clashingtime

during my first week, i had to sit in front of a panel of 6 professors from all subfields and get grilled on my dissertation topic, even though i was just starting my MA. they were nice about it, splitting the 18 hour interrogation (department requirement) into three six-hour sessions, no break. at the end, they told me all my ideas were worthless and i had to go in front of the entire faculty to justify my existence. there, the faculty took turns ripping off a piece of cloth from my body and spitting in my face before commanding me to confine myself to the library microfilms for three weeks until i could emerge with a real thesis project. after that, all i had to do was eat some broken glass and then, by about november, they decided to start actually giving me my fellowship paycheck.

no biggie, really. you'll be fine.

Your right, you must be professional in your work too. Luckily in real life I am. I have been doing a ton of research and I am tired when I get home. Sometimes I don't proof read an online message for an online forum.

i would imagine that professors are more concerned with whether their students and colleagues can write grammatically correct coherent sentences than if they have visible tattoos.

Im sorry if a lot of people don't like my previous post, but it is the truth. Reason why most people with the tattoos don't see it is because the academic field is full of two face people. They would never say something to the individual but professors behind their back talk plenty. I was privilege on a few conferences to be including in this. Professors ridicule other professors for allowing their students to be unprofessional like piercing, having tattoos, how they act, and/or how they dress. Mind you I have only been to the big very formal conferences but I figure everyone on here would have the goal of working for a big university if you went into academics. Also, I am sorry if you fell I'm cool since I have tattoos and no one will stop me for this. I know plenty of those people in previous programs and current programs. They never/don't knew/know what is said about them but if it came down to two people from the program applying, professors would write a very strong recommendation for the professional one and an average recommendation for the unprofessional one. Just be professional at conferences and don't embarrass professors. If you have sleeve tats so what wear a long sleeve at formal events. I know my friends who cover them up for class might be overkill but they dont want their tats affecting their lives in later life.

As for my lucky I don't have tats comment, I meant no disrespect. Why I said I felt lucky is because when I was 18 I almost got an ugly, non-coverable tat and to this day I dont know why I didn't get it but I am thanlful my 18 year old self made the decision not to get it. I know I would of hated it from the second I got it. So for me it was lucky, for others it is a personal decision and one that I know a lot of people think a lot about it before they get it. And I didn't mean to imply someone was unlucky if they have a tat. Just me I would of gotten it for the wrong reasons and thus I am lucky I didn't get it.

Yeah. I can't really do anything about my ears (they're stretched to 3/4", but the contour is still relatively natural) but honestly, most of my extended family still hasn't noticed and I've had them for 7 years. I look extremely presentable when everything's covered, and even when its not. My u/g adviser hasn't seen my arms yet but he knows about my ears, etc and has never seemed bothered. My field school teacher saw me in shorts around the field house and knows i have arm tattoos and didn't make mention of it. I like the idea of playing it safe and letting people judge me on my ability first and my appearance later and I'll probably take that advice.

Also, anthropologygeek, I read through your post a second time. There's nothing "lucky" about not having any tattoos or body modification, I'm not a stray dog that got tattooed by the pound. We all make decisions that are right for ourselves

Egads! Something tells me this may have more to do with your personal opinion than the picture of the academic climate you're painting, no?

I wouldn't go around forcing everyone to accept you for the unique butterfly you are by refusing to wear anything but tank tops at all times, but my thought is that if you go out of your way to make yourself feel awkward, this will transfer to those around you, and thus play it by ear. If you somehow "know" that tattoos will get you fired instantly, than you might want to think about covering up. It's not the end of the world. But I don't believe its anything like the above poster made it out to be, especially since he/she "luckily" has no tattoos.

It is a huge deal in the anthropology/archeology field. If you have tattoos you are recommended to hide them. I have seen people at conferences with visible tattoos not get introduced to certain people by their adviser based on this. Its embarrassing for all parties if you have visible tattoos based on the unprofessional attitude it provides. Luckily I have no tattoos but a lot of my friends do, and they cover them up for every conference they attend. Also most of them will cover up their tattoos for school based on wanted to only portray the upmost professionalism they can. However, for department functions like bbq or christmas parties they don't cover their tattoos.

Got first rejection from Princeton....considered framing it to remind me of the LOADS of self-efficacy it took to apply in the first place....and then drank a bottle of wine, had raucous sex with my significant other and ordered chinese takeout. I felt better after.

I agree with this posting. I received two rejections before getting my first acceptance...AND I GOT ACCEPTED BY THE TOP SCHOOL IN MY FIELD (according to US News and World Report), so go figure...LOL....I'm still waiting to hear back from 3 other schools, and I wouldn't feel bad if they say "NO," because the TOP SCHOOL said a BIG. FAT. YESSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!! LOL :-)

I've been rejected off waitlists twice in past admission cycles, so I know what that is like. That doesn't change the fact that deadlines are in place to protect applicants from being forced into earlier decisions, when they themselves might be waiting for wait list decisions. Comparing me *following the deadline* with being mean to strangers is taking it a bit far, IMHO. Until the last few days, I was waiting to hear from one other program (now I have given up) so I had my reasons for delaying.

I totally disagree with you, LadyL. you treat your acceptance as property, as if its something you own that you can do whatever you'd like with. the reality is that, by sitting on an offer that you know you will reject, you are making life worse for a number of people on the waitlist. so, sure, it's your "right" not to inform the school of your decision just like its my "right" not to be kind to strangers, not to donate to charity, or to throw food and goods away instead of donating them, etc.

the note you received is definitely a little terse, but i think you should consider the positions of others (the department, students on the waitlist) on not just your own fancy in this situation.

I've posted here before with my thoughts about choosing graduate school. Seeing how so many of you are in the middle of this supremely stressful time, agonizing over admissions and deciding where to go, I thought that I would let you all have some insight into what the process looks like from the perspective of an admissions committee member. I do this for three reasons. First, some of you could use the distraction. Second, many of you are facing the prospect of asking "why was I denied at school X" and should know how difficult this process is. Third, this is the first time that I've served on an admissions committee and I frankly was surprised at how hard this was, so now that it's all over I want to record my own thoughts.

Some background: I am an associate prof at a large department that is somewhere in the 20-40 range. We're good, not great, and we place our students fairly well. We admit an average sized class for schools at our rank. We have somewhere between 30 and 40 times as many complete applications as we have spots in our program. Another 50-75 every year are incomplete (missing GRE scores, something like that). We do not hold it against you if you are missing one of your letters of recommendation, but if you are missing more than one your files goes into the incomplete pile and is not reviewed.

From there, the process works like this. Every candidate who submits a complete application is given an anonymous number. We then do an initial pass through the applications to eliminate students who are simply unqualified based on test scores. The bar for this is very, very low, but if you cannot score at least a 100 on your TOEFL and a 500 on each of your GRE sections you are eliminated at the very beginning. This doesn't cut a lot of people, but it does have the benefit of eliminating students whose English or basic math skills are not up to snuff.

From there, the files are divided randomly into piles, which are divided up across the members of the admissions committee without regard to subfield or anything like that. Each file is read carefully by a committee member and assigned a numerical score from 1-10. Anyone who receives a "1" at this stage is automatically forwarded to the final round.

The remaining files that receive a 2-10 ranking are then given to another member of the search committee, who re-reads them and rescores them. Any file that receives a "1" in this second stage is automatically forwarded to the final round.

The remaining files from this stage (meaning that they received "2" or lower on both initial reviews) are then divided up based on subfield and given to the member of the admissions committee who represents that subfield. That committee member then ranks the files a final time. Any student that receives a "1" or a "2" at this penultimate stage makes it to the final round, regardless of the earlier scores from the first two reviews.

The point of doing it this way is to ensure that we give every student a fair shake. Each student receives a close read from three separate faculty members, each of whom can advance a student to the final round.

We end up with around four times as many files in final round as we have available spots. Each committee member then ranks these students, and we have a big meeting where we decide who to admit and to waitlist out of this group. We then bring our proposal to the subfield representatives who are *not* on the search committee, and they have the ability to lobby for different choices from the final round (although they tend not to do this). From there, the department votes on the proposed list of admits and waitlisters.


***********


So that is how the process works in terms of procedures. I suppose that all of you are probably wondering how we decide who gets one of the 1s. The answer is that it is supremely difficult to do this. We make mistakes, I am sure of it. Our goal is to find people--and this is important, so read carefully--who can successfully complete our program and secure a tenure-track job. That is the outcome that we are trying to achieve; we are not trying to admit the smartest, the most unique, or even the most interesting students (although we do want these people too!). It's possible that other departments that care less about placement are more interested in just admitting smart people, and I bet that for schools like Harvard and Princeton, that's probably true. But for us, we want students who will succeed.

The challenge is that it is really difficult for us to tell what kind of applicant will be able to do this. We know that you will have to be bright, you will have to be creative, and you will have to be highly motivated. But trust me, anyone who has gone through a PhD can tell you, it's not like anything you've ever done before. Unless you already have a PhD, there's nothing that you could write in your application that will convince us that without a doubt you've got the chops. We have to make a bet based on imperfect information (and in fact, we probably are facing a game of incomplete information too, at least about your own objectives). It takes a special kind of person to do this, and I'm not certain how much we learn from pedigree, letters, grades, and test scores, but that's what we have.

What I can say for sure is that even if we only based our decision on pedigree, letters, grades, and test scores, that wouldn't be enough to whittle down our choices to a manageable number. We are dealing with a massive oversupply of qualified candidates. In my first round alone, at least 20 students were Ivy League grads with 3.7+ GPAs, 700+/700+ GREs, and glowing letters. We could have populated an incoming class with these alone, yet each other admissions committee member probably had the same number of people with similar backgrounds. Then you dig deeper and you realize the number of people with incredible life experiences, great grades, great letters, and all the rest, but from other schools. Or they have great writing samples that make it clear that they know what a political science PhD is all about, even if they don't have the very best grades. Or you get a student who has worked two jobs to pay for an education at a regional state university, someone whose drive and motivation clearly signals his/her ability to bring a project to completion even if s/he does not have the best pedigree. Or someone who's at the top of her class at a top-rank Indian university. I could go on. There are simply too many of these people for us to admit all of them.

So what does it come down to? At the end of the day, it's seemingly minor things like "fit," or "interest," or "promise." Most of these are beyond your control as applicant. If you don't seem to have a good idea of what graduate school is all about--many applicants, unfortunately, do not--you don't make it. If you make a big deal about how you want to work with Professor X, and Professor X is considering a move to a different department, we don't accept you. If your writing sample doesn't show that you can express yourself clearly, there is little hope for your application. If your application emphasizes grade/scores/letters/pedigree, but doesn't convince us that you have what it takes to succeed in the PhD, you're not going to be admitted. If you've gone straight through from undergrad, without the sort of life experiences that convince us that you know why you want to go to get an advanced degree, the bar is a lot higher (but not insurmountable). And these are very fine distinctions, and again, we definitely make mistakes.

There are two things that you should take away from this. The first is that, at least this year, admission to my department (admittedly, not the best one) was fiercely competitive. Unbelievably so. I have never served on an admissions committee before (my department only allows tenured professors to be on this committee) but I get the impression that it's gotten much harder since I got my PhD. The second is that you should not sweat it if you don't make into the departments of your dreams. I'd say that at least 80% of the total applicants in our pool this year were plausible candidates for admission, meaning that I would have been happy to admit them. We end up making a lot of hard choices based on imperfect signals of future professional performance, and to reiterate once more, we definitely make mistakes. Nothing makes me more frustrated than when we admit a dud (it happens). I am always happy to see a student who didn't make it into our department succeed somewhere else.

Best of luck to you all.

We actually have had this discussion before on other threads but anyways, thanks for your intentions.

It's nice to hear some positive stories.

I agree with what you said entirely although it's not working like that at all for me. I've been rejected across the board for two and it looks like three years in a row at this point. I haven't been able to find fullfilling work at all. I was unemployed for a year and work a miserable job now. I think the economy is a major part of this. I'm hoping and I'm sure I will find a job that allows me to do something related to my interests. It's just that it takes a lot of time and affort to even find that-as much time and effort it takes to get into a grad school program. So what's one to do in the mean time until you even find that job or similar opportunity? The way things are for me at his point-no time for volunteering even-I'll just have to kind of ride out this thing with this job I have now until things change.

What you said is true. I don't think it's the end of the world or anything if you don't get into a program. One can Still have a fulfilling life but it's just as time consuming and agonizing to find that happiness--at least it has been for me, but that's just me.

Once I know where I'm going, I'm proposing to my girlfriend.

(Seriously.)

There's really no room for someone like you (or her) in academia.

First of all, if you can't even muster the courage to ask for a letter of recommendation, what makes you think you are going to survive in academia? Surviving this "rat race" is about far more than being smart. If someone can't even face a professor to ask for a letter of recommendation (usually a positive experience for most), how can they begin to think they can survive in a competitive world that includes teaching (in person), grant proposals, advising graduate students, serving on committees, going up for tenure (a process unbelievably nerve-wracking and public) presenting at conferences...

Would you argue the same for someone who steals your work and puts their name on it? Do they have some justification because of their own shortcomings, in this case, shyness? Is that what you would call "hustling?" What is the point of entering a field in which you can justify such behavior? Why not just steal others work now and take credit for it? For that matter, why not just forge a diploma from the institution of your choice? What is the point of ethics? Or hard work?

She doesn't behave in that manner because of honest people. She behaves in that manner because she has a flawed personality and no conscience. You are incorrect to assume that we all cheat on tests and hide in the shadows from our advisors when things are due- the majority of us on this site (and in academia) own up to our responsibilities and do the work that is required of us. It's because we do the work that we don't have to slime around forging letters of recommendation.

For someone who claims to be so shy, you certainly have no problem hiding behind the anonymity of the net and calling people horrific names, people that could someday be your colleagues. I can say with certainty that I hope I never have the ill fortune of becoming your colleague, or the girl who is in question. I'm better than that. The OP did nothing remotely resembling "backstabbing." She did what she should have done, acted responsibly and with integrity. You might try some of that.

If you have trouble with these things that you mention (initiating relationships with profs, getting work in on time, whether it's right or wrong to forge a letter) I strongly urge you to reconsider entering academia. It just doesn't sound like an appropriate place for you.

Honestly i agree with this guy. As a fairly extreme introvert, who is awkward as a heart attack, and also applying to grad school, I feel I can offer a little perspective. No, I didn't forge my LOR's, but I can see why someone like myself would.

Establishing a adivisor-advisee relationship as an undergrad with a fucking Ph.D is already a nerve wracking and awkward experience. People who get anxious in simple conversational settings like myself are in for an absolute hurricane of anxiety and feelings of awkwardness and inadequacy etc when having to relate intimately about your ideas etc. Some of us simply handicapped when it comes to relating to other people, and I think there are many people-centric aspects of the academic process that present us extremist-introverts with special challenges that many wouldn't think twice about. So while you think she has found some shortcut to obviate hard work that you had to do, you have absolutely no idea what sort of special obstacles she has encountered that you will never experience.

The fact that this girl is obviously still maintaining a 3.9 leads me to glean that there is a sharp intelligence somewhere in her. And as many people pointed out, forging LOR's only shifts the kinds of anxiety she must be feeling. Sure she skipped having to bite the bullet and forge relationships with her undergrad profs, but the structure of grad school will force her to confront her anxieties at some point- she has only delayed it to when it is more manageable for her. She also has the added worry of getting caught forging and being even being harassed by the dean of her own current department.

Furthermore, this entire game is about how well you can hustle. And we all are professional hustlers by now. We all make pitches about why the cultural meaning of underwater pottery is relevant, or embellish our fit into programs, tiptoe around our depts to avoid our advisors when things are due, etc. When we do shit like this, the real evaluator of whether it was the right thing to do or not I think is whether it works. In this case apparently it won't, cause even if she gets in somewhere, your narking to the dean will probably throw quite a wrench into her ambition.

Her most critical mistake in my eye at least, was her thinking that you were a person she could confide in. As you glibly mention "she just thinks she can trust me". You smug fuck. It's probably because of people like you that she behaves this way in the first place. If the people who she confides her most intimate secretes to, are the first to backstab her - then no wonder she has trouble forging relationships with professors.

I think what YOU did-telling the dean, was absolutely detestable, a real fucking pig move. It seems like a way to take out some of your own insecurities of getting into grad school on someone who is really in the same boat, but in a very predatory way. You sound like a complete shitsack to me.

Is it fairly normal not to get into grad school on the first try in Alnthro? I am really hoping that this isn't the case, but I would rather know ahead of time so I can figure out what I am suppose to do for an extra year!

I find this post misinformed and stereotypical on so many levels.

I don't know why you think that people who got on waiting lists are ones who slacked off in ug and took basket-weaving or dancing instead of classes that could strengthen their applications. I also don't understand why you put liberal arts in the same category as basket-weaving, but I'm not going to dignify that with an explanation of why you're wrong. People who get onto waiting lists are usually very good applicants who the department would love to accept, if it had more funding. They are not anything like what you describe.

As for the advice to prove to the adcom that you would do anything for a place in their program, including spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars, I'd be very weary of doing that. There are so many reasons not to be the person who wants things too badly. You want to be appreciated and well payed for your trouble; you don't want to be the person who everybody knows can be offered less and will still do more. Stay within reason. I also wouldn't be surprised if professors don't want to work with people who seem too invested in their work, it's a bit uncomfortable, and can give off an impression of naivete.

As for learning languages in general - that could be good advice for some people in some disciplines, and useless for others. If what you do has nothing to do with languages and you find an awkward way to work the fact that you taught yourself 3 languages into your SOP - it's going to be just that: awkward. Not to mention that it'll take up space you need for more pertinent things. [case in point: I am doing a PhD in linguistics and have in fact taught myself and learned several languages, but none of that made into my SOP. My CV mentions my language skills, but no one really cares about how I obtained them. If anything, language courses have documentation and as a result receive more recognition than self-teaching].

As for Rosetta: I don't understand why you would spend so much money on a resource that can be replaced by much cheaper resources that will give similar results. There are online sites for beginners in many languages, there are books and tapes, there are language exchange programs at most universities. Why not start there? Your money will probably be better spent on summer courses and immersion camps after you acquire some basic skills.


It is good advice to try to boost your profile as much as you can - both before you apply and once you're on a waiting list. Take the time to figure out if there is some important skill that you don't have: it could be a language, stats, math, programming skills, advanced classes in your major, writing skills, experience writing a large paper or working on a research project, or something else. Do what you can to first of all acknowledge that there is something missing, which the program might be worried about in terms of abilities and fit, and try to do what you can to fix it. Take a summer course, for instance (and mention that you plan to do so somewhere on your application). Teach yourself, take private lessons, work one on one with a professor. There are many options for improving deficiencies. Consult your mentors - there is no one quick solution like the one in the post I quoted. But there certainly are things you can do.

So, I've been in touch with several professors from my top school. They've all be super kind and helpful, and they all are interested in me and my research. The prof I'm hoping would be my advisor if I were to be admitted has asked me if I'm available for a phone date after thanksgiving since I wouldn't be able to actually visit the school due to financial reasons. I'm really excited about this, and this prof seems to be as well. One problem: I'm extremely awkward and socially impaired. I've got good credentials (except for my GRE, that's good enough to just fit their min), and our research interests overlap perfectly. I'm just worried that once I open my giant awkward mouth, things will start to go downhill. It won't help that I'm suuuuper nervous about this.

Anyone have any advice, or anything to alleviate my fears about being all weird?

http://science-professor.blogspot.com/2007/12/writing-to-me.html

There's a link. It's written by a science prof, but the principle is still the same for any field. My research advisor says that he usually ignores the first two kinds- if they can't take enough time to write out a concise, detailed email, then neither can he.