ExponentialDecay

OP doesn't explain how or why teaching a language indicates a heavier TA load than teaching an intro class, so I am inclined to agree with @fuzzylogician that it may be partially a perception problem fueled by a prejudice that language classes are less prestigious than intro classes. To me personally, it doesn't make very much sense. It's not like one group teaches a blow-off elective with multiple choice computer-graded exams, and the other group teaches 300-level 2 hour long seminars. They're both teaching standardized intro-level courses with plenty of existing class material. I think there may be a sample bias, because the second group is all international students, who may have more trouble adjusting to the American teaching system than domestic students, and what they perceive as a heavier load is actually a comparable load exacerbated by the difficulties of adjusting to a new country, a new university system, and new norms/expectations?

Oh man. Where is your advisor in all this? Do they know about your philosophy on grad school/academia? You need to talk to them (or some other senior person you trust) about your feelings, because you're going about this all wrong. Yes, many people in academia share your enthusiasm for pursuing knowledge. So do many butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers. But you are not paid to consume knowledge; you are paid to produce knowledge. You have to concentrate on one thing not because it is a mindset foisted on you by evil neoliberal oppressive academia, but because if you work in a niche, you will be able to learn all or almost all there is to know about that niche, and you will be more efficient at producing knowledge other people will find useful. That's what gets you hired into an academic job - not how many classes you take, or how many irrelevant factoids you know. You are not a student; you are a future professional researcher. Grad school isn't a free opportunity for you to chill out and pursue your personal hobbies in CS or statistics - it is borrowed time where you are free of practical obligations such as having a full-time job or finding a way to work with experts in your field and have access to a scholarly library, which you are supposed to use to show the professional community that you can produce competent research and can be considered for a similar, more permanent, and better paid job doing what you have proved you do best. Your research and teaching are the only things that matter. Teaching, because that's what pays your bills, and that's what's likely to pay your bills in the future barring a major, major stroke of luck. Research, because that is what you are here to do. They are the two pillars that support your career. If you enjoy pursuing knowledge for the sake of knowledge and taking classes in a variety of subjects for the hell of it, but don't enjoy teaching and aren't dedicated to your research, you should not have pursued academia. Your advisor needs to know about this because I think you need help figuring out your priorities right now. It may seem counterintuitive, but the wrong priorities, the wrong attitude, and a lack of understanding of how this system functions are probably (can't say definitely because I don't have generalizable evidence) the leading cause of brilliant people not getting academic jobs.

A low UGPA isn't great, but the fact that your major GPA is so much lower than your cGPA is a huge red flag. A low cGPA can be overcome because adcoms don't usually care that you didn't do well in classes unrelated to your field. But if you're a C student in your major, that raises the question of whether you'd be capable of succeeding or why you'd even want to attend a grad program in that subject.

An Econ MS is fine if you want to do development, but in the US, it is not the desirable degree for either policy or finance (unless by "policy" you mean the Fed, but that's 99% research and 1% chatting about policy at the water cooler). For finance, your chances are eons better if you do an MBA or an MSQF, and for policy, work experience and one of those hot-ticket professional government schools. A word about development, the field has been angling heavily towards hiring research PhDs, at least the outfits that pay a salary with benefits. In the US, the MS is heavily a way to strengthen your PhD application.

This is certainly good advice. That said, 20h/week is... about right? That doesn't sound exploitative at all. I mean, what did you expect? That you'd sit in a couple undergraduate classes and your program will throw money at you? It's certainly not as advantageous as being able to TA/RA in an area directly relevant to your interests, but it is the obvious reality for fields where there are no labs (and even in fields with labs, people spend years working on things they're not interested in because their supervisor told them to). Relatively few people get to teach classes directly relevant to their research in their entire careers, much less their time in graduate school. Graduate TAs are usually assigned to teach low-level intro classes like composition or foreign language ab initio or the dreaded calc 1. Nobody likes it, which is why people at the bottom of the food chain get to do it. That's not to say you shouldn't lobby to be assigned to a linguistics class or to be an instructor of record for an elective of your own design, but what's happening to you is normal. Why do you believe that teaching experience won't help you in your career? Obviously, I don't know your career aspirations, but unless you're a computational linguist with a strong comp sci bent, if you choose to stay in academia, you will need to teach. There is even a high possibility that you will need to teach language classes, because outside of R1s, linguists get hired into language departments, which teach old-school philology.

Wtf no. What gave you that idea.

Can't you ask one of those Nigerian Princes who will give you a million dollars if you help him get his money out of the country?

I take it, "fuck off to Starbucks because you're an English major trolololol" is valuable help? You know what grinds my gears? People who think they're ~~providing a service by shitting on posters on an anonymous forum. Like, shut up. You're not here to help anyone. You're here to rant and feed your ego. Any tough love "advice" you give you do because acting mean and superior makes you feel good about yourself. If you actually wanted to help, you'd use those skills that you're punching into OP right now to figure out that nobody gives a shit about what somebody with "truther" in their name thinks about them, and put a face to your advice by mentoring students in person, joining organisations, or otherwise getting off your ass and doing something in the real world, and you'd do it with compassion, because the first rule of helping someone is not hurting them. But noooo, it's easier to sit on the throne with your pants around your ankles and diddle angry messages into the internet, and if you close your eyes, you can even feel proud for doing it!

what's your major GPA?

Hey, at least they don't pay in internet karma!

He's Chair of the Trolling Department at Under The Bridge University. In my experience, most Trolling departments are interdisciplinary, but they try super hard to hang out with the STEMlords so they can be Science.

Both my parents have PhDs, but they're from a different country with a completely different academic culture and education system, so whilst I got the benefit of reading good books and going to the theater from early childhood, they can't help me with any of the practical stuff. Plus, sometimes they're very insistent that how things worked in that other country 30-40 years ago is how things work here and now, and it can be difficult to dissuade them of the applicability of their priors. In general, I think that the world has changed so much and continues to change so rapidly that, outside of direct stuff like giving your children money or introducing them to people who can give them money/opportunities, no parent is going to be of much help in a professional setting.

Oh, this old malarkey. You assume that, in some long past good old days, the standards for the BA were higher, and therefore employers were more impressed with it. Do you have any evidence whatsoever for this claim? I am by no means a specialist, but in my understanding, the reason the BA was more valued in the past (which, frankly, I've yet to see evidence of) is that it was an extremely good indicator of socioeconomic class, and was, by extension, comparatively much rarer. In other words, employers used to like BAs because they were shiny and new, and not because they necessarily qualified a person for a job or even qualified a person to be considered a responsible adult. I also strongly contend the claim that getting a BA is easier today than it was before, if only because the amount of knowledge one has to have to be considered a loose specialist is so much higher than ever in the past, because humanity has more knowledge in total. I mean, in the medieval ages, an extremely educated man essentially knew how to read, write, count, and play music - things that your average middle schooler is proficient in today. Maybe 50% of the scientific knowledge of today didn't exist even 50 years ago. You can go on and on about how in the past the average GPA was 3.0 and now it's 3.2 or somesuch, but the only way you can make the comparison is if the material and the degree requirements haven't changed. Which they have. Significantly.

With all due respect, I never said she should go in right after undergrad. All I said is, sooner is better than later. You can't argue with that. Not only because of ageism in academia (or the corporate world, for that matter, which is no kinder than academia in this regard), but because, the more entrenched you get in "secular" life, the harder it is to break away. People have this tendency to fall in love, get married, have children, buy houses, take care of sick parents, and take on other huge responsibilities as they age. For most of us, our ties and commitments are going to get bigger, and our geographical mobility and ability to work insane hours for years at a time is only going to diminish. OP can do whatever they want, but time is an important factor to keep in mind. That said, your perspective is rather limited by the kind of work you do, the industries you're in, and where you live. In any recession, mid-career is always the slowest demographic to pick back up. Businesses always need the entry levels and the linchpins, but the stuff in the middle is both not experienced enough to be essential and too experienced to keep on payroll. This is by no means a general statement, but an individual doing a cost-benefit analysis of their private situation does well to keep current that a 5+ year employment gap, a degree that an employer may or may not find relevant or overqualified, and the fact that they're competing for the same jobs as people 5-10 years younger are not always factors that are looked upon favorably. Diversified resumes are nice, but the best resume is the one that fits the job specifications, you know?

Oh man, OP. Given the profusion of red flags all over this thing, starting with the going to an unranked institution for your PhD, no matter how cool the project, and ending with, really, a first year graduate student new to the program hiring and directing her own fleet of RAs?, I'd bet money that most if not all of your professors have been expecting you to come back all along. I wonder if the reason you felt you had to convince them at all is that the concerns they brought up were thinly-veiled SOS signals. As a career enfant terrible, I get the shame you feel, I really do. But you can't let your shame dig you an early grave. I think you need to stop worrying about wasting people's times, embarrassing them, or otherwise making waves and addressing the rotten in the state of Denmark in favor of mobilizing and getting yourself out of this mess. It's useful to remember that nobody cares about your failures as much as you do, and that despite this, most people will understand and will try to help.

This is slightly off-topic, but if grad school is something you want to try, you're better off trying it sooner rather than later. Being back on the corporate job market after striking out on the academic one is tough enough at thirty, but at 40+ you're pretty much dead in the water.

Get work experience before doing a master's. You're unlikely to get in without work experience anyway.

OP, srsly?

I don't think it's problematic, frankly. In legal parlance, what OP did would be called coming to the nuisance. Suffering consequences for somebody else's mistake is an extremely frequent part of life, and whilst such an eventuality should be minimized to the greatest extent possible, that minimization of risk must come from both parties involved. Not only should OP have kept a copy because it's common sense to keep a copy, but he should have realized, being the big boy that he is, that, if his work got lost and he got a bad grade for it, it would be his problem, not the professor's, so it's in his interest to do everything in his power to make sure the professor had an easy time of grading his work. It would be nice if the professor admitted she lost it and gave OP the benefit of the doubt in some way - and that's assuming she's asking for a copy because she lost it, which is in no way a certainty - but that's up to her discretion, and OP shouldn't act entitled and assume that strangers' discretion will always work out in his favor. I think it's problematic that you paint people in their teens and early twenties as children incapable of thinking two steps ahead. When I was in high school, I knew that, if I crossed a highway on a red light and got run over, it would be my problem because I'd be dead, so I took more precautions than simply expecting everyone to stop what they're doing and let me do as I please. I likewise knew that, if a teacher couldn't grade my assignment for whatever reason - because they lost it or because I refused to resubmit it - the bad grade would be my problem, not my teacher's. So I took more precautions than tossing whatever their way and being like, it's your problem now man figure it out. Because it's not their problem. It's my problem. They're not affected by whether I get an A or an incomplete. I am. Basic life skills, man.

You know what else the taxpayers are funding? The military (nearly 50% of every tax dollar, btw). The interest on federal debt. Courthouses and the salaries of everyone that works in them. The infamous parks and rec. Road maintenance. Green energy subsidies. Farming subsidies, for that matter. Development aid to poorer countries. Politicians' airfare to international congresses. Etc etc etc. Which of those have anything to do with first amendment rights? Is good asphalt a right? Are solar panels a right? Is taking photos with African orphans to pad your Facebook page a right? The government doesn't just spend money on rights. If it did, it would be a lot smaller, and the smooth trajectory of your civilian life which you now take for granted would be a lot less smooth. The government also doesn't spend money on things you think it should spend money on. What you pay in taxes is money you give away to be spent at the discretion of the wider community, and sometimes it is spent in ways you don't agree with. Too bad, so sad. OP, your line of argument is so incredibly stupid, and judging by how passive aggressive and rude you're being to the other commenters, I no longer believe that you're arguing for the sake of argument, playing devil's advocate, or even trolling. I think that your failure at getting accepted into whatever grad school inspired this rant is due to the fact that you spend too little time studying and too much time ranting on internet forums, rather than to some imagined miscarriage of justice.

I don't get it. All of this stuff is also asked for in grad schools' written application materials. So why is talking about this unconstitutional, but writing, no? I mean, it's not literally free speech, is it?

It obviously differs by discipline as well as by program, but in general, STEM schools judge the math GRE hard. Look at the admissions statistics of top quant heavy programs (which I guess I should specify as physics, math, engineering, CS, and economics, because chem/bio and similar don't come anywhere close to the level of mathematical ability you need for the former, and that may be where your experience is from). 165 is ~25th percentile for admitted students. A shit ton of people applying have a perfect score.

Yeah, it's pretty mediocre. 90th % +, for international students, pretty much perfect score. the quartiles for accepted students' GREs are available for almost all programs. you should google them.

Your post is very strange. "I realized I'm not as competitive as I thought, so I applied to the top Biomedical program in the entire world, predictably got rejected, and take that as confirmation that I'm not competitive anywhere else". I mean, you're obviously competitive, because I'm sitting here racking my brain how you got into anything STEM related with an 86th percentile math GRE. Your fatal flaw is that you only applied to MIT. Dude, who does that??? Undergrads from MIT, who are applying to the lab they've been working in for 4 years, who are BFFs with their PIs, don't only apply to MIT because it is that competitive. The obvious answer is to research fit and apply widely, but I can understand that you don't want to waste a year. That said, you can get funding for a Master's, even if it won't be at Yale. I personally think 70 grand is insane and don't understand how an international student can even get that kind of money.

No, but I'm really good at editing bibliographies, so suck on that.