by an evaluation of your chosen ranking publication's value system. I would be surprised if those two lists matched up with any statistical significance. For example, US News values the use of SAT and/or ACT scores in admissions; and will not rank schools that do not. Is the undergraduate population's collective ability to take the SAT/ACT something you value? If not, why would you consider the value of a ranking system that requires its use to even be considered for a ranked position? Do you value ROI across every field? Does it matter to you that art majors spend a lot of money but don't make much? Why would you use a system that thinks blanket ROI does? People do not get into humanities and education to make money, and these majors are made up of a statistically significant number of the undergraduate population. I would propose that, instead of considering your school's unranked state in US News & World Report, you look to your field. What makes prestige in the field? Sure, a name like MIT on your diploma is going to open some doors, but so will exciting research. Steve Wozniak went the the University of Colorado in Boulder (US News ranks #88). Ken Thompson went to Harvard. For every Ken Thompson, though, there are many more like the Woz. Not in terms of making bank (there is only one Apple, after all), but in terms of having a fulfilling career after graduation.

Target and Walmart have similar type furniture. It's all MDF or cheap metal that you must put together yourself. It's not bad for the price. In parts of the US, there is a store called Big Lots which sells furniture similar to Target and Walmart, but much, much cheaper. It's an overstock type store. You might check into that. Another option is to wait until you get to the community to furnish the place. Yes, you'd like to have it furnished immediately, who wouldn't?, but the US is stocked full of secondhand stores and weekends are traditionally full of yard sales, garage sales, and so on. Buy the mattress new (they have cheap, decent ones at places like Big Lots and Walmart). In between getting a bed and arriving, you can pick up a relatively cheap air mattress to sleep on and store away in case you have overnight guests or you go on a trip, like a camping trip, and can bring it with you. Or you can resell it. I furnished my entire house for 900. Except the bed. We bought a sleep by number, which isn't cheap, but it's been worth the money. I got my big, big desk at a secondhand furniture store. It retailed for 400, I got it for 100. Tons of bookshelves, a couch. Of course, we also own a pickup truck, which means that we can go to places like yard sales. There are places that will rent trucks of varying natures if you decide to do shopping in places that don't deliver.

The director of freshman comp at my previous institution was an internist with and MD until he went back in his forties and got a PhD in English. Whether you should do it or not? I can't tell ya.

Like everyone else, I think this a personal preference thing. I do know that some ebooks do not contain all of the material a physical book contains, though I imagine these instances are few and can be gotten around by photocopying relevant pages of a classmate's book. One of the texts in the composition course I teach did not obtain electronic rights to one of the articles it published in the physical books, which forced students to have to find an alternative. I don't see this as a common problem since most texts aren't "readers". I did discover that ebooks are seriously handy when one must read a book that one had someone managed to not purchase prior to the beginning of the semester when one goes through all of her course papers and purchases books. One feels like a complete idiot, FYI. Cause, really. How frickin hard is it to double check an order? Bad Daniele! Though, I do admit to something of a conundrum every semester when I take classes that have texts in the public domain. Do I buy a physical copy or do I just download from Project Gutenburg? So far, I've always bought a physical copy. I don't have a kindle itself, though I do have a tablet and smartphone with kindle apps. There's a difference between backlit screens and e-ink screens. My tablet does let me doodle with a stylus, but not with the book. I'm not a fan. Like a lot of people, I like to annotate my texts.