hypervodka

I've started practicing guided meditation. I use one of two mobile apps: Headspace and Breathe.
 
In regards to the app season, it's been helpful to me in promoting self-awareness and -reflection, and it's helped me be forthright with professors at my target programs about my thoughts, concerns, and interests. Before I didn't talk about applying to graduate school to anyone accept my immediate family, my BFFs, and my recommenders, because I didn't want to have to talk to too many people if I got rejected (I also just don't dig it as a convo starter), being honest about my choices and struggles now is very helpful, because it means that the people who are in the best position to help me at the schools I'm considering can be reciprocally forthright in return.
 
My first love always has and always will be television, and Broad City's back on air. That's probably the most important thing.

I've started practicing guided meditation. I use one of two mobile apps: Headspace and Breathe.
 
In regards to the app season, it's been helpful to me in promoting self-awareness and -reflection, and it's helped me be forthright with professors at my target programs about my thoughts, concerns, and interests. Before I didn't talk about applying to graduate school to anyone accept my immediate family, my BFFs, and my recommenders, because I didn't want to have to talk to too many people if I got rejected (I also just don't dig it as a convo starter), being honest about my choices and struggles now is very helpful, because it means that the people who are in the best position to help me at the schools I'm considering can be reciprocally forthright in return.
 
My first love always has and always will be television, and Broad City's back on air. That's probably the most important thing.

Wait and vomit in the DGS' office to establish dominance.
 
*may have binge watched House of Cards season 3 this week*

This may interest some of the folks who just received offers from Toronto:
 
http://www.thestar.com/yourtoronto/education/2015/02/27/u-of-t-teaching-assistants-strike-late-night-deal.html
 
TAs and instructors on strike (despite what the URL suggests) as of last night due to near-poverty level stipends (15k when the official low-income line in Canada is 23k for single workers in large cities).

Announcing your privilege just before you write a post that in itself exposes your privilege (like for example, making a comment that dismisses the work of an entrenched, sub-poverty-level workforce that regularly and insecurely gets paid below a living wage as a "great problem to have") is just unnecessary. It's redundant.

I'm really uncomfortable with the suggestion that some people can't "hack" grad school because of a disability. People with anxiety, autism, panic attacks, depression, and PTSD make important contributions to academia all the time. 
 
I do agree that you, youngcharlie, need to prioritize your health above all else. Does ETS offer accommodations for documented disabilities? You may want to look into that. Also, what did your professors say about your GRE scores? Did they offer any strategies for how to overcome them in your application?
 
ETA: Let's not wish we had another disability in place of our own. 

I'm not saying that you said adjuncting was "sufficient" or "just." I'm not accusing you of anything more or less than what you actually said, my only point being that the intersections of your various privileges were obvious without annunciation, just as mine are, as are anyone's, when I say pretty much anything.

I'm not saying that you said adjuncting was "sufficient" or "just." I'm not accusing you of anything more or less than what you actually said, my only point being that the intersections of your various privileges were obvious without annunciation, just as mine are, as are anyone's, when I say pretty much anything.

Except that hasn't been the dominant focus of this thread at all. Who on this thread has been preoccupied with their chances at teaching at Harvard? Several people on this thread, lifealive for example, have been vigorously pushing against the narrative that non-elite PhDs lack value. Several people have pointed out the potential TT hiring opportunities for  graduates from non-elite institutions. From what I understand, empress-marmot in particular was concerned about getting a job period, and  Who has been complaining about the fact that their degree from Emory won't land them that job at Cornell?
 
One of the Slate articles posted here, about the dominance of graduates from specific universities in  TT/tenured placements at ALL institutions (though it's focused on a couple of different non-humanist disciplines), does a great job of illustrating the significance of this discussion. Myopic hiring practices at certain institutions (which, again, I honestly don't think was ever the focus of this thread) are indicative of myopic hiring decisions at ALL institutions, so I'm really not understanding the distinction you're making here.

(crappy school computer erased original post, so this might be a little terse).
 
I was dismayed to only find out about this event late last night, which prevented me from being able to adequately plan for any action today. As I understand it, NAWD is meant to be awareness-raising action only, so in that I think organizers have both failed (I didn't know about it until last night) and succeeded (main goals have been pushing us to inform undergraduates/general public).
 
Here's what I did: I didn't tell students class was cancelled but when they arrived, I informed them that it was NAWD and talked for a bit about adjunct issues and how they affect higher education (and thus, their education). I fielded questions and allowed any pushback. Then I "refused to teach" and allowed them to leave (they were pretty happy about that last part). So kind of a half walkout.
 
Most students, surprise surprise, didn't care much (most hadn't even ever seen the word adjunct before) but some came up afterwards and said they were glad to be made aware of the issue, which was comforting.
 
Anyone else take action today? Some good examples here: http://nationaladjunct.tumblr.com/page/2/
 
 

Bullshit. Not getting a TT job isn't just a mild disappointment. It's emblematic that the heart and soul of higher education is eroding in a tidal wide of corporatization. Who suffers from the most from this trend? College students, and often the most disadvantaged, who no longer have access to office hours or commited advisors because all their adjunct instructors are teaching seven classes to make ends meet. Is it surprising that students of color, low income students, and disabled students are dropping out of college in record numbers just as the powers that be put all their efforts into streamlining everything in higher education? It's all connected: adjunctification, the gutting of student services, caps on financial aid, caps on basic skills courses, the devaluing of the humanities. And there are awfully big stakes.

Again, getting hired/not getting hired at Ivies has never been the focus of the conversation here, and no one here is clamoring about the injustice of being refused a tenured position at Yale.
 
Worrying over whether or not you will actually get a job at all because of the school you were able to go to is a legitimate concern, and it doesn't make sense to devalue it based on the larger concerns plaguing the globe. Even if this had been a conversation preoccupied with getting us all jobs at Ivy League institutions, I don't understand how that "minimizes the injustices that happen across the world." If someone had complained about their desperate need for a post-doc at Princeton, they wouldn't have been doing so to put that need in direct competition with other, far greater and dire social needs. There are threads here fretting over the weather in Chicago during campus visit weekends, how to make a good impression, what music people like, the price of and preparation for ETS's endless exams, and a wide host of cosmically insignificant topics that do nothing to minimize macroscopic social issues.
 
I'm not sure I'm really understanding you, so please correct me. It does not make sense to point out that not getting a job at Harvard is a far lesser problem than violent transphobia, because no one has been arguing any different.

Again, getting hired/not getting hired at Ivies has never been the focus of the conversation here, and no one here is clamoring about the injustice of being refused a tenured position at Yale.
 
Worrying over whether or not you will actually get a job at all because of the school you were able to go to is a legitimate concern, and it doesn't make sense to devalue it based on the larger concerns plaguing the globe. Even if this had been a conversation preoccupied with getting us all jobs at Ivy League institutions, I don't understand how that "minimizes the injustices that happen across the world." If someone had complained about their desperate need for a post-doc at Princeton, they wouldn't have been doing so to put that need in direct competition with other, far greater and dire social needs. There are threads here fretting over the weather in Chicago during campus visit weekends, how to make a good impression, what music people like, the price of and preparation for ETS's endless exams, and a wide host of cosmically insignificant topics that do nothing to minimize macroscopic social issues.
 
I'm not sure I'm really understanding you, so please correct me. It does not make sense to point out that not getting a job at Harvard is a far lesser problem than violent transphobia, because no one has been arguing any different.

Well, OK, I think lots of folks have been notably clear that they're worried about more than simply not getting hired at an Ivy. If this is a good faith discussion and you disagree, we can dig more deeply into some quotes.
 
More generally, though, I think there are ways of talking about all of these issues together without holding them to be "comparable" or one to be "a symbol for" another. Instead, the thing that connects professorial hiring woes with other kinds of social inequality is causality. If we're interested in dismantling oppressive and unequal systems, then we need to look at how those systems work and what effects they have on a broad scale. I agree that not getting hired at an Ivy is not as important as, say, the rising problem of student loan debt, or the racial gap in income and wealth. However, all of these problems are caused, at least in part, by the same system--and part of that system is the concentration of massive resources in protected and exclusionary zones (whether Ivies or SLACs or universities in general).

Except that hasn't been the dominant focus of this thread at all. Who on this thread has been preoccupied with their chances at teaching at Harvard? Several people on this thread, lifealive for example, have been vigorously pushing against the narrative that non-elite PhDs lack value. Several people have pointed out the potential TT hiring opportunities for  graduates from non-elite institutions. From what I understand, empress-marmot in particular was concerned about getting a job period, and  Who has been complaining about the fact that their degree from Emory won't land them that job at Cornell?
 
One of the Slate articles posted here, about the dominance of graduates from specific universities in  TT/tenured placements at ALL institutions (though it's focused on a couple of different non-humanist disciplines), does a great job of illustrating the significance of this discussion. Myopic hiring practices at certain institutions (which, again, I honestly don't think was ever the focus of this thread) are indicative of myopic hiring decisions at ALL institutions, so I'm really not understanding the distinction you're making here.

I can't believe anyone would be concerned about diversity in higher education without acknowledging the accumulation of disadvantage figured from the potential myopia of hiring decisions. If there's bias toward degrees from particular institutions, that bias extends out beyond the Ivory Tower, and deserves to be addressed.

I can't believe anyone would be concerned about diversity in higher education without acknowledging the accumulation of disadvantage figured from the potential myopia of hiring decisions. If there's bias toward degrees from particular institutions, that bias extends out beyond the Ivory Tower, and deserves to be addressed.

Except that hasn't been the dominant focus of this thread at all. Who on this thread has been preoccupied with their chances at teaching at Harvard? Several people on this thread, lifealive for example, have been vigorously pushing against the narrative that non-elite PhDs lack value. Several people have pointed out the potential TT hiring opportunities for  graduates from non-elite institutions. From what I understand, empress-marmot in particular was concerned about getting a job period, and  Who has been complaining about the fact that their degree from Emory won't land them that job at Cornell?
 
One of the Slate articles posted here, about the dominance of graduates from specific universities in  TT/tenured placements at ALL institutions (though it's focused on a couple of different non-humanist disciplines), does a great job of illustrating the significance of this discussion. Myopic hiring practices at certain institutions (which, again, I honestly don't think was ever the focus of this thread) are indicative of myopic hiring decisions at ALL institutions, so I'm really not understanding the distinction you're making here.

Except that hasn't been the dominant focus of this thread at all. Who on this thread has been preoccupied with their chances at teaching at Harvard? Several people on this thread, lifealive for example, have been vigorously pushing against the narrative that non-elite PhDs lack value. Several people have pointed out the potential TT hiring opportunities for  graduates from non-elite institutions. From what I understand, empress-marmot in particular was concerned about getting a job period, and  Who has been complaining about the fact that their degree from Emory won't land them that job at Cornell?
 
One of the Slate articles posted here, about the dominance of graduates from specific universities in  TT/tenured placements at ALL institutions (though it's focused on a couple of different non-humanist disciplines), does a great job of illustrating the significance of this discussion. Myopic hiring practices at certain institutions (which, again, I honestly don't think was ever the focus of this thread) are indicative of myopic hiring decisions at ALL institutions, so I'm really not understanding the distinction you're making here.

Except that hasn't been the dominant focus of this thread at all. Who on this thread has been preoccupied with their chances at teaching at Harvard? Several people on this thread, lifealive for example, have been vigorously pushing against the narrative that non-elite PhDs lack value. Several people have pointed out the potential TT hiring opportunities for  graduates from non-elite institutions. From what I understand, empress-marmot in particular was concerned about getting a job period, and  Who has been complaining about the fact that their degree from Emory won't land them that job at Cornell?
 
One of the Slate articles posted here, about the dominance of graduates from specific universities in  TT/tenured placements at ALL institutions (though it's focused on a couple of different non-humanist disciplines), does a great job of illustrating the significance of this discussion. Myopic hiring practices at certain institutions (which, again, I honestly don't think was ever the focus of this thread) are indicative of myopic hiring decisions at ALL institutions, so I'm really not understanding the distinction you're making here.

I can't believe anyone would be concerned about diversity in higher education without acknowledging the accumulation of disadvantage figured from the potential myopia of hiring decisions. If there's bias toward degrees from particular institutions, that bias extends out beyond the Ivory Tower, and deserves to be addressed.

This is mentioned in the Professor is In link someone posted awhile ago, but going into debt for an education was considered "good debt" until fairly recently, when people began to realize that many jobs graduates can expect to receive don't actually allow debtors the financial stability to pay off the substantial debts that often come from student loans, and there's no reprieve for those unable to pay these loans off. It used to be considered an "investment," but the pay-off just isn't worth the buy-in.

There are only a few things that I would add: I'm another one of those no-name B.A.-only and it didn't hurt me, but that isn't to say that a Masters would hurt you. However, pretty much all of the programs you applied to strongly prefer candidates with only a BA (particularly Harvard and Yale).
 
Even though I don't think applying with a Masters is a bad thing, and it could give you the necessary opportunity to assess and refocus your research goals in a structured environment (which I think is the more important part of an application), but, to my knowledge, NYU's MA program doesn't have a particularly solid placement record in PhD programs (this is just what some professor at Rutgers obliquely told me in the past couple of days) and even "full funding" at NYU in general is actually difficult to maintain with New York's substantial cost of living. It may be stressful (especially in regards to trying to make ends meet), but it is a good program and may be a good opportunity. I just... I really just don't want you to feel like you have to continue school at this point. You really can just... stop for a second. You've graduated from a prestigious university: you can get a job--an internship, at a non-profit, overseas--you can get a part-time job with no direction. NYU is not the only option, and it may not be the best option.
 
I honestly think you will just benefit from time. I think that your undergrad was ample preparation, and you just need a little time for the ideas you're entertaining to percolate. You have the benefit of being rejected from the school you actually went to, so that's a great opportunity to work with people in your department to assess what parts of your application need to be improved. I was shut-out the first time I applied, I stepped away, got a job I loved and had fun with. Then, at the last minute (like September), I wrote the writing sample I used to submit. My real world experiences made my research goal far more focused than they would have been otherwise. I realized how lofty (and, worse, amorphous) my original goals were and made sure to be more specific. I also had more time, because I wasn't simultaneously studying for ETS's gibberish standardized tests and my undergraduate actual tests. Even with a job, I had more time to devote to my applications, because it didn't feel like I was going straight from working on schoolwork to working on MORE SCHOOLWORK to back to working on real schoolwork. I was exhausted and shaken. I didn't enjoy the experience of applying my first time around.
 
Still, I'm extremely biased against undergraduates applying right out of UG, especially so young (I say as if I'm not a pesky whipper-snapper myself) because there's just so much we can do that does not involve stressing about school, so, please, others chime in...

Tip from someone who's moved across the country before and will be doing it again: you can ship your books across the country cheap through media mail, which is reserved for "educational materials." It takes them longer to get to the destination and the boxes will probably arrive (1) a little beaten up and (2) not all at the same time, but if you're okay with that, it's a really nice way to save room in a car or suitcase and get to keep some of your belongings.

I've also been really focused on the idea that I need to move from undergrad straight into more school, whether its a PhD program or an MA, as if taking a year or two off would somehow make me lose my momentum or cause me to fall behind. Now that I see how many people have benefitted from taking time off to do other things, I'm much less terrified of the idea. Even kind of excited about it! This morning I was offered a full time position at the online publication I've been interning at. The company is tons of fun and full of really nice and supportive people. I definitely think that taking this job once I graduate is, for me, a much better option than going into an MA right now. I need some time to breathe. I also don't need debt. I think I've been so narrow minded about getting into a program and having a plan for the next few years that I haven't given myself time to consider other options.
 
Anyway, thanks for sharing, hypervodka and MonicaBang!