ExponentialDecay

The research thing was more of a general comment meant towards fields that need regressions run and specimen monitored 24/7. People don't really need many research assistants in theoretical physics, as far as I know. Besides, I don't know if I said that, but academia is kind of committed to propagating and creating knowledge, so it makes sense to bring in new people who will inherit the field.

I would disagree that a "squishy" field at a T10 department is not rigorous. The fact is also borne out by attrition rates at top-rated humanities programs: they are very high. I don't understand where this notion that people who did kind of okay in undergrad are getting into top grad schools came from. They're not. Admitted applicants to top grad schools in the humanities are eminently qualified for what they want to do. They both show incredible scholarly promise, and they already have most if not all of the skills they need to do their research. These are people with fluency in 4+ languages, research experience, publications, and background reading in a number of interconnected fields. To me, this sounds like a rigorous education. If you keep increasing rigor, you are eventually going to hit a tradeoff, where more rigor means fewer good ideas get researched. That is the point where you are rejected eminently qualified, talented scholars with promising ideas just because you're trying to keep program numbers small. That point has already been reached. The reality is that academia, like pro football and Hollywood, only accepts the best of the best, and that best is so good that it is not possible to weed it out at an earlier stage. I have a friend who does quantum physics, and he tells me that there are 4 schools in the USA whose program places PhDs in any kind of academic position, and of those schools, 50% of their PhDs still don't get jobs. It sucks that young people have to gamble 5-10 years of their life on a pipe dream, but what can anybody do? As regards schools that are lower-tier or schools that don't place (not necessarily overlapping sets in every field), yeah, that's a thing, but we're back where we started. In the end, academia exists to produce new knowledge, not to provide sinecures to people who did good in school. You can say, let's close down these programs, but then you'd be like, if we close down these programs, we will have to close down their research too, and isn't that counter-productive to our goals? There are programs that produce good research out there who don't place their PhDs. Yes, they need those PhDs to do that research - but you can't legally call that exploitative, since these people are getting paid. Why are they doing it? Idk, everybody's entitled to her own utility curve.

Just out of curiosity, what was that area? I'm assuming it's not quantitative, so my uneducated guess would be some sort of -studies or some kind of area politics. Because it's cheaper.

Was there ever a time in history when there were enough tenure-track positions for all graduating PhDs? Wouldn't slashing programs exacerbate the problem, at least in the short term? As regards reducing cohorts, considering most programs in the humanities and social sciences admit 5 +-3 people a cycle, and considering the abysmal attrition rates at the vast majority of grad programs in any field, how much more can these cohorts realistically be cut? My chief frustration about this process is the catastrophic lack of data and obfuscation of facts that goes on in academia, and in the humanities in particular. I'd like to take a look at whether the prestige-hiring trend changes after every polytechnic in the country starts calling itself a university, because I don't suspect that it does. I've never in my life heard any other logic than that humanities scholarship is a calling rather than a profession, and that scholarship in the soft and hard sciences is more hopeful, but still contingent on institutional prestige and on the whims of public policy.

It's reading threads like this that makes me an unwilling participant in that xkcd comic about somebody being wrong on the internet. Airports have regional and international terminals, and you will always need to exit one to enter the other. Depending on the airport and country, this may mean that you need a transit visa, or it may not. For instance, if OP is flying A (outside EU) -> Frankfurt -> Paris -> B, then they will need to exit the international terminal in Frankfurt, enter the Schengen zone (for which they will need a visa), board a regional flight in a different terminal to Paris, and then get out of the Schengen zone again in Paris. If OP, however, were flying A -> Frankfurt -> somewhere in the US, then they will likely not need a Schengen transit visa because they will remain in the same international terminal throughout. Additional warning regarding London HRW- unless you are flying British Airways, international flights will arrive into Heathrow Terminal 4, and unless your connection leaves from Terminal 4 also (which it will not, in many cases), you will need to exit the terminal on a transit visa and take the underground to one of the other terminals. Sigh. There's a lot of well-meaning people here. The UK is not part of the Schengen zone. Any kind of Schengen visa (the visa you get to visit France, Italy, etc) is invalid for gaining entry into the UK. There is a British visa for anybody who is not a British or EU citizen. There is also a Switzerland visa, a Norway visa, and an Ireland visa, because those countries (among others) are also not part of the Schengen zone. I'm a person with a third-country passport and I travel frequently through Europe to the US. In general, I would recommend as few layovers as possible, because the journey will be extremely taxing as is. Which side of the Atlantic you should layover depends on where your destination is. I prefer to layover in Europe because I don't need to take another plane if I land in BOS or NYC, but if you need to get to, like, Indiana or somewhere else that no European airline flies to, laying over in the US may make more sense. I would avoid the UK because the visa process and border control are a lot shittier than the EU. The best airports to go through in the EU are Schipol, Frankfurt, and (this is a personal opinion - many people think it's too big, but I like it because it's new and clear-cut, like ATL) Madrid. I would avoid Charles de Gaulle (Paris) and anything in Italy. But frankly, this is all facetious because any airport is ultimately fine. I wouldn't transfer in anything less than 1.5 hrs - 1 hour is cutting it extremely short, and anything less than 1 hour means that if your connecting flight is late or if there is a line at border control or if you suck at spatial reasoning and get lost frequently that you're gonna miss your connection.

Leaving home for the first time is scary for anybody, at any age. The best you can do, really, is embrace the fear and keep on, or quit. In the end, millions of people leave home every day, and most of them end up alright, and so will you. It was pretty shitty of your mother to freak you out like that, but I suspect she's doing it because she, too, is very scared for you, because she knows about as much about your future as you do. As regards Russia, I'm not really sure what the question is. Are you asking about studying in Russia or living in Russia? If the latter, you need to give us more information about what and where you're studying. As regards living, Russia's a pretty closed society (as all European societies are, compared to the US), and you will struggle with daily life if you don't speak Russian, but that aside, people are generally friendly and there's a huge expat community in Moscow (don't know about St. Petersburg), and all the shit you hear in the west about homophobia and sexism and violence is at least 60% exaggerated. Just, you know, keep your mind and eyes open, and you should have no trouble at all. All the expats I know who live in Russia love it there.

Marshalls? Nordstrom? Lord and Taylor? I actually prefer shoe shopping in the US than in Europe because I can find everything (even hot sale items) in a 10 in any store, and the fit is wider and taller than most European brands. This may be an East Coast thing, though. I do notice that we're all bigger and taller here (and we're all rowers).

Dude, get your degree funded through FLAAS and improve your language skills in a more focused program. There is no contest.

No.

I don't remember the I-20 being that specific about your sponsors. Mine just said family.

I have a question for Jessica: what is your country, and how hard is it to get citizenship in your country? I want free money to pursue a PhD in whatever too!

I mean, obviously, it's better if you have research experience and if you graduate with honors, but it won't kill you if you didn't.

Thank you for bringing up that Atlantic article. I have a lot of pent-up rage about it that I've been dying to express ever since it came out 2 years ago (PS if you want to use statistics in your arguments, look for something more recent - it is both available and the trend is less biased by a serious economic downturn). Its first argument is that humanities majors have about the same unemployment rate as everyone else. Dude, no shit. If you average across such a huge sample of roughly homogenous variables (which BA holders are, educationally and experience-wise), you're gonna get really close estimates because that's how the central limit theorem works (and hey, look, although I don't have estimates of statistical significance, it looks like the engineers, who earn a state-controlled certification, have a practically different estimate!). On the other hand, take a slice from, say, the PhD labor market: science PhDs are tens of percent less unemployed than humanities PhDs. Take a look at any OLS labor market study controlled by education and experience. Studies that look at the gender wage gap are an excellent illustration. As education and experience go up, these gaps practically disappear because tighter data on education and experience gives us tighter estimates, and because employment trends in better-deifned fields converge. Now let's talk about the quality of this data. Let's look at economics majors for a second. In America, the economics BA could stand for literally anything. An economics BA is just as likely to be a highly-educated data scientist as he is to be a kid who took a bunch of 100-level Business classes. The data in the Atlantic doesn't capture this difference. This difference is captured at higher levels of education and experience, when highly educated data scientists pursue data science PhDs and work for Google, and kids with 100-level Business classes man the phones for their dad's lumber business. Note also that the sample size for social sciences here is probably much larger than the humanities, and includes all sorts of incongruous disciplines, so I'm predicting some funny heteroskedasticity going on in there. If you have funny heteroskedasticity going on, these averages are poor estimates because they are inconsistent, that is the sample size has no bearing on how precisely they reflect true population parameters. Returning to the article, the ultimate point they make is that, yeah, these figures still suck but since English majors aren't exactly angling to become engineers, then it's all cool because their unemployment rate isn't 100%. Yeah, no shit. There's probably as good a distance between an English major and food stamps as between an engineer and the same. This is the wrong way of looking at the issue. In lay terms, what we care about is opportunity. If you are a good economist or a good engineer, there is financial opportunity out there for you because you are a good economist or engineer. If you are a good English major, there is financial opportunity out there for you because of your other excellent personal qualities. The market for English majors can essentially be used as a proxy for the market for any college degree; it is not specialized. It does not behave in special ways. These differences are apparent if you look at it in the long-term or from the demand side. Which is why this article is also bullshit. It doesn't capture anything worth capturing. Anyway, please tell me again how aerospace was in the shitter in the 90s because the Great Anti-Communist Space Race didn't exist anymore, or do I have to pay extra for the sass? Or, like, let's talk about what I'm actually talking about, which is the fact that, whereas English majors may do quite well on the market, they're not doing quite well in jobs that specifically look for English majors. I'm sorry, but today almost all parents and students arrive at college and ask, what jobs can I get with this major? Something like, as an English major with an A average from a T20 school you are potentially eligible to be in the running for a junior financial analyst position at a boutique hedge fund, is not a good answer. Saying that English majors can get jobs or that some English majors sometimes get excellent jobs is boring and stupid. It tells us nothing about the moments of English majors as a population. It doesn't counter the perception that the mathematical sciences (lol, STEM? Stop clowning.) offer more job security, better career prospects, and better exit opps than anything in the humanities or lab sciences. It further says nothing to talented young people who show up at college hoping to pursue valuable careers and end up working in HR. This is a multifaceted problem and I'm not blaming anything on the humanities or humanities majors, but throwing around your wonderfully old and opaque statistics is only exacerbating it.

What a bullshit article. Dude, what? Publishing is dying. Professional journalism is probably the only field that has it worse right now than humanities academia. Unless you're getting paid pocket money mining Reddit for clickbait, you need to have expert-level experience in the field you write about, be it sports, entertainment, economics, or human rights, because there's a lot of amateurs out there who are willing to write surface-level articles for free. You're getting paid for your experience with the subject, not for the article itself. Nobody's gonna care if you're an English major unless you're writing articles about English literature. making us question the ethics of using electronics built with exploited labor. Exploited labor sucks and I'd rather it not happen. There. I questioned it. I'm sure all of you came up with the same conclusion as I and you didn't even need to research the subject on Wikipedia. Newsflash: this hasn't solved the problem of exploited labor. The causes and ramification of labor exploitation are legal, economic, sociological, and it's legal and economic scholars who are making the real difference in these fields. ​People aren't abandoning the humanities because the programs don't offer co-ops. That's surface thinking that's about 20 years old, and this shit is a band-aid solution that's trite and tired. The reality is, there just aren't enough jobs out there for humanities majors. I mean specialized jobs that pay a living wage and resemble something like a career. To get one of those jobs, you have to be competent, when a, most people are not, and b, I suspect the number of competent people still outpaces the number of good jobs. The real struggle of the post-humanities job market is that some small cream of the crop will get these nice jobs, and then everybody else will either transfer to completely different fields or become footnote formatters. This is not to say that you don't have to be a brilliant engineer to get a top engineering jobs, nor to suggest that there isn't an engineering equivalent of a footnote formatter; this is to say that the gap between top job and footnote formatter is so, so much greater than the gap in engineering, in terms of salary, prestige, career prospects, etc. There is a saying in engineering, that if you are an engineer, no matter what, you will get a job; the concurrent fear in the humanities is that, no matter how brilliant you are, you may still get shut out. Because the market is so small. The market virtually does not exist. This is a structural problem that is determined by macroeconomic forces. You're not going to solve it by pushing students into internships. That will only mean that your students are more likely to get one of these rapidly disappearing unicorn jobs, and somebody else's students are not. Don't get me wrong, I love the liberal arts. That is to say, I love all the liberal arts. I love literary analysis, mathematics, history. If you want to be a good generalist (which is what humanities majors, if they don't luck out in academia or at the New York Times, are going to do), you need to be competent in all of those areas - it's still much more lucrative to specialize in some practical field, but hey, if you can't live without taking classes on Proust, it's a living. That was me, and I think going that direction has made me a better person and a better amateur scholar, because that's the way my brain works best. But I harbor no illusions as to how necessary it is for me to be good at math, computer science, interpersonal interaction - all those things no humanities major is expressly taught. I further agree with the author that there is a sad dearth of good statistical applications to, let's say, the less-quantized fields out there. Most of the mathy stuff I see in anthropology or, heaven forbid, literature is drab mode-median-mean stuff that's basically there to say "I spent two days learning how to make pie graphs in excel for information that shouldn't be in a pie graph anyway". I hope and expect the state of things to improve. But don't get me wrong, understanding literature and statistics both well enough to make a contribution to the field of data analysis is fucking hard. It's non-trivial. It's an emerging field. It's not a vocation. I also think this last paragraph mimics the disorganization of the last section of that article, which doesn't really talk about the dichotomy between applied fields and liberal arts - it talks about the dichotomy between people who know math and people who don't.

Dude, this winter? Unless you got your 3.1 GPA because you were taking multivariable calculus and thermodynamics on the side, you're gonna have to take about 4 semesters' worth of prereqs before you're admissible to any kind of STEM program.

Why are you asking? You're applying for Physics, and not to NWU.

Two common fallacies: thinking that a phenomenon is explained exclusively or predominantly by one variable, and deriving conclusions from a sample of 1. All of the reasons you mention and many more factor into why you don't see as many international students pursuing English degrees. By the way, if you open up your search to Comp Lit or foreign language degrees, the proportion of internationals will increase. Note also that humanities programs tend to be much smaller than science programs: that 17% international statistic may reflect 1 foreign student in 5, or 17 foreign students in 100. Admission in the humanities also works differently from admission in the sciences; sadly, things like prestige, cultural capital, social and research conventions matter a lot more in the humanities, and most international students don't excel in those attributes.

Isn't it kind of imperative that you figure out what you're applying for before you can actually, you know, apply?

I found this very handy website that answers all your questions, and I leave it here for posterity: http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate 4) That depends on your field. If you're in STEM, you will have an easier time outside of your country of citizenship. If you're in the arts, you'll have a harder time to find jobs that aren't 100% official and full-time (which is unfortunately often the reality for arts students) because you may not be eligible for work visas, or getting you a work visa may incur an extra cost for the employer.

Ahahahaha dude I wish it were easy to find. It would've made my life this summer soooooo much easier. You're gonna have to dig around publications by the American Energy Association, World Bank, UN, or consulting or audit firms that publish sector reports to find this stuff.

alternatively, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost-of-production_theory_of_value or the theory of value used by people closer to the libertarian side, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value philosophically, economics is still divided on whether the value of a thing comes from the supply or the demand side (how much it costs to make vs how much you want to buy it), at least on the margin, but mainstream economics accepts the notion that the value of a good is determined by the interaction of both (i.e. that price accurately reflects value), so that our big problem now is how to accurately calculate that value in practice. that said, I second the Marx. he's very fun to read.

I wonder whether looking at the educational background of people who graduated UG in the 60s and 70s is really useful. The academic landscape has changed since then. As an example, women's colleges like Mt. Holyoke were a lot more prestigious in the 60s than they are now (then Mt. Holyoke was the female equivalent of Brown). Now, somebody who graduated UCLA may be in a better position letter-wise than somebody who graduated Bryn Mawr. It's much more informational to look at the CVs of young professors (max 10 years out of PhD) or grad students. Look at the people who get hired tenure-track versus people who get prestigious post-docs versus people who get teaching post-docs.

was your school on a 5-pt scale?

you need to be more specific re where in the private sector, what international organizations, and what department/role you want. In general: Senior researchers and above at consulting firms all have PhDs in a relevant field, 100% in America, and increasingly so in Europe. If you already have some consultings in mind, you can simply access their "people" page and look at the qualifications of the people who hold the job you want. You will need those qualifications or better. IMF, World Bank, UN like to hire PhDs at the senior level. MAs and ABs from Harvard get in at junior positions, but you need a PhD or extensive work experience (which can be research) to advance beyond level 5. Again, http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTJOBSNEW/0,,contentMDK:23123971~pagePK:8453902~piPK:8453359~theSitePK:8453353,00.html Senior people at NGOs don't always have PhDs because these organizations are less formulaic than the big international outfits, and also because, depending on the field of the NGO, field experience may be more valuable than formal qualifications. I have no idea what you want to do because you don't say, but if you want to continue in Ag Ec, yes, you do need a PhD. I mean, if superiors in your field are telling you to get a PhD, maybe you should get a PhD, no?

I have never heard of this particular route to a career in market research. Who suggested it to you? That said, MA Economics programs require up to Calc III (you cannot study microeconomic theory at the upper-undergraduate level without Calc III, technically). They also expect a course in probability (not a 100-level in statistics) and/or econometrics. I would recommend that you email the admin assistants at the schools you're considering and ask them what the math background of a typical successful applicant is, because that is the 90% crucial differentiator.