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bugbear

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Posts posted by bugbear

  1. I'm not in English, so I hope you guys don't mind if I post here. But I've also received the ECF and am a bit concerned about the teaching in years 2,3, and 4. Since there are people in this thread with similar questions, it might be useful if I join the discussion even though I'm in a different discipline. Specifically I want to know more about how it's possible to teach 2 classes, do your own research, and finish your degree in a reasonably timely fashion. I understand that it's beneficial to get teaching experience, and can obviously be intellectually rewarding, but there is a limit to those benefits. It would be different if these were just TA positions, but from what I understand they are more or less adjunct positions with a different title, ie, you teach the entire course. I wonder how good of a job a 2nd year student could really do with their own class, although a very dedicated person could probably do a good job at it. But to be dedicated requires a pretty significant time commitment. Which the undergraduate students obviously deserve, but might not be fair to ask of a PhD student with lots of their own work to do. I just wish I had a more concrete picture of how it works and how manageable it is.

  2. Looks like somebody else called in and got rejected.... oh gawd... i can't take it anymore!

    I know! This is ridiculous. I want to know...and yet I don't, because as long as I don't know, there is hope....

  3. Can a current CUNY student maybe clear some things up for with regard to teaching? It seems like teaching "assistants" are sometimes expected to teach entire classes from scratch, basically serving the purpose of an adjunct rather than a true "teaching assistant", who usually do the bulk of the marking for a course while a professor does the lecturing. As far as I can tell, 2nd and 3rd year PhD students can end up having to teach multiple course as these sorts of lecturers, which seems a bit excessive to me. How is it possible to design a syllabus from scratch, plan lectures (this alone seems like it would be a massive time sink especially for people doing it for the first time), mark papers, for 50-100 students, all while doing seminar papers, presenting at conferences, preparing for comps, setting up your committee, etc? Am I getting things wrong or is this how it works? And if so, how do people manage it? Is it possible to do it while being a productive researcher and finishing your dissertation within a reasonable amount of time?

  4. They rarely pull from the waitlist.

    Well, there's that dream shot dead. This non-rejection-rejection definitely hurt a bit - this was the program I've been thinking about & aiming towards for two years.

    Three years ago, I would have had a very solid shot at admittance; now, though, there are just too many applicants.

    Time for a medicinal glass of Scotch.

    So you mean you haven't heard from Hopkins at all, ie, implied rejection? Or were you waitlisted as well?

    Anyway, I also suspected that the chances of being pulled from the list are marginal at best. I just didn't want to believe it. Difficult decisions await. That Scotch sounds good right about now.

  5. Hmm, I wonder if this JHU waitlist by mail is one of the people who posted earlier. They told me I would be getting a letter in the mail about being on the waitlist. Haven't received it yet, though. I wonder how many people are on the list. All they would say is that the list is "small". Anyone admitted to Hopkins who is maybe not entirely sure if they are going? Just trying to get an idea of my chances.

  6. Welp, looks like I won't know if I got into my top choice or not until April. *has thousand-yard stare, is twiddling thumbs*

    In the meantime, I've realized that I should have applied to more schools. Although, exactly how big a miscalculation that was depends on what I hear from the places that haven't sent out results yet.

  7. If you want a more conservative perspective, you'd do much better with Burke, Schmitt, or Oakeshott than Rand. If defense of capitalism or libertarianism is your bag, go for Nozick or Hayek (or if you want to get real crazy, check out left-libertarianism ala Van Parijs). There's no need to ever read Rand except in American cultural studies, in order to understand how she became a phenomenon. EDIT: obviously, it could very well be relevant to political science to study objectivism from this latter perspective as well.

  8. I have more problems with Rand the novelist than Rand the philosopher. Rand the novelist is utterly awful--if her books were to stand merely as works of fiction they would be among the poorest written ever to reach a wide audience. Rand the philosopher I'll give a bit more credit. I think she's as flawed as Marx (ironically, in some of the same ways, namely in deterministic thought), but like Marx, the flaws don't negate her significance.

    Amazing, amazing.

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