Cheshire_Cat

Speaking of that... Business school pwns social and hard sciences both. Just sayin'. But we are kind of the red-headed step children of academia. Probably because everyone else is jealous. We don't have to write grants much, and accounting students can get jobs ABD making 90k a year... Crap, I'm gonna be the one getting murdered.

I have one and I enjoy playing around with it. I've never taken notes, but I can see how it would be useful for such a purpose. Mine is about the size of my ipad mini. I got it at Best Buy. They have a great return policy, so I would suggest buying one there, trying it out for a couple of weeks to see if you like the feel of it, and returning it if you don't.

I understand what you are saying, rising_star. I went to a small state school with no name and it probably hurt my app. There is a lot of elitism in the upper schools. But I don't see how closing the wage gap in the Ph.D program is going to help people who can't make it this far. We need to start from the bottom. Better education and nutrition in pre-K and work our way up. It is impossible to fix something if the foundation is broken. You are right, it probably is too hard for a lot of lower socioeconomic status people to get in. But that isn't just because they aren't given the opportunity. They may not have the knowledge to do well in a program, because they didn't get the schooling they needed, and their parents didn't read to them as a child, and they ate hot dogs and kraft macaroni and cheese for dinner every night instead of a nutritious meal. But you can't just get them in and hope they do fine because you give them a chance. There has to be some foundational learning, and at this moment, most people who are have lower socioeconomic statuses don't have it. And you can't fix that here, you have to fix it there. Pruning a tree doesn't help if its roots are rotting.

These are for people with 5-8 years of experience in their field, not newbies. And those are all marketing jobs that anyone with any major can get, not really major specific unless you are marketing. To really know you would have to look at the percentages of English majors in those fields. And I mean, I'm not trying to bash English in particular. Two of my best friends were English majors. But I highly doubt most people with English degrees are going to be making anywhere close to what most people with accounting degrees make.

Also, I looked at the stats from the Payscale.com and I disagree with them. I don't think there are all that many Marketing Directors come from English B.A.s unless they have something like an MBA as well, and it is skewing the numbers. In fact, it seems to me that the "jobs" for English B.A.s are pretty nebulous.

My dad has his Ph.D, and he had to work his way through college. His mom was a single mom and alcoholic, without any college education. His dad is successful now, but also doesn't have any sort of formal education past 16. Despite this, he has his Ph.D, one brother has a masters, and the other is actually a lawyer. All of them had to do it on their own. All of them are successful. It can be done. I 100% agree with your last paragraph. You have to consider opportunity cost of people attending school. For someone like you, the opportunity cost of going to school vs. working in industry is 25K a year, so over the life of a program that could be anywhere from 100-150k. However, for an English Ph.D student making 20k instead of 30k in industry, the opportunity costs are less than a quarter of that. So even though you make more than a English Ph.D student, in reality, if you look at total cost like a finance person making a business decision, it is costing you a whole lot more to go to school. Also, I got a "big" scholarship for my masters. A whole $1,000 dollars towards tuition. You can take out huge loans for an MBA or other business masters. The idea of anyone getting paid to get theirs is strange to me. So English people do have it lucky in some ways.

I think it is good to address both hard work and quality of work. You don't get ahead in life if your work isn't quality, however brains aren't all there is to it. You have to show up to work every day, even if you can get your work done in half the time. Being smart also doesn't get you through the tedious tasks that your job will inevitably require of you at some point. It takes hard work. Having to actually attend class, or fill out a journal entry every day, or do other things that require consistency and effort are important parts of learning.

I don't think it will just be for the upper middle class. I feel like someone who is used to making less money may find it easier to figure out how to live on the stipend they give us better than someone who is used to privilege. But I do think the "prioritize your career over everything else" is unhealthy. When you are old and grey and on your deathbed, you won't want to be surrounded by your academic articles, you will want to be surrounded by family. People with good relationships tend to outperform and be more mentally healthy than those without them. But we act like they are ancillary.

I second a handwritten card or something from the place you got accepted.

Why do the laws of physics have to apply to graduate students? Market forces just are. You can't really argue that they should or shouldn't apply somewhere any more than you can argue that gravity shouldn't apply somewhere. It is just how it works. We can work with within the laws of physics to create airplanes, which may seem to defy gravity, but in reality, as soon as you change something, like a wing, then the plane will plummet to the ground. A better question, is how you can use market forces to "defy gravity" so to speak.

I think we need to make a distinction between skill, inherent value of an occupation, and market value of an occupation. My BFF is English, and she is just as brilliant as I am, but the market value for someone who is in English is less than the market value for an accountant. Does that mean the person or job is really less valuable? No. I'd say that the most important job in the world is being a parent, and you get paid diddly squat for that. A trash mans job is way more important than mine, but he gets paid less because there are more people who can do his job than can do mine. He is less "skilled" than I am. An artist may be incredibly skilled at art, but since a lot of people don't pay for art, they don't make as much. IMO, art adds a lot more inherent value to the world than my job, but it doesn't add value in the marketplace. But really, accountants get paid as much as they do partially because no one else wants to stare at a spreadsheet all day. It is boring. The people who do accounting value the money it will provide over the other things they could be doing. You have to pay them more money than you have to pay a teacher because the job is less internally fulfilling. Really, skill and need, as well as a lot of other factors play into how much you get paid. But it all comes down to how much the market thinks the service you provide is worth. Not how much you are worth as a person, or the inherent value of what you do.

What I mean by "need" is that the supply outweighs the demand. You have a lot of people with liberal arts Ph.Ds who are unable to find jobs. TAs are taking up jobs that better qualified people could have, if their were not as many. The pay gap will continue throughout your career. It's just economics. I chose accounting, while my brother chose marketing, and now I make more than him. Admittedly, if he really put his mind to it, his earning potential is 10x more than mine. My friend chose teaching. You could have chosen business instead of English. When you made the decision of your discipline, you agreed to making less than some others in other disciplines. I decided that I didn't want to go through the hell of studying for the GMAT again, so I'm going to a lower ranked school than I possibly could go to if I had studied and reapplied. That decision will affect my earning potential. There is a reason for the difference in earnings, and it is a lot of math. There isn't a way to "fix" the pay gap without creating a lot of other issues.

Another argument for making allowances for children- children with better educated parents are more likely to be successful in their own lives. Yes, it may be bad timing to have kids in grad school, but there never really is a good time to have kids. Currently, people who are less educated and less successful are having a lot more kids than those who are successful, because by the time we are settled enough to consider children, we are past prime child-bearing years. As the system is right now, you have to put your family aside for career stability in the workplace or academia. Wouldn't it be better if that wasn't the case? It doesn't happen in industry, but people in industry don't get tenure either. I see the abuses, I audit government programs for a living. But I feel like there should be some way to increase the work/life balance of a graduate student so they don't always have to make the choice between career or children. I'm not sure if more money is the answer, but I think it is something to be considered.

Looking at it from an economic perspective- Currently the demand for business professors outweighs the supply. Business schools are also cash cows for a university. If we've done our jobs correctly, we have a lot of rich alumni. And we don't have quite the research costs of the other disciplines. However, the AICPA actually had to run a program to subsidize accounting Ph.D student's salaries for a few years because no one in their right mind would leave a 60k a year job for 25k and 5 years of misery. Unfortunately the program ended a year before I graduated college. In that way, the market kind of took care of itself. There was more of a demand, so someone stepped up to meet the supply. Also, I'm apparently not in my right mind. I won't be making nearly as much as the business student in the article. I won't even make as much as ss2player. My COL is lower though. OTOH, there are more liberal arts Ph.Ds than they need. So the "smart" thing to do would be to raise barriers of entry. One of those is the ability to support yourself through the Ph.D program. Is that the correct barrier to raise, I don't know. But there has to be something so the "market" won't be flooded, thus driving the salaries for liberal arts Ph.Ds down even further than they already are. Making the program harder isn't a good barrier because then you have greater costs for people who don't even succeed. So the only logical thing to do would be to raise salaries of accepted students, but cut back on the number of students accepted. That seems like a logical plan to me, but it does make it a lot more competitive for those trying to get into a program.

I would speak to someone, because the school could be liable under promissory estopple. "In the law of contracts, the doctrine that provides that if a party changes his or her position substantially either by acting or forbearing from acting in reliance upon a gratuitous promise, then that party can enforce the promisealthough the essential elements of a contract are not present." You rejected the other offers upon reliance on their promise, so it should be enforceable. I would speak with a lawyer, the school's legal department, and maybe a professor to see if they could speak to a different program and get you in there because of this if they are unable to fulfill it themselves.

It depends on the store. I'm a 10 & 1/2 so I've never had that problem, but I know in the outlier sizes sometimes stores carry them and sometimes they don't. But I'm sure some children's shoe stores carry heels in NY, so you should be fine either way.

Also, stupid #$*%$ Excel! I've been working on something all day, which I thought I saved several times, but none of them "took" This has happened before and our IT guy says he will get me a new computer (which I'm trying to put off until I leave so they won't buy new stuff for someone who isn't going to be here in three months) It even said "do you want to save Excel Docx 1" and I clicked yes right before I closed. And it isn't interesting or easy work that got lost either. It is detail work that takes time and brains to do right and at the end of the day you are tired and can't think anymore. Time to go home before I throw the computer out the window. I'm too mad to get anything else done today.

How long does it take to reset a freakin' password? We are going on more than 2 weeks. That's government efficiency for you.

I agree with orange. All they can say is no. And if the program director thinks you have a chance, then that is in your favor.

Yeah, happened to me twice in grad school with group projects. One group just refused to do enough work to make an A, and they were all redneck drinking buddies and I was the odd girl out, and I ended up making a B because of them. Another group project I was in, they were busy and didn't want to meet in a group for a group project that was basically a discussion question that needed to be done in the group. They just wanted to send it in to one group member (who I knew for a fact was struggling a lot more in the class than I) and have him synthesize our answers. I thought that was a bad idea and refused to send mine in until we met, so they said I wasn't contributing. So I had to do the assignment on my own. (I got the same grade as them though, so HA!) There really is an ethos to a group of students, and it determines a lot. I went into my masters a summer earlier than most people, and the class that I was with that summer was amazing. But then the unofficial leader, and some of the other students graduated, and several influential leaders in the new cohort were mean and lazy.

I had a 4.0 through undergrad and then a 3.8 in grad school. It is frustrating, but it didn't stop me from getting into a program. It is still a decently high GPA.

Math. I know, I'm an accountant who hates math. Trying to brush up on calculus is hard though. I understand the concepts, but it is boring.

I had a spider at my old apartment who lived in my bathroom vent. I tried killing it a couple of times, but then stopped because it always stayed up there and hid in the vent when I tried to get it, and I was afraid of it falling on me when I tried to kill it. I'm not particularly afraid of spiders though. I have caught a couple in a glass jar once, and the bigger one ate the smaller one. Then I killed the bigger one because it was a brown recluse. I hate killing anything though, so I usually leave things alone unless they are bothering me. The exception being cockroaches and ticks. I'll kill those suckers in a heartbeat.

Florida spiders are the scariest. I can't tell you how many times I've ridden my horse through woods and run smack into a huge banana spider web... But, they keep other bugs away, so I tolerate them.

Things reviewers do- write the same "see note on workpaper XXX" for the rest of the workpapers in the series. Ok, got it. I'm really not stupid. But I've had three people review my work and their review notes are inconsistent. One wants me to do the exact opposite of the other. And it isn't worth fighting over, but I really wish I'd know which reviewer to cater to before the fact.