anxietygirl

I will be attending Northwestern! 

Committed to Michigan State...great environment and I was offered a great fellowship!!!

Congrats! I'm submitting mine in a week, and can only imagine how fantastic it must feel!  

It's official! I just submitted my thesis to be bound and printed today!! I can't believe all this work is coming to a close!!! Once my oral defense and capstone speech are finished, I'll be done with undergrad!! 

It's official! I just submitted my thesis to be bound and printed today!! I can't believe all this work is coming to a close!!! Once my oral defense and capstone speech are finished, I'll be done with undergrad!! 

I will be attending Penn State! Just committed this morning. It feels good to have definite direction in my life again  

No idea if they have a wait list or not, but I just declined my offer from the University of Cincinnati.

I was in a CVS getting antibiotics with my boyfriend, who had strep, when I got my first acceptance. It was kind of embarrassing because I immediately started crying and jumping up and down. He started crying too, so everyone was just kind of staring at us. Then I called my parents and told them. My mom was in the grocery store, and she started crying. It was way more public than I would have liked, but also it was one of the best feelings ever. 

Attending Purdue! Just made my official acceptance today.

Committed to the University of Oklahoma yesterday morning! So glad to have this process over with...

For crissake dude it's one random elective. Just fucking drop it already.
That said, your attitude towards failure has got to go. You're obviously not doing well in this class, yet you can't even admit that to yourself. You know 70% isn't a good grade. You know that you failed a 25% assignment, and you know that getting the precise percentage on your paper isn't going to make a difference to your outcome because that F is already pulling you down significantly. Instead of doing something proactive to fix your situation, such as dropping the class or asking for extra credit or meeting with the professor and having a frank discussion without hints and insinuations and fortune-telling on tarot cards, you're focusing all your energies on denying that this is happening to you. It's okay to fail. It's okay to feel challenged. It's good that both of these things are happening to you because it means you're working to your potential. One of the big goals of graduate school is getting you to stop needing validation, whether for practical or emotional reasons, from grades and professors, and instead teaching you to make decisions based on your own thoughts and evaluation of the situation.

A lesson in pragmatics that I just taught in my freshman Intro to Linguistics class: questions like "do you know what time it is?", "can you open the window", "could you pass the salt?" are not (usually) information-seeking questions. If you answer "yes" and do nothing else, any reasonable person would consider you to be uncooperative. This is a request for you to take action! There are some background assumptions that all speakers in a conversation share -- for example, that the contributions we make to a conversation are relevant, and that they are truthful, and that they give just as much information as is needed, not more and not less. In most contexts, if someone asks if you can pass the salt, it's not just so they know whether or not you can do it. Unless the conversation is about your physical abilities (maybe you had a stroke and can't move your arm very well, for example, or maybe we're testing you ability to reach very far in the distance), in most contexts it's assumed that of course you are physically capable of passing the salt. We don't ask just to get a 'yes' answer. Instead: we ask an obvious question: of course you can reach the salt --> we are making the salt relevant to the conversation, and specifically making your ability to pass it relevant --> it's a request for actual action to be taken, of the kind that we just made salient --> so please pass the freaking salt! The exact same logic works here for your professor's request. He is not asking if you have a copy of your paper just to have that information and to do nothing with it. He is asking because he *wants you to send him a copy*! So a simple "yes" or "no" response isn't being cooperative in the conversation, it's exactly like answering "yes" when someone asks "could you pass me the salt?". And it'll be perceived in exactly that way by your professor, who I am sure is very confused about why you are being so difficult. 

Oh my god, just scan it and send it to him already!

This happens more often than you think, and you're making a big deal out of it for nothing. Professors are humans and forget things at home or misplace them. If he's asking for a copy of the assignment, that is not an unreasonable request and your inability to provide it probably seems extremely strange to him. There could be a variety of reasons why he would want an electronic copy (including facility of providing feedback, checking for plagiarism, wanting it for future reference, or he honest to god forgot the original at home like he said). I don't know a single graduate student who wouldn't save an assignment, even if they were working on it at school (this is an undergrad move, one I pulled several times my first year, but I was barely 18 years old). Let this be a lesson for you to always carry a USB drive or email yourself all the assignments you complete on campus.

I have to ask: why don't you have the latest version? Certainly there are legitimate circumstances for this, but I really don't see why this scenario is such a big deal. If you hand in something printed out, they will assume you have an electronic version. Being asked for another copy is not an outrageous request and there are many legitimate reasons for your prof to do so.

I have decided on The Ohio State University, although it was a very tough choice between two very different programs which both had strengths and weaknesses. However, OSU offered me a fellowship offer just yesterday and it was really the extra little bit I needed to make the decision I already wanted to make. No regrets baby!

Wait, you see adjunct labor as the disease at the heart of the neoliberal academy rather than another symptom? That doesn't make much sense.
 
 
...crap, I just got dragged in, too, didn't I?

If people followed this advice, then literally no one would ever go to graduate school in the humanities. Was that what you were trying to say? (I'm honestly confused.) Because no one needs a PhD in the humanities to do any other job besides teach college.
 
In any case, I don't think it's really up to anyone to have the final word on the "good reasons" vs. "bad reasons" for going to grad school. These are life choices that people make for their own private reasons. It's probably not smart to go to grad school, say, because your girlfriend is going to grad school. But who knows. People grow and change and sometimes get lucky. And these decisions aren't set in stone. If you go to grad school and don't like it, you do something else. If you graduate and can't find a job, oh well--you played a hand. You'll find something else. 

My guess is as long as you don't fail classes... who cares?

today I got a $3,000 scholarship that I didn't even know existed 

I just accepted my offer to go to Rice University as a PhD student! Exciting!

I just officially accepted the offer to Virginia Tech!

Hi everyone! I've been a lurker for a while (I may have posted early in the Wait, Whine, Wine thread). I just wanted to congratulate everyone on their decisions and say thanks for creating such a positive community during such a stressful time! I'll be moving to Irvine in the fall (not very far from where I am now), and I'm really nervous and excited! I met my cohort at recruitment day, and I'm the youngest one (senior in college)!  Also @Pink Fuzzy Bunny CONGRATS! Try not to worry about your hair! It's an awesome opportunity! 

Hi everyone! I've been a lurker for a while (I may have posted early in the Wait, Whine, Wine thread). I just wanted to congratulate everyone on their decisions and say thanks for creating such a positive community during such a stressful time! I'll be moving to Irvine in the fall (not very far from where I am now), and I'm really nervous and excited! I met my cohort at recruitment day, and I'm the youngest one (senior in college)!  Also @Pink Fuzzy Bunny CONGRATS! Try not to worry about your hair! It's an awesome opportunity! 

Hi everyone! I've been a lurker for a while (I may have posted early in the Wait, Whine, Wine thread). I just wanted to congratulate everyone on their decisions and say thanks for creating such a positive community during such a stressful time! I'll be moving to Irvine in the fall (not very far from where I am now), and I'm really nervous and excited! I met my cohort at recruitment day, and I'm the youngest one (senior in college)!  Also @Pink Fuzzy Bunny CONGRATS! Try not to worry about your hair! It's an awesome opportunity!