ExponentialDecay

Silence is the true friend that never betrays. - Confucius

Regarding the original post, I think the numerous red flags - first generation college student, online(!) Psychology(!) PhD(!), no research component, bullshit "practicals" - indicate that there is cause for concern. Fortunately, it's not OP's situation. Regarding your valuable remarks, I completely agree with you that context is key. I also think that Sophie_B is missing some vital context, and also that a blanket statement such as "if they are proud of what they are doing, give them the go-ahead" is wrong in practically any situation. Hypothetically, person x is justified in feeling proud of what they're doing (everyone's feelings are valid!), but that doesn't make what they're doing right. Saying otherwise is feeding into a rhetoric where getting any old degree is good in and of itself, even if the intention is morally sound. I just want to add that the American PhD model is incredibly draining (and devastating for those of us who take ourselves out of the workforce for 5+ years and then strike out on the market, as opposed to indeed doing the PhD part-time, as is the case in many other countries, and working in a day job that doesn't pay at most $30k and doesn't involve daily interaction with entitled undergrads), but the online debate needs a lot more context than we're giving it here.

I honor personal agency, but I don't think that feeling proud of what one is doing is enough justification to take out hundreds of thousands in loans for a degree that's not worth the paper it's printed on. This is how lives get ruined, people. My question to people who are defending this online PhD thing is, if society at large is still struggling to accept bachelor and masters-level degrees done online as legitimate, how long do you think it will take the academic public, which is notoriously conservative, to accept online PhDs, regardless of whether they are more practice-based or not? I mean, let's be prepared for the future, whatever, but there are people doing these programs right now. Should we use them as sacrificial lambs? And, I mean, there's a difference between doing a 2-year practical masters partially online, and a 5+ year PhD fully online.

So, uh, VM, I've always wanted to ask - what are you doing now? Work-wise?

The GRE company website lists the average scores for top schools for select programs. Google it.

Your situation is complicated as it is; with the (giant) added complication of you being an international student (in the US?), I don't think you will find useful advice on the internet or indeed with anyone who doesn't know your situation in detail. Whether or not your program will know that you are taking courses outside the department will depend on your program. Whether or not they will take action against you for pursuing this course of action depends on your program, the people in charge, and which way the universe chooses to turn on that day. In general, no, you shouldn't be taking any classes that are not sanctioned by your academic advisor (and as such, classes that aren't progress towards your research/degree), but there are all sorts of programs out there, and all sorts of advisors out there, and strangers-who-may-be-dogs on the internet can't give you any advice in this regard. Like, this is something you have to plan and execute on your own. That said, if I were in your situation, I would be asking myself some hard questions. For one, what specifically would getting out of this program with a master's in a humanities field and a bunch of unrelated courses on my transcript net me in real terms. I don't know where you're from, but in most countries outside the Anglo-Saxon jus soli set, people look at the subject of your degree to determine what you're qualified to do. Nobody's going to care about your random electives. If you're planning to apply for a PhD in STEM in the States, you will in 90% of cases need research experience. Do you have a plan for how you're going to get that while going rogue as a humanities PhD student? If you're applying for a master's, it may make sense to take the prereqs at your current institution since you're paying for it anyway, but how many prereqs are we talking? Finally, why is it so important for you to stay in your country of study?

Post here: http://forum.thegradcafe.com/forum/43-literature-and-rhetoric-and-composition/

How you deal depends on whether your grandma is ignorant or toxic. If she doesn't understand how school works/you haven't been updating her on your life, then it may make sense to talk her through your decisions/plans (most people don't know how to express their emotions in a healthy way, aka don't mature past adolescence, so I meet a lot of people who seem confrontational but are actually scared/hurt, and soothing them helps them return to reason). If she's a toxic person, she's basically intent on ruining your life, so the only way to fix this situation is to tell her to go fuck herself. The latter method is a very important life skill, especially in academia.

I can't prove that teaching ability is not passed down genetically, but dude, nobody wants to see this.

Damn, it's a necromancy party up in here tonight.

You could, and then you would be two things: 1) Wasting your and our time 2) Having to ask the school anyway

By building the studies upon one another, you mean combining datasets, right? Because just talking about how three studies kind of support the theory that intelligence has no relationship to high school achievement isn't really research (I hope), and is kind of what you would do as part of a literature review. Here's what I think you should do. I think you should take your broad topic, "why students drop out of high school", log onto EBSCO (or the equivalent psychology database) and read everything you can find on the subject. Once you've got a base of 20-30 articles (some of which should be literature reviews, some of which should be influential "theory" papers), you will have enough knowledge of the topic that you can make executive decisions such as question x being too broad a question, or question y not having enough research done on it.

A literature review doesn't have a hypothesis. A literature review is a summary of the significant research about a topic.

If OP's not coming back, I would like RevolutionBlues to expand on economic history from a history department's perspective and to name the notable exceptions. Pretty please

And even on CHE, most people aren't TT...

I'm not sure about the discipline of economic history, but I know something about the history of economic thought, so maybe you will find this helpful. If you're looking for introductory works, Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers is a good introduction to the history of economic thought starting with Adam Smith (ideally, you should start with Aristotle's treatises on how to run a household [oikonomia] and progress onto the medieval philosophers like Aquinas to get a fuller appreciation of where the 18th century porto-economic philosophers were coming from). It's light reading aimed at laymen that contextualizes developments in economic thought in a historical background, so although I wouldn't cite it in a paper, but it's great for when you're just dipping your feet into the discipline. I haven't read other works by Heilbroner, but he has written in more detail on capitalism, communism, and theoretical themes in economics, and potentially those works could also be good. Also, Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years is informative (I wouldn't be put off by the title - debt is one of the necessary mechanisms of a capitalist economy). If you care for primary sources, here's a syllabus for a history of economic thought class at Harvard that lists most of the important stuff you should read. If you don't have economic training/don't care about the discipline of economics, I would pay most attention to Mun, Quesnay, Adam Smith, Malthus, Mill, Marx, Hayek (not the essay mentioned there - I would read The Use of Knowledge in Society, which talks about a fundamental economic principle that differentiates capitalism from communism), Sen. If you're interested in why economics is as it is, Walras, Ricardo, Friedman, Keynes, I would argue Veblen are necessary reading. Most of these should be free on IDEAS and similar, if that's important to you. Though perhaps more relevant to economists than historians, Mark Blaug's Economic History and the History of Economics (with special attention to No History of Ideas) is a good brain-cleaner. He also wrote on Keynes, Ricardo, Marxian economics I believe, and two books on the great economists.

I have defended my point, way back on page 1. Your response was to silently downvote me. I thought a bit of humor would help Your Highness to get out of your shell.

That's a little unreasonable.

One can be not fond without frothing at the mouth.

Now you see, if there's an actual ceremony with cloaks and daggers involved, I have nothing against that.

There are HS rings? Madness. I don't really get the point of this. It's not significant enough to wear on a daily basis (unless you're really invested in letting people know that you went to University of X before you've even opened your mouth), and yet it's not strictly decorative jewelry either. I just wouldn't know what to do with a class ring.

I've had this conversation in the past, and most professors said that, whilst taking stats in the math department may give you broader preparation, you end up learning a lot of stuff that isn't used in your discipline and, conversely, miss out on techniques that are not standard-fare in statistics taken broadly, but which are necessary for your field. If you're interested in statistics per se, taking the MS through the math department may be a good idea, but otherwise you may be confusing yourself and giving yourself extra work without much payback. Also, if your psych department is considerably better than your math department at your school, the stats given in the psych department may actually be stronger. As regards getting a professional edge, I don't know; maybe it would be a good idea to ask people working in your desired field for advice rather than a motley crew of current and potential students.

Also relevant: As for myself, I tend to get frustrated if I'm not sure that somebody has received/read/understood my communique, so I do try to sign off on everything with a "thanks" or "got it" unless it's obviously unnecessary.

Most of my hotel-booking experience is in Europe, though I too have stayed at "hotels" while adventure-traveling that asked for money up front and didn't provide anything. They didn't usually appear on booking.com. But, point taken, the pricing landscape is not as standardized as I thought.