Bumblebea

I'm doing okay. So are a lot of other people I went through grad school with. Shit, a guy I know was on the market since 2013, and he just got a great job. So maybe it really is you.

I will say that this happened at only one grad program I went to (for my MA) and not at my PhD program, so I don't think it's a widespread problem that women routinely get asked what they're going to do about rapidly diminishing fertility in front of other grad students and professors. This sort of thing was very much part of the culture at my MA program. Almost everyone came in married or engaged, so that was seen as normal, and those who were not coupled were often asked what they were going to do to solve that "problem. (It was also assumed that spending too much time studying was going to hurt your chances of finding someone, and this has not proven true in my experience.) At my PhD program, no one cared or even asked people about these things. It just was such a non-issue. But women's bodies are routinely thought of as "public domain," and academia, sadly, is no exception to that rule.

This article captures like no other some of the conversations I had about my age in graduate school: http://www.theonion.com/article/woman-looks-great-for-a-32-year-old-1710 I don't think I got any cred for being older, but I eventually started turning the jabs about my age around to poke fun at the youth and inexperience of the rest of my cohort. "Yes, I'm 29. I had to work to save money before going back to grad school. Oh, you were able to go straight through? So lucky! But don't you think it's going to be rough hitting the job market at 30 without having held a 'real job' before? And do you have a back-up plan? Because, I mean, I hope the academic career works out for you, but if not, you're going to be thirty and have a PhD and a very thin resume. Oh well, good luck!"

I was 28 when I started my grad program, which made me older than almost everyone in my cohort--but not THAT much older. But to an early 20-something, late-20s is devastatingly old. I was at a party a few weeks into my second semester and another grad student, after discovering how old I was, congratulated me on "looking so young for [my] age" and then asked if I worried that it would all fall off when I hit 30. (It didn't.) The next year, when I was on the threshold of 30, a 25-year-old friend remarked that I was such an inspiration to her and she hoped she could still look so young and hip and cool for her age when she was my age. (I was 29.) I was also routinely asked by people (men) in my grad program if I was planning on freezing my eggs any time soon. One guy even recommended that I forgo the PhD program altogether so that I could have kids. That was actually sort of creepy and unreal, and not funny, to be honest.

Why would you have to get your eggs tested at 30? Most people don't have that done until they're in their 40s. And please don't buy into all the hype about "post-35 is too old to have kids." A lot of that info was debunked as unreliable a few years ago.

It's a proven fact that this happens to your face in the last month of being 29.

I'm not sure what you mean by "pimped"? Do you mean "pimped out" in that other people have had a hand in polishing it? If that's the case, it's really not a big deal as long as your language and ideas aren't being altered. I paid a professional editor to help copy edit an article I was trying to publish. ESL students frequently hire native English speakers to help them edit their dissertations.

I've actually had a lot of access to applicants' GRE scores over the years, and they represent a much larger spread than you might initially expect. I was surprised myself to see people admitted to perfectly decent programs with scores all over the map (and much lower than the "bare minimum" I'd originally assumed). Then again, I'm not talking about the scores it takes to get into Harvard or Yale or Columbia, or the schools the OP is talking about.

If the OP is ESL, the verbal portion of the GRE may not be weighted as heavily as it often is for native English speakers. A lot of programs understand that people coming from vastly different language backgrounds are just never going to do as well on a test that is all about word connotations and shades of meaning. I mean, one of my program friends was from East Asia, and I think her GRE was 490 (old system). She really struggled with the analogies, which is normal for an ESL applicant, but she completed the program just fine. Having said that, I didn't go to a top program. (But I didn't go to a bad program either.) I'd say getting into a top-20 program these days is an extreme long shot, regardless of scores.

I don't think that failing to specify a time period in your SOP will doom you outright (though it's hard to say without seeing your writing) as long as you were specific in your interests and you connected those interests to your writing sample. If anything, the committee will just go by the time period of your writing sample and consign you to that area. The one thing that would cause a great deal of consternation is if your writing sample and SOP didn't match up at all, i.e. your SOP is about Renaissance drama and your writing sample is about Uncle Tom's Cabin. I mean--to use myself as an example: My writing sample was about a 19th/20th-century author but my SOP talked all about how much I loved the eighteenth century. So I think I ended up connecting the two things thematically (luckily they were on the same side of the Atlantic) and making a big deal about the transhistorical construction of disability, criminality, and masculinity as they manifested in colonial geography. LOL. (Now I work in book history, by the way.) So anyway, I got into a fairly decent program, but when I came to visit I noticed that they didn't send me into to talk to any 18th-century people--I was hooked up with a 19th-century prof, a postcolonial prof, and a guy doing global south stuff. When I started at the program, they assigned me an advisor who was an Africanist. By the end of the year I'd switched over to a suitable advisor who did 18th/19th century, and it was a match made in heaven. So anyway, my point is that the way I got into a program wasn't pretty. The program apparently thought my interests were postcolonial in nature ... or maybe even transnational ... and perhaps having to do with gender/disability studies ... and I ended up chucking all those things. But it really didn't matter--what mattered was that I got in. And that was just a lucky break (since a lot of other programs said no).

One school sent me a rejection letter in the form of a PDF file named "regrets." I'd like to tell you I didn't bother to open the file after seeing the name, but I did anyway.

Ugh, that's horrible. I wish the grad school process would move to a dossier service (like interfolio) as the job market has.

But P&T decisions, even at R1 schools, also depend on a professor's mentoring and teaching abilities. In fact, mentoring graduate students often comes up in promotion meetings. I know there are rock star professors out there who publish the It Book of the Decade and then get away with being the literal worst to grad students and colleagues, but I think that situation is pretty rare. When my faculty mentors went up for promotion, they had to put together dossiers that featured not only their many publications but also the number of dissertations they chaired and the success of those students. In fact, placing successful graduate students in TT jobs is hugely important to a lot of faculty. It cements their reputation in the department, and more importantly in the field. (Yes, professors do get a huge ego boost out of having mentored a rising star--at conferences, junior scholars are almost always referred to as so-and-so's advisee.) And you don't attract successful graduate students if you can't be counted on to turn in recommendation letters on time at the other end of the process. I don't think that's really accurate. For the reasons I explained above, I've never seen a professor fail a student and then reason away their failure with "life's just unfair like that, oh well, you'll see." In fact, if anyone is currently experiencing this kind of behavior at a program, I would urge you to get out now. I mean, yes, I've had recommenders fail to come through for me, but it was never out of malice or spite or arrogance. It was always an oversight that they felt very bad about afterwards.

I don't know the "backstory" here, but I do want to emphasize that writing recommendation letters is part of any professor's job. No, it's not something they get immediate credit for (much like serving on a dissertation committee--only the chair really gets credit for that), but it's something they're expected to do nonetheless. And many take pride in it. If you're a professor, you get a little bit of prestige by circulating letters to your colleagues at other programs. Failing to come through for your grad students isn't a career-limiting gesture, but it certainly won't win you any friends in your department (especially among other professors expected to pick up the slack), and it might even get you in trouble with the DGS (who wants to promote a solid program and place students in good places). Beyond that--yes, publishing is more important for a professor's career advancement. But that still does not give them the right to promise to write a letter of recommendation and then not come through for that student. If these professors promised to write letters and promised to have them in by these particular deadlines, then it's really not right for them to renege on this promise, regardless of when the student asked. I often write letters for students--not for graduate school but for on-campus activities and internships and what-not--and I would be horrified if I cost them an opportunity by missing a deadline, even if the student was somewhat late with their request. (If a professor feels a student has approached them too close to a deadline, then it is their job to say "I can't do this for you because of the last-minute nature of this request.") We all have articles to write and revisions to turn in. But that doesn't give us the right to promise things and then just flake out. It's not right.

Frankly, you need to take this stuff to a lawyer who deals with wrongful termination suits. Because of your health issues, you may have grounds for some kind of lawsuit that might result in your being reinstated, but I'm guessing (actually, I'm certain) that no one at TGC is qualified enough to advise you on this matter.

The Chronicle's got a run-down of the campus incidents that have happened since Trump's election: http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/heres-a-rundown-of-the-latest-campus-climate-incidents-since-trumps-election/115553 And this incident at Ohio State (which I'm sure everyone has seen on social media or the news) wasn't racially motivated, but it was stunning and brazen nonetheless: http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2016/11/14/1115-osu-student-pushed-at-protest.html

Um, they're crimes committed against certain minority groups with the intent to intimidate. I'm not sure what you proof you're really looking for. Trump spent all year using inflammatory hate speech against minorities. Is it a surprise that his supporters, whilst celebrating their victory, are doing the same? And when someone writes "Trump" on a Muslim prayer room in an attempt to deface it, just days after the election, I'm going to apply Occam's razor here and assume they're a Trump supporter. There was also a hate crime at Wellesley--Clinton's alma mater. Some Trump supporters waved Trump flags and spat on African-American students. http://www.wcvb.com/news/fraternity-ousts-2-students-who-waved-trump-flag-at-wellesley-college/42458568 But yeah, I'm sure they're just hoaxing. Or their actions are being totally misinterpreted.

What? I don't know how you're defining "substantiated," but there have been plenty of reports. Kind of difficult to deny the veracity of the actual fliers and messages people have been circulating on campuses since he's been elected. TRUMP was written on a Muslim prayer room at NYU. Black students at Penn were sent racist pro-lynching messages. What kind of proof are you looking for, exactly? Just because you haven't witnessed this harassment first hand does not mean it isn't happening. Getting "suspicious looks" from people doesn't compare.

Yikes. That's remarkably terrible. As for the question of being an Americanist in Canada--I will say that for the past two or three years, there were a couple of really good jobs at Canadian universities for Americanists. These jobs were very difficult for US citizens to get. I assume that a degree from Toronto would better position you for those jobs.

I think that @whodathunk has hit it on the head. A Trump presidency certainly isn't going to make things *better* for academia. That's for sure. But academia's problems run so deep, and have been around for the last several decades, that I sincerely believe that his election will have little to no effect in the short term. That is to say: we've already been crowded onto a lifeboat in freezing cold water. No one is coming for us. Before, we had some hope that we could be rescued. Now we know we are truly on our own. Having said that, I'm not sure what the long-term effects could be on academia. It certainly isn't reassuring that we now have a president who openly shows disdain for ideas and intellectual pursuits. More frightening are the people he's surrounding himself with. Tbh, that's my deeper concern. And my most immediate concern is one that you all have already touched on: our authority in the classroom. Many students--many, many students--already despise what we stand for or what they perceive us to stand for: diversity, humanistic inquiry, critical thinking (especially as that critical thinking relates to American culture and ideology), and heightened reflexivity. We strive to make people question what they know to be true, and we've already been made vulnerable for voicing unpopular concerns--or, even more frightening, for actually daring to teach writers who aren't white and straight and able-bodied and male. African-American professors have been fired for making their white students uncomfortable. I don't think that Trump and his cronies are going to shut down universities or fire all liberal profs. But I DO think his election will further embolden certain students to be more aggressive and bullying in our classrooms--toward both us and other students--and on their evaluations (which, for those of us who don't have tenure or TT jobs, is somewhat troubling). And then there's needing to worry about our safety, possibly. Already a group of students at Texas State University have circulated fliers saying that they are going to "tar & feather VIGILANTE SQUADS and go arrest & torture those deviant university leaders spouting off all this Diversity Garbage." (http://www.kvue.com/news/local/hays-county/texas-state-police-investigating-trump-vigilante-fliers/350690961) A few students sat in my classroom this week wearing "Make America Great Again" hats. I'm a white woman, and I'm nervous. I can't imagine what it is like right now to be a professor or grad student of color or of Muslim/Jewish affiliation or LGBT.

It's been my experience that many programs are aware that international or second-language students will not be as good at the verbal portion of the GRE as their native English counterparts. The GRE verbal is extremely difficult to navigate if you're ESL because so much of the test hinges upon an understanding of the context in which these words are used and the nuances that go along with these contexts. My friend, for instance, who is from an East Asian country, got a 470 on the verbal and still got into our (fairly respectable) program. 157 actually seems like a somewhat decent score for someone who didn't grow up speaking English. But as with everything, YMMV, and it will depend on the school's you're applying to as well as the rest of your application.

This is an older post, but I'll chime in anyway: I tended to be upfront with my students while I was in graduate school. I think it's good that they have more, not less, information about who's teaching them and how the university is structured. Like, I guess I think they deserve to know that the university has entrusted a lot of their more basic courses to graduate students rather than tenured faculty. And like, I wouldn't tell them that they were getting "ripped off" or something, or what I made, but I would explain to them the different "ranks" of professor, and what "tenure" is, and then I would explain that I was a graduate student who was getting my tuition waived in exchange for teaching. YMMV on this, but I found that it often made them more, not less, sympathetic, and that they then seemed to be forgiving if I wasn't the quickest in replying to emails. When I first started teaching, I tried to hide it from them (and I was in my late 20s, so I wasn't necessarily super obvious as a young grad student), and I would occasionally get bad evaluations that would say things like, "She doesn't deserve the salary she makes here!" or "She doesn't deserve to teach at a university as prestigious as this one, you should fire her!!!!" These made me laugh, but I did feel that evaluations like that went away once my students knew I was a grad student, not some professor raking in tons (lol) of money.

I believe that UConn has a funded MA program. I think that Rutgers-Camden does as well. Rutgers-Newark waives tuition and has opportunities to apply for fellowships. Whatever you do, don't be taken in by fancy programs that make you pay tuition for your MA. It is absolutely not worth it and, IMO, probably unethical. I personally would not recommend attending a program that doesn't provide a stipend either, as the East coast is an expensive place to live.

I think you've got the right idea here. Honestly, it doesn't sound like your teaching is an issue. Your students are doing about average. As long as half the class is doing well, and your average is matching the other professor's, I don't think you have reason to be worried. If anything, it sounds like maybe your lack of confidence is coming across to the students. This is pretty normal. You're a new instructor, you're probably young, and they think they can push you around. You're an easy target for their discontent. They "smell blood in the water," as one of my first mentors put it. I don't think you should push back by overdoing it--by getting really strict or mean, for instance. But I think you have to be firm. You need to emphasize to the students over and over again what you basically said here--that half the class is doing very well, and that the average in your class matches the average in the other classes. This puts the ball in the court of the sub-average students. They can't blame you if their classmates aren't having problems. You also want to emphasize to them that it's their job to come to you or to see a tutor if they don't understand things. It's not your job to troubleshoot their difficulties. You're not in their heads. You don't know what they don't understand or what they're struggling with. Part of being an adult is speaking up if you don't understand something, because honestly, no one in the adult world helps you if you don't ask for help first. In other words, you need to emphasize that if they're not using office hours, they have no right to complain. Anyone who's not getting a passing grade should be in your office hours going over that test. That's basically how I handle my students, even now, and I've been teaching for several years. When I pass back papers, I always stress that certain students did very well, or that the papers on the whole were good (unless they weren't, and then I don't say anything). This lets the not-good students know that I'm not an impossible grader or a lousy teacher--in other words, it's them. And if they want to turn that around, they need to work for it. I absolutely never come in, though, and tell them that everyone did badly, or that the papers were abysmal (even if they were). Because that kind of thing can open you up to criticism for not being a good enough teacher or having impossible standards. Or for just being really freaking negative. Even when many of the papers are bad, I will tell the students that there were some excellent papers, and some good papers, but there are things we still have to work on. And then I'll enumerate those things. You might also want to stress this to the department head. If you know who complained, you might mention that that student never came to see you in office hours, and so you had no idea he or she was struggling or how to help him or her. And yeah, to follow up what everyone else is saying--everyone's bad at teaching at first. Or just not good. And classes where you have to use someone else's curriculum are the worst. I was a pretty disastrous teacher in my first two or three years or so, and I got dinged so badly on evaluations that my course director even flagged me as an "at risk" TA. And after that there was a long stretch of just being average. It wasn't until I was in the later stages of my degree that I finally felt confident enough (and had gotten enough positive evaluations ... and then really positive evaluations) to call myself a good teacher. So you're definitely not alone here, though I doubt you're as bad as you think you are. This honestly sounds like a confidence issue.

I wouldn't nix them. Especially not Berkeley. I know people who went to Berkeley who bragged about how low their subject test scores were.