ExponentialDecay

1. if you are being asked by a professional in your field, answer with the school at which you did your last degree 2. if you are being asked by Aunt Myrtle, answer with your most prestigious school 3. if you are being asked with reference to an athletic contest, your first allegiance is always with your undergraduate institution (unless you used your NCAA eligibility in postgrad)

A class is only as interesting as its dumbest participant. Which is why I went to class in high school but not in college.

holy shit bro but actually i was such a fucking nerd.

but if i skipped homeroom and smoked in my friend's car in the parking lot every morning, it does? i love how you're generalizing across a diverse and international student body here. idk about you, but i didn't have homeroom and none of my friends had cars and the parking lot was teachers-only because i went to a posh boarding school. but i did skip english class to smoke in the 13th century graveyard. or am i a nerd because of my socioeconomic class?

if you do one or all of those things and still find time for 420, are you still a nerd?

i wish i were child free. children are not at all conducive to maintaining a successful career.

Go old school with the Kaplan textbook.

Depends on where you live. You can get a room in a house for $400-600, but most apartments are $900+. Most people have roommates. If you are at UMass, they have subsidized college apartments which I think all UMass students can rent. The area is quite expensive in terms of living expenses. Grocery shopping is expensive in the towns, so you need a car to go to one of the two malls in the area. I shop at Walmart, Trader Joe's, and sometimes Wholefoods, and I leave about $60-80 at all three places just for snacks/necessities (I am on meal plan). You can join a co-op though. Drinks are $8 or so. An entree at a restaurant will be $10-15+tax. Northampton has a lot of faux-hippie upmarket shops where you can buy a pair of New Balance sneakers for $90, for instance. But if you have a car, there are malls and by-the-road type places that are inconvenient for college students to go to, so prices there are less. Public transport on the PVTA is free for students. The area is home to a couple vibrant towns (Noho and Amherst p much), but a lot of people especially over a 5+ year period get a little stir-crazy and like to escape to Boston for the weekends, which is, you know, 140 miles of gas + expenses. I have some friends going to grad school here who survive on 13-18k stipends (humanities... don't get me started on UMass humanities), but they all have part-time jobs. Jobs here are also pretty hard to come by because of how big the colleges are relative to the supporting economy. If you prefer not to live in Noho or Amherst, Easthampton and Florence are also worth a look.

yes, but i often feel like a person who is serious about getting a PhD should be so engrossed in their subject that they shouldn't care where they are - that they're living in their head, essentially. then again, i know very successful academics who absolutely require distractions to be able to do good work. then again, it's always good to be prepared for the contingency of teaching at Flyover Community College in IA

Aaaaaand now I know why college administrators are usually sociopathic idiots

okay, unless you get a D, which would still not tank your GPA, you should be fine. However, if you're gonna feel like a second-class citizen because you got a couple Cs, yeah, I'd be worried.

Our administration attempted to sack a tenured professor the other day because they were liquidating her department. Grad school is where it starts, bro.

fitocracy.com is a better tool to keep track of your workouts and it has an easier social platform. $.02

Yeah, but there's no funding of any kind for the majority of people in higher education in Britain, so for those of us who can get funded, America is a much bigger deal.

if you're gonna be miserable and hate them for forcing your decision, don't do it. it's much easier to live with guilt than with hating your family.

Answer: do a PhD in engineering. although for some, even a BS is enough.

there is a danger of leading people on. i think some people take flirting more seriously than others. here's my take on feminism. nothing good comes of acting unprofessionally in a professional setting, but nothing good comes of denying your impulses either. it takes a lot of courage to be able to admit "vulnerable" things like being attracted to somebody, or being a woman who must exist in a male-dominated environment and find a way to express her gender and sexuality. i think people would respect you for that.

join okcupid. teaches you this stuff right quick.

I would go for the thesis, even from the point of view of MA/employment in the research sector. Highly competitive jobs have the luxury of picking employees who are the closest fit. As such, if you are planning to work with the Middle East, knowing Arabic or Farsi would certainly help, but you might be outranked by people who have extensive coursework in Middle Eastern studies or who have studied abroad in the area. I take it you concentrate on Europe. By choosing the language, you are essentially betting your money on the possibility of finding a position at an NGO or think tank who works with Europe, but in some capacity that makes use of Arabic languages. It's not impossible, but it is a risk. Whereas writing a thesis would prove invaluable should you wish to apply to graduate school.

have you tried applying to funded Art History programs? Programs with lower costs of living? Funded criticism/humanities programs? I know at least a couple of the latter where the funding is competitive, but it exists.

Love! I agree that we have three broad questions: the structure of the economy, the derived structure of the labor market, and how higher education fits into all of this. And now I'll talk about my research. Campus Career Centres, no-nonsense literature on post-college employment, internship schemes, and professionalization classes are only useful insofar as you have something to apply them to. As the above poster said, no matter how qualified you are for a job, you won't get it if that job doesn't exist (a topic of particular concern for humanities PhDs, I hear). All of the above professionalization schemes, whether done individually or on an institutional level, are marginal - that is to say, they are not the factor that determines your hireability. This phrasing - colleges are not training graduates for today's job market - is one I have encountered in all its variants. And it is true, but its truth is a lot subtler than people are given to understand. My approach broadly is to distinguish between graduates of competitive colleges and graduates of everything else. But I will also add a paragraph on humanities PhDs, because I care. What is today's job market? I will recap from my previous post. Today's job market has a lot of opportunities for highly-skilled labor - so many, in fact, that the developed countries regularly import highly skilled labor from abroad. Tangentially, developed countries are also very happy to import capital (whether investment or actual entrepreneurs) from abroad. Why? Because we don't have enough dollars in America? No; in fact, American real interest rates have hovered around 0 for 6 years. Indeed, we have so much capital we literally don't know what to do with it - see the explosion of venture capitalism. Venture capitalism was a lot less common in the post-war boom, not only because credit requirements were tighter, but because capital was more expensive. In fact, the developed economies are experiencing a shortage of new investment opportunities. Hence, the push to get everyone through college. Hence, the emphasis on STEM. America's labor market, legislative environment, and abundance of capital give it an unprecedented comparative advantage over the rest of the world in the area of research and (technology) development. As such, talented engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs really cannot get a better deal in any other country. Does that mean you must absolutely study STEM or business in college? We will see. As I have outlined above, the developed economies run on innovation, because the developing economies have taken over manufacturing due to their lower production costs. These innovative firms generate a lot of capital - but they also run on capital. WhatsApp, which has been sold to Facebook for $19bn, has a staff payroll that nominates slightly more people than the amount of posters on this topic. For comparison, Sony Co. is worth $18 bn. This business model is completely different from what dominated this country in the fifties - large industrial concerns with seemingly endless demand for semi-skilled labor and modest but fair wages that, in the aggregate, were able to fuel the kind of consumer demand that founded the middle class and built the economic engine of this country. The business model of innovation, the business model that now dominates this country, relies on empowering a small number of very bright workers with costly, but labor-free tools. It is a business model built for Harvard graduates. It is not a business model that will support legions of technicians, mediocre engineers, and typesetters. These are the real useless degrees. As I have shown, the quarternary sector (research and innovation) is closed to all but the brightest, the secondary sector (manufacturing) is dead, and the primary (farming and resource extraction) is mechanized and will continue on the less-labor trajectory by the quaternary sector's efforts. We are left with the tertiary sector (services), which must absorb the majority of the western labor force. And in the tertiary sector, a humanities degree may actually be more useful than any other one. Here's why. If we take out the finance portion of the service sector, we are left with stuff to do with either marketing or management. Marketing and management have little to do with numbers and much to do with cultural capital, social cues, and an awareness of what literature majors call "the canon". I cannot overestimate the importance of soft skills in advancement in non-technical careers, because, as time has shown, every occupation within the tertiary sector that is "by the books", that can be algorithmized, has been outsourced or programmed into a software. By soft skills I do not only mean smiling and maintaining eye contact. By virtue of my specialization, I am kind of on the Rubicon between the quantifiable and the ambiguous, and I have to say, humanities disciplines such as philosophy, literature, history are apt - no, specially crafted - to teach their students a methodology for the analysis of the unquantifiable. Because when we cannot predict (and in non-technical fields, and biology, we cannot predict), we must interpret. And even when we can predict, we must interpret. There is no financial model in the world that will answer the question, "will widespread microlending reduce social inequality in India", although there are plenty of financial models that can predict, to a varying degree of accuracy, the addition to capital stock as a result of Indian microlending. I'm not just bullshitting. There are faculty at the Harvard economics department that have dedicated their lives to this. My point is, unless one is exceptional, precisely what one studies in college has little to no bearing on one's earning potential. People reiterate the second part but lay off the first part because it's rude. As such, perhaps more widespread professionalizing programs would be good, to make students aware of the opportunities open to them. However, it seems to me that very few people matriculating college in the past 10 years really believe/d that getting a peace of paper would get them a job. I mean, you ask a college senior anywhere this time of year, or a humanities major at any time, and they are fucking shitting themselves with fear of the future. Also, from the treatises on "the new college reality" that I have read, I could not seriously recommend any of these popular get-the-best-out-of-college, put-your-major-to-work books. They seem to be written by economically and financially illiterate yet highly arrogant people. Finally, humanities PhDs. I personally have never considered the PhD a pathway to prosperity - but that is likely because I read a lot as a child, and the scholars and students in the books I read were regularly poor, misunderstood, and likely malnourished. However, the question of exit opportunities for unsuccessful humanities PhDs is an enticing one. Firstly, I would contest the notion that a humanities PhD must think hard before attempting grad school, whereas a hard sciences PhD should not. The people who I know who have sought hard science PhDs - by virtue of my disgustingly white classist background, people with high GPAs from elite schools - had the grades and the pedigree to go into, say, quant finance, straight out of undergrad, except that, if they had done that, they would've had the inclement experience, the youth, and the hunger to raise to much higher ranks and salaries than what they got as PhDs coming out of grad school. I am biased towards math and physics, I admit, because the other shit has too many goddamn labs, and I am sure that some industry occupations, such as R&D, require a PhD for consideration - but that is very much a different story from going into any PhD with the intention of making tenure and ending up in industry. I won't expand on the notion of industry PhDs, however, because I have no basis from which to speak. My idea is, the opportunity cost of pursuing a PhD is great for all PhDs - whatever their discipline. But speaking specifically about humanities PhDs, I think it is useful to consider humanities students in general. What are any of us to do? I attended a talk by a very successful economist the other day, and what struck me about him is what strikes me about all successful people: he was above all a personality, a great orator. As such, I don't think that a person without rigorous training or significant natural talent in the humanities, in the areas of rhetoric and written analysis, will be able to rise to a position of leadership. However, it seems that, except for government, in all career paths nowadays, a proficiency with mathematics is a necessary condition for entry. I mean by proficiency not a knowledge of the TI-84 inspired by one or two semesters of calculus; I mean the understanding of the treatment of numerical data sets - a basic skill, critical thinking with numbers. There is a suspicion in both the industry and graduate school admissions that humanities students don't have this skill. However, it isn't correct to say that students who are inordinately talented in the humanities (like yours truly) shouldn't be able to dedicate themselves safely to the study of the humanities for 4 years of their college life. In defining opportunities in the humanities, I must return to the notion of cultural capital. Humanities scholars interpret, and interpretations by their definition must be adapted to their context. As such, humanities students must not only know their context, but belong in their context (e.g. even if you are interpreting the art of a different culture, so not your own context, whom are you interpreting it to?) And I understand that this sounds classist at the least and like an argument against academic integrity at the extremity. However, the position of interpreter is one for which people would be willing to pay. What do we do with our humanities majors leaving undergrad? I see a lot going into government and the soft ends of private companies (including finance, bitches), and I think I have clarified why above. As for humanities PhDs, I am not sure, again, that the university system would be the most efficient agent in "funneling" them anywhere. A better port of call would be your adviser or your conference or your contacts. Humanities PhDs just aren't widely regarded as applicable to a lot of roles - cue Kant, Enlightenment, positivism - but I am not convinced that universities advertising them more would make them better regarded. I would start with noting that the thinkers and methodologies we use aren't highly regarded, and I am not sure that a university-wide pogrom would be the solution to this, I think, essential misunderstanding between humanities students and everybody else. One of my advisers would say that critical theory became the death of literary criticism, and, whereas I love to read critical theory, I see myself agreeing with him more and more as I go on. I am generally opposed to using any methodology that is so overwhelming that you must include it on your abstract.

Are you fucking kidding me? No, no, I'm sorry. Are you seriously trying to assert that making higher education MORE like a private business, we're going to ensure that the positive externality that education provides to society is made better? Hey, why doesn't everybody just take out a $200,000 loan, go to University of Phoenix, get a BA in Business, and ask their professors for their valuable contacts in Wal-Mart and the highway McD's? In what way, precisely, do you see "educators" (you don't even have the courtesy to afford them their professional titles, professor, or teacher, or captain my captain) being held accountable for students' success? In the same way that they are accountable for Jimmy getting an A even though he hasn't come to a single class and didn't turn in a single paper? In the same way that now every hiring decision in every university department hinges significantly on (SUBJECTIVE) student evaluations of that researcher's teaching? Should I be able to sue my liberal arts college if I am unable to find a job after graduation? Should I sue my mother for not birthing me with the looks of Angelina Jolie and the mind of Stephen Hawking? I am by no means denying that there are institutions out there who misrepresent what they are able to give their students; I am equally sure that there are departments and individual professors out there who are toxic and need to be kept in a terrarium tank. However, the answer to protecting yourself against them is not to create a legislation that would a) make college into a business, which would result in GROSS inefficiencies and a loss of not only academic capital, but future research capacities, and b )create nothing but a lot of legal costs and wasted paper. The answer to protecting yourself against such contingencies of life is to 1) open your eyes to your reality, and 2) do the best you can do with what you have been given. It's sad that we are no longer living in the fifties, and we are not experiencing that unprecedented post-war economic boom, where anybody with a college degree (or without a college degree) could expect to be twice as rich as their parents over the course of 20 years. Creating nonsense regulation isn't going to help us regenerate an economy blighted by structural issues in its distribution of both labor and capital. I'm sorry, but if you're spewing this nonsense after having had 6 years in tertiary education, I can totally see why the establishment is reluctant to give you any more chances.

http://www.evanmarckatz.com/blog/letting-go/should-i-stay-with-my-wimpy-boyfriend/ Seriously, one of the main deterrents I have to entering academia is having to deal with people who can't function in a normal environment. Out of the numerous grad students and professors I have dated, I would say about 2-3 have had problems with normal life activities similar in magnitude to this guy, and whereas it didn't bother me very much, most of the time I was like, WTF. People in academia just seem so anxious about everything, in a way that people in other high-stakes high-profile jobs such as finance or medicine aren't. It really makes one reconsider the precariousness of academic life. Basically, I hate scholars because they're petty, I hate students because they're stupid... Why am I here?

You know, if you were happy, you wouldn't have depression... Such empathy. Much knowledge of what they are talking about. So Geologizer. Sorry for trolling, y'all. Carry on.