MadtownJacket

Is this a joke?

I feel you. I get certain parts of grad school can be hard, but the shit people on GradCafe complain about is ridiculous. Look at the status updates on the side. You see shit like this:

Week 1: OMG soooooo stressed. Applied to 10 schools. Hope I get in.

Week 2: OMG soooooo stressed. Got into my top choice. Hope I get funding.

Week 3: OMG soooooo stressed. Got full funding. Hope I find an apartment.

Week 4: OMG soooooo stressed. Found an apartment. Hope I like my roommate.

Week 5: OMG soooooo stressed. My roommate rocks. Hope I find a parking space tomorrow.

Shut. The. Fuck. Up. Nervous much?

Ain't nobody got time for that. 

I'm 24, I'm not married (nor in a relationship), and I have no desire to have kids as well.  Perhaps I'll change my mind in a few years, but I'm making good money now, I travel a lot, and I'll be starting graduate school this fall.  I ain't got time for kids!

I'm 24, I'm not married (nor in a relationship), and I have no desire to have kids as well.  Perhaps I'll change my mind in a few years, but I'm making good money now, I travel a lot, and I'll be starting graduate school this fall.  I ain't got time for kids!

I won't be applying to any ivy schools because none of then have strong faculty in my field.

Program ranking and faculty fit are important. The athletic conference that the school is in has zero importance.

It bothers me when potential applicants ask about their chances at "Ivy League schools." There's this nagging misconception that "Ivy" means "best," and while the Ivies are certainly great schools, there are also plenty of other great schools. Yet for some reason, it persists.
 
But what really baffles me is graduate level applicants who are dead set on attending "Ivy schools"--not one school in particular which is strong in their particular field of interest and also happens to be an Ivy, but "Ivy schools" in general. At the graduate level, there is more than enough variation between schools and departments at schools (and specific faculty at schools) that the "Ivy" designation really means nothing.

One problem I see with alternative universities is that there isn't consistency across the "individualized" majors.  HR folks are receiving thousands of resumes, and they don't have time to sort through them and read every single class that a student has taken just to make sure they learned at least the basics.  It's a lot easier to read resumes knowing that a degree in biology from University of Wisconsin consists of the bare minimum courses the student needs for the job than it is to look at a "degree" from an alternative university and wonder what courses the student took.

Grad school anywhere is composed of the smart people who want to be there. So in that sense you are likely to face imposter syndrome where-ever you attend university. 
 
As a note about UK universities (it sounds like you're talking about Oxford/Cambridge) - they really aren't that traditionalist. You wear the weird robes only once or twice - most people think it's a bit silly, but also kinda fun - the rest of the time it will be quite ordinary. In some ways the hierarchy within British universities is less rigid than in their American counterparts (no tenure system, grad students are better-protected, the moderately cynical British attitude towards authority).

The most important question, I think, you should be asking yourself in this season of acceptances is if you should go to grad school at all.  If you are in the humanities or certain fields of the social sciences, the job market is very bleak.  It may well be better when you graduate, but it may well not be.  There are troubling trends like MOOCs that, many people think, will  restructure much of education in a way that will reduce the number of tenure track hires.
 
How bad is the job market currently?  According to Harvard, as of the fall of 2012, only 52% of those who got a Harvard PhD in the humanities from 2006-2011 had an academic job.  (And it looks like, based on some other data they report elsewhere, that about 1/3 of those are in non-tenure-track positions.)  23% were "unemployed and searching."  And due to self selection bias in reporting, this data probably underestimates the number of unployed.  http://history.fas.harvard.edu/programs/graduate/program/documents/five-year-cumulative-all-fields-2006-2011.pdf. 
 
Because the job market, many people in the humanities, for instance, spend several years after graduating twisting in the wind with low-paid, time-consuming, and short-term lectureships and visiting assistant professorsips before either get a tt job or quitting academia.  If you are really committed to an academic career, you may well be signing up for a PhD + several years of uncertainty and scrapping by after that.
 
Of course not all fields and subfields are made the same.  Some of your fields will have excellent job prospects; others, terrible.  It behooves you to research the matter and think about the kind of bet your are making.  You are giving up 5-8 years of pay, and more importantly, 5-8 years in which you could be launching a different career.  When you graduate at age 30 with a PhD, you will have opened a few doors (for instance, you are an attractive hire for a private high school), but shut many more.
 
I am not saying you should not go.  That is a decision to make yourself.  Personally, I have found getting a PhD immensley rewarding.  But it has also come at a great cost. 

You're wrong that Ivy generally refers to those 5 schools you mentioned (Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Princeton). Stanford isn't even an Ivy League school so that makes no sense. m-ttl summed it up perfectly. Ivy League is an athletic conference, much like the Pac-12, Big Ten, etc. They were some of the very first schools built in America, built to emulate the elite British universities like Cambridge and Oxford, and are all in the northeast. There are certain schools that are thought of more highly than some of the lower ranked Ivy League schools (like MIT, Stanford, even schools like Duke and others). But Ivy league is specifically the 8 schools in the Ivy League athletic conference. People might say they want to go to an Ivy-caliber school, but most Americans know what the Ivy League schools are. There are also unofficial lists such as the Southern Ivies, Public Ivies, Liberal Arts Ivies, etc. These lists are dependent on whoever came up with the list. For example, the guy who create the Public Ivies list created it mainly based on the look of the school--stone buildings, landscaping, etc. 

Georgia Tech. That name is praised in CS!

This statement kind of confuses me. 
 
Tattoos are for people to express themselves, or really do whatever the heck they please. To say, "you can express yourself with pictures, but not words," just seems odd. Why can't you put words on a canvas?
 
Also, on topic, some of my favorite tattoos are biology ones where it looks like the muscle or bone in whatever body part the tattoo is. The ones that look really realistic are pretty sweet looking. (Although it's a little too creepy for me to get, I don't really like the idea of blood and muscles and stuff, to look at a reminder on my body every day would give me the heebie jeebies.)
 
Also, I really found that book by Carl Zimmer very interesting! I would love to look through the entire book.

Sorry it rubs you the wrong way, you'll get over it. I don't expect to "earn" any thing. It seems poor taste to say that, if I were ever in a situation to get a tattoo (which it would take an extreme one), that I wouldn't say "no" to a situation such as an initiation right? I never said I expected it to happen, or that I seek that experience, just that if I were in that situation I would accept one and be proud of it. 
 
 
 
I didn't say that "omg super cool native tatto bro" tattos are the only examples what would be deemed appropriative.
 
" It just doesn't feel like your place to expect or ask for that - especially if they're related to sacred/initiation rites."
 
Did you even read what I said?  I don't expect anything, or ask for anything. Furthermore, I don't expect to "push to get" anything. 
 
Why mention you're mexican? Does this give you higher ground on this subject if I were white? Please step out from behind your ego for a second and actually read what I said. The topic at hand is field related tattoos. My field is Anthropology, therefore I thought of a hyperbolic situation in which I would think about getting a tattoo. I do not have tattoos, nor would I get one. It would take an extreme situation for me to get one, and thus prompted my answer. Note the words "as if I happen", "it just so happend", which mean we are speaking hypothetically.
 
In the end, if my comment offends you - too bad. Go have a sandwich and blog about it. 

Personally I find the expectation that you would earn that kind of tattoo to be a sign of the appropriative nature of the exchange in itself. It really rubs me the wrong way -- it just seems in poor taste to believe you could assimilate or would be deemed worthy of that honor by what is now to you, an unknown group of peoples you're going out to study. 
 
It's not just the "omg super cool native tattoo bro" tattoos that are appropriative and this is frankly expectant of what would be a gift and an honor. You can get a tattoo of deep meaning and relevant to your research that isn't something you'd have to push to get. It just doesn't feel like your place to expect or ask for that - especially if they're related to sacred/initiation rites. 
 
related: as someone of native/mexican descent if I see one more white girl with a sugar skull tattoo, I might lose it. 
 
also related: art historians and artists who cringe at bad/poor quality/cliched (but not classic) tattoos. Guys please, it's a form of art on your body! Make SURE it's going to be done by an artist giving you an original piece of work, and avoid purely text if you can. You're a 3D canvas, not a book! 

I hate to say it but since you got 3 interviews out of 4 applications, I don't think this is about your application packet. Clearly, your application was intriguing enough for these schools to want to interview you. That would indicate (I think) that you are good enough to get your foot in the door, and that all these schools were considering admitting you despite the weaknesses that you list above. The fact that all of the rejections came post-interview make me think that perhaps you didn't handle the interviews well. It's hard to guess what the issue might have been without knowing more, though. My first guess would be that since you say you have less experience in the field you are apply to, that this was a concern for the schools; maybe you didn't do a good enough job convincing them that you know enough about the field or that you'd make a good candidate for it? Maybe they had concerns about your grades that you somehow failed to assuage? These are pure guesses, of course. 
 
Also, I would not recommend applying to schools that you don't want to go to. What's the point? Actually, this makes me wonder if the problem with your application this year was the fit, and that it became clear during the interviews. As an applicant from another field, you want to demonstrate that you understand how the new field works, that you can define a reasonable (in scope, feasibility) research question(s), and that you know what schools are good places to study that question (and why). Perhaps that didn't come through as clearly as you'd hope. The fact that you only applied to 4 schools and are already talking about applying to ill-fitting schools makes me think that perhaps you could have done a better job researching programs to find ones that really fit what you want to study. I would be willing to bet that there are more than just a handful throughout the country. So maybe the problem was in your ability to communicate why you chose the schools you did? (But, of course, this is another guess.) 
 
ETA: In addition to these guesses, it's worth noting that sometimes it's really not about you. There are more good applicants than spots in good programs, so you could have done everything right and still drawn the short stick. There is not much to do about this situation except try again, and in the meanwhile get more experience and perhaps apply more broadly next time. 

You actually make a good point that hasn't been brought up yet in this thread. Obesity seems to be primarily an American issue. But then how does that play into the argument that people can't help that they're fat? If people can't help it, it's a human issues, not an American issue. Maybe we (Americans) need to evaluate the way we live. Sure, there may be the occasional "thyroid problem" but for the most part, it's how you live. Americans just live differently from the rest of the world, and it shows. 
 
Thanks for dropping by, Graditude. And welcome to the dark side of Grad Cafe. 
 
Oh, and if you want to be amused, read anything by LittleDarlings (formerly known as CorruptedInnocence, and formerly formerly known as Pinkster). 

This forum has a terrifying lack of empathy, and understanding of BASIC concepts regarding food politics, body politics, disabilities and general human decency. 
 
Seriously I'm beginning to think they should require a basic sociology class, something that covers poverty, disability, race -- certainly maybe some of you can try looking up "food deserts". 
 
Or....basic economics: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128621057
 
It doesn't even matter if the OP is serious or not, and what the cause of their weight is. Personally I'd rather be around someone who "chose" to be fat than a bunch of people who choose to be assholes. 

You ignorant putz, prednisone *increases your appetite*.  If you haven't been there, then STFU.  Of course people on pred are a smaller percentage.  The point is, you can't assume.  
 
Yeah, I've been living with my wife and her chronic condition for twenty years.  But you're the expert, because there's something called thermodynamics.  What a schmuck.  Downvote me twenty times.  I don't care.

I'd imagine employers will start looking at GPA of Georgia Tech graduates more closely and asking more difficult interview questions since more people are now graduating with the Georgia Tech name. It will devalue the Georgia Tech name yes, but not the knowledge you gain (actually it does devalue the knowledge a little bit since everyone is smarter but the effect of this is negligible).
 
For those saying the degree won't be devalued:
Part of a degree is that it conveys the selectivity of the school granting the degree. Many qualified applicants are not admitted to some degree programs. This "luck" factor is why we "ooohh ahh" at great schools (e.g. Stanford, GaTech). It doesn't matter if the quality of instruction is the same, the fact of the matter is that now there are (example) 5 times more people with the same degree as you. Imagine 5 times more people from your school (and same degree program!) are applying to the same job you are. Or better yet, imagine competing against 5 exact copies of yourself. You must have been qualified to get admitted to the school, so assuming the admissions standards do not drop, it now becomes more difficult for you to compete. If I'm a recruiter (or faculty member looking for new hires), I have to devise other means of "screening" out applicants. This new "screening" out process may not have existed before the online program existed and you, as a degree holder, will have to pass this brand new filter which was the result of increased enrollment (i.e. online degrees).

Guacamole/avocado.

Guacamole/avocado.

You'd be adding $125,000 in debt for a Masters? I think you should evaluate if your future career earnings would even make that worth while.

Or you could uh... you know, try to lose weight? I don't know your situation at all and don't mean to be judgmental... but if you have to rest after every 20-30 paces you are definitely not getting the exercise you need and should be more concerned about becoming healthier than finding a campus that have seats with no armrests.
 
Edit: oh and to answer your original question...stay away from Colorado I guess. Lots of active health nuts here.

Stuck at a tiny airport for the next six hours, so I'm drowning my sorrows in hard cider and Sour Patch Kids while listening to "All of Me" on repeat.