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MissingVandyCandy

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  1. Well this seems like the perfect place for me to chime in after a somewhat lengthy hiatus from my cafe musings... Hawaii, Florence, Heavan... Vanderbilt. Which one of these does not belong? Ah it's a trick question because my new Commodore they all belong. In fact, if the corollary to the old cliche that Dante forwent writing about a depth of Hell that went beyond that which could be described in mere human discourse, he surely could not have written about the beacon of Heavenly bliss that is Vanderbilt. You are about to enter a privileged layer. A school community unlike any other, for not only will you experience a soundly top 20 academic institution and all the benefits that accrue from that association, but your social life is about to upgrade 10 fold. Move over New York, Boston, Chicago, because Vanderbilt and Nashville offer you: 1) More affordability 2) A plethora of smart and beautiful people 3) A strong athletic program - basketball is some of the best in the nation and remember this is an academic school 4) Great dining 5) City life without the dirty NYC vibe, yet without the trendy nonsense... mom and pop stores still live here and you can avoid Walmart and all that it entails 6) A social life where grad students from all areas interact - Vanderbilt is unique because it has 11,000 students total with nearly half of them being graduate students so you won't be outnumbered by undergrads. I could go on, but all future Dores can contact me with questions and I'd be happy to advise. If you are a single male you are about to learn what shooting fish in a tank is all about - even dorky engineers date supermodels in the oasis of attractiveness they call VandyLand
  2. I think you'll find the girls at both schools amenable to a variety of methodological approaches to intercourse... doggy, scissors, missionary. The coed committment to pluralism should be strong at either institution, though there is something about those girls in Athens. I'd method myself down to UGA.
  3. I've been admitted to a PhD in the social sciences at BC, however, I am inclined not to go because I'm concerned that the social life within the graduate school is very bare. Do you have any positive views that you might be able to share to quell my anxiety. First, my program is small (5 in the cohort) and current students told me their is little intermingling with other grad students accross Law, Education, and other core disciplines. That is very dissapointing news to me given that the students (probably mostly undergrad seemed cool and social and attractive etc etc)... but I've heard that most grad students treat BC like a commuter school - come to class to their time then go back to their apartments and study - very little sense of social or intellectual community. Maybe its diff from program to program and maybe this is just grad school life in a city in general, but I was hoping there would be more of a social community - that's the whole benefit of academia and a career in a university no? Please please please tell me if you got a different impression. I love my program at BC, but don't want to spend 6 years with my thumb up my you know what in my apartment or wondering the streets with 2 ppl in my cohort in Boston.
  4. Hey Undrafted... thanks for the info, but per our last back and forth I'm probably not going to ND
  5. The whole point of my post was to get a handle on whether Doctoral students can date underclassmen because I suspect they will pique my interest more than the doctoral students.
  6. May I refer you to my disclaimer: (All of the above should be taken with a little grain of salt)...
  7. I did warn you to read it with a grain of salt... I just want to know whether I need to prepare to target undergrads only or whether there are a few diamonds in the doctoral rough as it were...
  8. On a less serious note, now that VandyCandy is in to grad school, the social environment of the grad student experience is of some concern/interest on my end. For those of us who are young (I am 25 and not even close to being in a serious relationship), I am curious what dating options are available to doctoral students. Any advice, especially from the somewhat cool guys on what I can expect to encounter would be great. I realize I'm not going to meet Penelope Cruz look-alike who is studying Latin American Politics in my doctoral program, but hopefully something not too far off... (All of the above should be taken with a little grain of salt)...
  9. Hey Everyone: There's a good enough chance that I may end up at ND that I've begun to look into living arrangements. I would appreciate anyone who has either lived in ND or has personal knowledge of the area chiming in on my questions. Some general things I've been told (feel free to confirm or dispel): 1) Graduate Student housing is not so hot. 2) The school bill's the area as being very low rent (400s), however the decent places are outside of South Bend and run 700s. 3) Purchasing a decent house in a safe area for under 125,000 is actually viable and people do it. What I am looking for: I really want to find either a historic loft, old apartment building, or house with tons of old world charm. A lot of what I've seen on craigslist just looks depressing and architecturally ugly. I don't want the typical yuppie nice and new condo or apartment community where every place looks just like the next. In fact, I'd rather sacrifice some niceness for charm.. (e.g. hardwoods, historic, loft, etc etc)... Can anyone tell me if this type of living arrangement exists. Any insider knowledge? How to go about looking? Craigslist hasn't been that helpful as it only has a few listings. Also, other towns nearby to search for this type of arrangement outside of Mishawaka or South Bend? Thanks
  10. Notre Dame's package this year is 16k over 5 years with a renewable 6th year in most cases. Pretty ridiculously good considering avg rents in south bend are in the low 400s.
  11. My 2 cents on the subject: Fake it, Until Ya Make It...
  12. I think that is generally true ampersand, however, I think your good analogy might not be generous enough in accounting for the topological knowledge of the faculty members that comprise these committees. Say, for instance, that Williams College is looking to hire a tenure track Political Science professor with teaching responsibilities in Public Law, American Constitutional Development and Legal Theory. I am hard pressed to believe that the faculty at Williams (experts themselves in Political Science who attend conferences, workshops and keep abreast of the latest in the subfields) who would be responsible for hiring lack the knowledge when picking up a dossier from a candidate coming from UPenn, Boston College or USC to make the connection that the candidate likely studied and learned the Law and Courts literature under Rogers Smith, Shep Melnick and Howard Gillman respectively. Though they might pull a Harvard candidate's file or internally know that UC-Berkeley is a "higher ranked" institution, if they are good Political Scientists who know the topography of the subfield and position they are hiring for (e.g. public law) they will not pass over the BC, Upenn, or USC candidate for Berkeley where even mildly informed members on this board know rat choice is the prevailing theme. **And this is the last time I'll say this: realist's main point is largely true, it just doesn't necessitate 10 posts to make the overriding observation that academy isn't an easy career path and that if you want to improve your chances for an easy transition into a TT job you do your best to go to a top 10 school. well, duh.
  13. ammar-- i couldn't agree more. i too think 90 percent of what realist says is spot on in terms of being, well reality, however this guy's delivery and constant debbie downer b.s. could depress a high school cheerleader doped out on prozac. it's not that all of us think we are know-it-all hot shots (you'll notice from my posts that I constantly point out when I'm addressing a topic outside of my experience or area of expertise), however, as prospective phd students we would all benefit from more prescriptive advice as ammar points out than the tired routine of, "academia is hard, bag groceries." That sentiment doesn't exactly recommend itself.
  14. God I hope nobody reading got into the program that is ranked 25.5 - that would present quite the predicament, no?
  15. The Hitch isn't a career scholar, killa. He's a journalist who from time to time takes a visiting position (New School I think). Plus he could take out Larry Sabato and that goddamn watercolor painting of UVa he is always blabbing in front of on the O'Reilly Factor with one hand tied behind his back and laced up on johnnie walker.
  16. Ha... thanks. Sorry, I like you Silencio and was not attempting to diminish your husband's field of work. I get carried away with the sarcastic verbage sometimes. I save my best shots for realist though, who I suspect may be petty enough to try and find out who I am and where I decide to go to grad school so he can tell search committees that I fornicate with puppies.
  17. First of all, I wasn't the one being negative... it was an attempt at some levity. Don't Associate Professors still appreciate that? As a prospective doctoral student, I obviously have not passed my Political Theory comps with flying colors like you, but I think I know enough to say that a "realist" appreciates a little piss and vinager. I mean you seriously couldn't have anticipated that you would lurk the grad cafe (which is mainly filled with people who are trying to start a career in academia and love the idea of that career) and expect to recommend a hyper-realist position in every post that makes Chronicle sob stories look less like the emotive drivel on Oprah's book club list and more like Pollyana prose and think that people will just soak up your offerings like a misquito grazing on blood at a nudist colony. It's not that folks on here don't want to live in a reality based world. We know academia is hard, but if you're coming down every time on the 'it can't be done' and 'it is rare' side of the equation a few of us are going to begin to reach for the salt shaker and conclude thou doth protest too much... unless of course you are harvey mansfield or larry sabato (who actually is a hack, charlatan, and psuedo scholar whose pop scholarship and celeb styled aura make me want to barf- sorry LS fans). As for your analogy re: wade and melo (great attempt at showing that profs are cool too)... Empirically that seems weak NBA vs. Tenure Track. Come on... again maybe not Harvard, but I'm sure transferring or going from MA to PhD is easier than the NBA. Look, I'm just joking around with all this a bit, but there is no need to come on this board and constantly bemoan the difficulty of the career in academia. No one is saying it's like getting a job in consulting, but do we always have to get the "defeatist" err realist perspective without any contra positives?
  18. anyone who reads much of realists contributions on the cafe knows full well that his alias would more appropriately be titled, "defeatist." It's one thing to go into life with your eyes wide open, and another to never afford oneself the healthy human impulse to live outside of the box and break the mold... Realism is one thing, but if this attitude were so pervasive in society I suspect we would have fewer Rudy's and Lance Armstrong's and more "realists" who accepted their ball-less existence and stay at home, eat bon bons and watch Oprah rather than manning up and taking care of business from "lesser well known schools [god forbid]." Don't get too down plato, part of me thinks realist is the one living in a cave... err ivory tower (top 10 of course)... a tower so ensconsced in defeatism that I wouldn't piss on him if he caught on fire.
  19. Ok now I am really stepping out on a limb in speaking to the technical/structural issues of timing given my actual unfamilarity with the process of transffering doctoral programs myself, however, it would seem to me that you'd want to go after getting the M.A. entirely. M.A.s themselves are probably a lot easier to transfer and enter another school ABD, than having to navigate two schools policies regarding requirements on minutae like methods courses, foreign language requirements, etc etc... again this is just a guess but I would assume waiting til you're close to ABD would be preferred.
  20. I'm not going to say it can't be done, and I claim no authority of expertise in this area, however, I would encourage you to keep in mind that transferring in most cases would need to be done quite delicately. It is entirely, different than transferring undergraduate institutions or even amongst law schools because the relationship between doctoral students and faculty is normatively different than the relationship between students in undergrad and professional schools. The relationship is more colleague like, less vertical though not entirely lateral which means that when you ask or give notice that you are looking to migrate to greener pastures you are essentially leaving a job which as many of us know from the real world is its own animal that comes complete with a host of feelings on the company's side (bitterness, resentment, jealousy)... again these things can certainly be mitigated or in certain cases made not to exist if you have a particularly affectionate (probably not the best verbage) relationship with faculty who in fact recognize that your aims cannot be met by the department. In cases where you develop those relationships with faculty who will go to bat for you and think it is in your best interest to transfer than I wouldn't envision a problem, however, developing that level of candor may be difficult. It strikes me that the best way to make that happen is stress that despite your affection for the department your areas of focus and interest have evolved and there simply aren't enough experts in your area to support the research and that you hear cutting edge activity in area X is blooming in another department (though I wouldn't tell Ohio State that you are leaving for Michigan... NEVER GRADUATE GO BUCKEYES!) - (not an OSU fan just like the commericial)... anyway my point is it can probably be done, other posters can speak to how they went about it, but it's not going to be a process anything like law school where the faculty expect and in fact many times encourage the top 5 percent of a class at a tier 2 school to transfer... it is literally status quo there. Probably not so in doctoral programs.
  21. Ok, I will be a 1st year grad student at a doctoral program in Political Science next year... therefore I am not sure if my question is in the wrong section of the cafe, but it seemed best to get current grads input on this issue. While I am interested in a career that includes tenure track, professorship, the whole 9 yards (preferably at a selective liberal arts college)... I do have a major interest in expanding from the niche of the tower and doing something like Dean of Admissions, Provost, maybe even if I work myself up there College President (not Harvard, but something like Furman, College of Charleston, you know...). Anyway, my question is this: how can one position themself to become viable... is this a normal track (academic/teacher to academic/teacher + administrator)... I would never want to leave the classroom entirely, but at my alma mater we had some folks who were high end administrators that still taught and came with an academic or J.D. background. Anyone know anything about this....and how to angle. I mean most high up administrative folk don't come through chintzy Higher Ed Admin. Programs of Fluff do they? usually more core disciplines... Howard Gillman (the eminent public law scholar and now USC Dean) comes to mind.
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