kekology4

@The Shade King oh god, yeah i feel like two messages of rejection is unnecessary. we just need the one 
I still have five programs to hear back from, three of which had applications due in december. I got a great offer with full funding to stony brook WGS, but for them I'm also waiting to hear back on a fellowship nomination. So. much. waiting. 
It's given me a lot of time to look at their program though, and it seems like a wonderful fit. 

There's an acceptance up for NYU - posted today, received today. 

FREAKIN OUT

Indeed it is, as those are the key concepts I research. I use those theories and political movements to critique state power n violence. 

is it that bad? I don't know much about the climate on the campus. well the department has a large criticaliving  mass of women color,  hopefully they support each other when things are rough.

I do too. So many amazing African Americanists and WGS on the faculty. But I don't know how I feel about doing work on inequality at a place where POC students and staff experience it on a daily basis. 

Awww okay,  I was hoping that it wasn't just a standard waitlisted email since it was also a waitlist for a fellowship. I got it from Miller-Young as well. I wonder how many people were accepted and how many people were waitlisted 

Orientalism by Edward Said

funny that you mentioned this book. Just finished reading this, and I agree. Fantastic resource!!!

Keep in mind that I don't think you should buy any of this until you actually arrive at your university because either 1) you don't want to move it or 2) it may be available through your university/department for free, in which case you could save yourself some money.

- Referencing software (check with the university library and the department to see if there are any discounts or if its freely available. Lots of schools have RefWorks or EndNoteWeb for free, the only downside is that you have to be online to use them).
- portable hard drive of at least 160GB
- flash drive of at least 2GB
- calendars, both weekly agenda style and monthly
- bookshelf
- large binders
- file folders
- looseleaf notebook paper
- a few spiral notebooks (not for classes but for keeping projects organized)
- netbook
- digital camera of decent quality

filing cabinets are good. any sort of filing system.

corkboard and coloured notecards. especially helpful for visually mapping out a long-term research project.

a calendar of some sort. do you write in an agenda? use your computer's calendar? want something on the wall? time management will be key in your life and you'll need this. badly.

external hard-drives and thumb drives. back up everything. save it on your computer and your thumb drive at all times. back it all up on the external HD once every two weeks or whenever you remember. keep updated copies of your work in two or three places. i had a friend who left everything on a thumb drive, and HE LOST IT (he luckily had a month-old version of his work saved in his email). i had another friend who used his laptop and his external HD only, and spilled coffee on both while he was doing a back-up. he promptly quit graduate school and he was ABD. (he claims the decision to quit came two days before the terrible spill, but i don't believe him).

a laptop. if you've already got a desktop, then get one of those little netbooks. they're light and they have long battery life.

several different comfy chairs. you will spend most of your time sitting down. get a variety of "feels" with your chairs. hard and upright, soft and sunken in, good for stretching your legs out straight, something that reclines, an ergonomically correct stool. trust me.

Give students opportunities to provide you with anonymous feedback throughout the semester. I passed around small blank pieces of paper and had students write any questions or provide feedback at the end of each seminar session. This allows you to catch any concerns early on and modify how you run your seminars accordingly. On a general note, be flexible and always willing to adapt to your students' needs and preferences. Depending on your audience, simplify everything you know. I had to explain psychology concepts to a group of non-psychology students and it was quite difficult. If you are in this situation and know someone at the undergrad level who is not as familiar with the subject matter, ask for their advice on how understandable your lesson plan is (if you have that opportunity). I did not have this available to me, but I wish I did. With this, of course, I suggest planning your seminar in advance, not the night before. Within your own focus and tolerance parameters, be as available as you can be. I had my TA email address on my phone and responded almost right away. It can be difficult, but you are there in an assistant/helper role, and students love it when TAs are super responsive. Show up early for your seminars, not just on time. This gives you a chance to connect with the students more. I found it has helped "prime" me for running more engaging and successful seminars. 

I'd never heard of Google metrics for journals before, only impact factors. Thanks for the link! Looking through the journals in my field and their rankings according to Google, it greatly pleases me that the journal I recently published in has a much higher ranking than a journal I submitted to whose editor was a condescending and perhaps sexist a-hole (impact factor-wise, they are similar). You made my day.

Likely they are ranked by the impact factor.  In one of my fields, highest-IF journal has an IF of 15, but our flagship journal is a 5.1 and most of our "great" journals have an IF between 2 and 4 and our "good" journals have an IF between 1 and ~2.5.  In my other field, our flagship journal has an IF of 3.93 and most of the great and good journals in that field are somewhere between 0.7 and 3.

Very specialized journals often have lower impact factors than general journals, even if they are pretty influential in their subfield, just because the field is smaller.  For example, that journal with the IF of 15 (Psychological Bulletin) is our field's review paper journal, so of course people cite it all the time because there are crazy reviews in there.  There's another review-paper journal that has an IF of around 15 (Annual Review of Psychology), but it's not as respected as the flagship journal (American Psychologist), which in turn has a relatively low IF because they publish a lot of opinion pieces and retrospectives in addition to empirical articles.

I don't go solely based on IF but also general opinion in my field.  Also, I don't think you need to totally avoid journals with a low impact factor, but that you should mix it up and make sure you have some higher-IF/higher-reputation journals on your CV, too.

@TakeruK People always like my office collection until they come to my house and see my real collection. I started calling my office "overflow" for all the stuff I don't have room for at home. I've started having to collect things in big glass vase like things to contain them
I'm always worried that if I bring in anything nice that someone will steal it or it will just "go missing". 
 

@DBear totally! Fingers crossed. @The Shade King Your research sounds very interesting. Good luck with the rest of your apps. 
Screw the waiting and page refreshing and obsessing today...I'm going out tonight!

Thank you so much for your adorable (AND instructive) answers !
I am a little bit less confused about how to deal with USC's offer now. In addition, they offered me to visit the campus in few weeks (and they pay for the flight from Paris!) As you have all said, it would be an excellent way to evaluate in which extent both the university and the program will fit with my future research interests and career plans. 
Besides, I really appreciated your message @towonderland72. I completely agree when you said that there is so much to learn about gender, race and sexuality in the streets of L.A. I have already visited L.A. few times these last years, and I think it represents is an unique and fascinating ethnographic field. I will be delighted to send you a private message when I will have more specific questions. 
Congrats to you @SEAsianIntl! I am so glad another international student had been admitted. I second you on the funding package proposed by USC. I had been selected by the French Fulbright Program and was interviewed by them two days ago. When they saw my letter of admission they told me: "this is a golden opportunity. Please do not refuse!". They looked sincerely happy for me. 
Do you consider to visit the campus in March? Maybe we'll meet each other! 
Congrats to other admits AND lots of support for the others. You worked hard, you deserve to be admitted and I am sure you will. 
Thanks again, have a great day

@PetiteFilleNoire CONGRATS!!!!!! 

My department and teaching situation makes this very easy for me - I teach the lab component of science courses, and the professors who do the lecture component have all made it clear that graduate teaching assistants are the instructors for the labs. We even get our pictures on a wall with our programs, research areas, and fun facts about us. I don't think this has much of an impact on how the students view me or if they are more likely to challenge a grade. However, the lab setting where a large chunk of the grade comes from just showing up and doing the work is a bit different than TAing a composition course where virtually all of the grade comes from writing assignments. 
That said, I think it's perfectly ok to not say anything about being a graduate student if you don't want to, just as it's ok to inform the students that you are. You might get a few students who won't take you as seriously I suppose, but as previously mentioned, those students probably have some issues of their own. If you do encounter any challenges to your grading, stand your ground. Of course you should be able and willing to explain why you assigned a certain grade, but never feel pressured to change it. One thing that maybe I wouldn't do is mention that it's your first time teaching (or that you're new to the school)... I think that could open yourself up to some grief depending on the personalities in the classroom. Granted, if someone directly asks you in your office or something, I don't think you should lie, but don't broadcast it.
As a few posters already mentioned, being female might result in more issues than being a graduate student. Personally, I have seen very little sexism from my students, but others here on the cafe have. TakeruK also hit it right on the nose about women of color, too. My current school is extremely white in terms of the student population, and this past year we only had two people of color on our teaching team of 20 graduate students. One was a woman, and she told us about her first day and all of the whispers when she walked up to the front of the room to load her lecture on the computer. The students apparently had difficulty believing that a black woman would be their TA. Hopefully their attitudes changed over the course of the term! 

You have definitely not committed some serious faux-pas. Ask your advisor or some other trusted professor if they have advice on this. The fact that students are telling you different things suggests that it's probably up to you to decide. So you need to ask yourself if you are more comfortable being vague or giving all the information. The way students will interpret what you tell them will also partly depend on how you conduct yourself in the classroom. As a general rule, students will simply assume that the person at the front of the classroom is a knowledgeable authority figure. You can take that and run with it. It is totally fine to say you're new to this school (and therefore you may not know fact X or procedure Y but you'll find out and get back to them, just like you would with any question where you're not sure you can answer it on the spot). That by itself should not diminish your authority. It's more about how you behave and how you project yourself to the class. You can be a new but strong and confident teacher, no contradiction there. So do a bit more to find out if there is a norm, and then either follow it if it exists or choose whatever you are most comfortable with. It's going to be a whole lot more important that you are comfortable with what you share than the particular details you choose to share. 

Congrats! Good job!!! Got really excited when I saw someone got accepted to UBC. Hopefully that means that they will start notifying Master applicants soon!
 

It would be a good idea to ask. But until then, I would assume 1" margins, Times New Roman, font size 12, single spaced. But maybe there is a big difference between fields. I'd say that double-spaced signals "incomplete" or "draft" work while single spaced is finished work. 

I've been notified by UBC! I'm admitted! Horraaaay!
Is there anyone else applying to UBC's Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality & Social Justice? Is anyone attending at the moment? I'd love to learn more about the program before deciding where to enrol (also admitted to USC's American Studies & Ethnicity as well as UCSB's Global Studies). I've never been to Vancouver, so any insight about being a grad student in Vancouver will be great as well.
I'm wishing everyone here who are still waiting for good news the very best of luck (although you might not need one) -- Sending unicorns of hope from rainy Jakarta

y'all omg top 5 overwhelming moments in my life... i got into stony brook  

y'all omg top 5 overwhelming moments in my life... i got into stony brook