EliaEmmers

@orange turtle This is great news and I'm very happy you spoke up. Every time a woman like you stands up to harassment, you help make the world a little bit better for everyone. THANK YOU FOR BEING BRAVE.

THIS. I mean, the sheer mental gymnastics that rphilos engages in to try to justify to himself why women should not speak up when facing harassment deserves its own gold medal on BS.

OR the much much MUCH more common case where legacy status outweighs your lack of personal and academic merit. I mean, you can try to twist and turn this in whatever way suits your conviction that systematic discrimination against people of lower resources should remain enshrined in the educational system. However, that does not change the fact that legacy-anything is just another bureaucratic maneuvering to make sure the rich still have first-hand access to as much opportunities they can at the expense of the poor.

At the risk of sounding a little, well, maybe "too concerned" you don't worry about all the pictures/personal info you post on your webpage? (Yes, guilty, I clicked on it). I know it seems a little bit weird but you never know who is checking you out on the Internet.

Just wanted to let you know that a colleague of mine (from a different area though) also got an invitation for a video. He emailed the people from SAGE and they said that they're contacting authors based on the amount of downloads their articles have had and they're using that as a proxy for 'people are reading this, so they must be interested'. So... yeah. I guess you're more popular than you think?

GUILTY OF DOING THIS IN CLASS!

I tend to refer to this problem as dividing programs/subjects/areas of study in “everybody-can-have-an-opinion” ones VS “only-the-experts-can-have-an-opinion” with two similar courses I’ve taken. During my first year as a computer science grad it was mandatory for us to take an ethics course in the Philosophy Department with a focus towards computer science (I guess they wanted to prevent us from becoming black hat hackers or something). Everybody in my cohort dreaded that course and I didn’t know why, but I tried to go in with an open mind. Gosh… WHAT.A.WASTE.OF.TIME. The course was mostly split around 15-20% CompSci students and 80-85% social science/humanities/business students. There was no formal structure to it (with the professor encouraging ‘discussion’ among students) and all I can say was that a lot of yapping was going on, with people mostly talking about their life experiences with file sharing networks and social media. Every now and then somebody would make a tangentially relevant point but it was mostly just 4 months of incessant yapping. What I found was, of course, that the material of the course was something everybody could relate to so you didn’t actually need to know anything about philosophy or ethics or computer science to have an opinion about it. You just needed to have used a computer at some point in your lifetime. But there was this one time where I took a course with a catchy name like “Modern Practice of Bioinformatics” or something that promised it would touch upon issues like genetics, bioengineering, GMOs, etc. It attracted a similar split of students (with the CompSci people being in the minority) but the course had so much emphasis on the technical details of computing that it effectively cut the yapping that was going on. Only people who knew their stuff and had something relevant to contribute dared rise their hand and say something, and this ‘something’ was usually very relevant. For better or worse, I think most areas of the soft sciences are easier to relate to which means a lot of people who are not experts can think they are experts and say stuff just for the sake of saying stuff. The hard sciences, on the other hand, are more difficult to relate to because your usual everyday life experiences are not very relevant to, say optimizing an algorithm or solving an integral. And if your everyday life experiences cannot help you make an argument or say something in a class discussion, you're forced to rely on your knowledge of the material, effectively filtering-out the opinions of people who don't understand the material. In any case, it’s always up to you to make the best you want from your degree.

I totally feel like this is true (not just in Psychology but in many other social sciences/humanities) and that has hit very close to home for me. My sister began her BA in Psychology around the same time her best friend (we’re from a small town) started working as a bank teller. My sister thought she could work doing something related with children with disabilities but couldn't get into the program she needed to get certified. She still assumed she could do something else with her college degree in the area of mental health, but those positions are both horribly underpaid and very scarce. When the interest rate on her student loans almost crushed her, she went to ask her friend if they were hiring bank tellers. By that time her friend had become a manager, got married and had enough savings and (a reliable-enough income) that she was able to put the down payment for a home. All my sister has to show for her degree is student debt and underemployment, but at least she’s getting a paycheck now. At the end of the day such is the nature of the beast and we do need to deal with the consequences of the decisions we make. And one such decision is exactly what the two other posters told you before: you need a Plan B.

Well, on his defense, he states his location to be 'Texas' and I believe Texas is one of those states known for its strong rhetoric against women's rights, isn't it? Maybe he thinks this kind of comments are acceptable not because he's trying to be mean, but because that's the only viewpoint he's used to and that's why he believes other people think like that.

I thought you had mentioned in a previous post that Greek life in UBC was "super cliquey"?