noodles.galaznik

Forgot about this one on my Netflix. Funny stuff, Noodles!

I tried to cut down on the amount of TV while during my later years of undergrad, and by the end, the only shows that I was keeping up with were:
Castle
Bones
Modern Family
The IT Crowd

Sometimes I would just turn on the TV for a break, and I would end up getting sucked into Keeping Up With the Kardashians. I'm not keeping up with them anymore, since we no longer have cable. Probably a good thing.

I would have set aside more money for bribes.

thanks all. i know that all programs are competitive. but i guess i need to find a way to find some obscure schools and see if my interests match. just because they are all competitive doesn't mean they will all only accept 4 new students out of 600 applicants

I met with a professor that I'm going to take a course with this semester as a non-degree seeking student. He asked me about my interests, I told him, and he said I should consider joining their program and getting an MA -- this fall. He explained that the cohort entering this fall was much smaller than usual, so they do have room.

First off, I'm really shocked. It's exciting, and completely unexpected. I'm a little hesitant though, and here's why:

School starts in about 2 weeks. I'd have to throw together some sort of application (the graduate director said that I would be accepted, this is just a formality) really, really quickly.

No funding. I know this is the norm for an MA in many programs, but I was told that a lot of MA students find funding in this particular program. Something might become available in the spring, but this semester, I'd have to pay out of pocket. Luckily, I got an appeal for in-state tuition approved, so that would cut it down to about 1/4 of the total costs.

I hadn't planned on it at all. Since I'm interested in forensic DNA, this was going to be my year to take a lot of biology, genetics, and criminology courses and strengthen my background. I was told by this professor we could make my thesis into something centered closely around my interests, but I think in order to do that well, I'd need these courses as background.

It is a very exciting idea, but there's a lot of uncertainty. Has anyone else experienced getting a really late and/or unexpected offer? What did you do?

There is no safe schools in anthropology. Every school is competitive. You need to apply to schools who have profs that have the same interest as you since fit is the most important issue.

I am so sick of all of these doomsday articles that suggest that there is no intrinsic value to a humanities education, or that there is no value to education generally unless it helps one nab a cushy corporate job. I've had a cushy corporate job, and it drove me to grad school-- in the humanities no less! I know exactly what I'm missing out on now, and good riddance. I'd prefer to spend my life earning a pittance for doing something I love than pull a high salary and hate myself and my life every day.

Grad school, in many ways, sucks. It's hard, it's often demoralizing, you don't get much respect from the average non-academic (indeed you don't get much respect from the average academic), and--yes--I'll be lucky to get any academic job at all, let alone tenure-track, after I'm finished. But it's the best job I've ever had. My worst days in grad school are better than my best days in the cubicle. I love what I do, and I thank my lucky stars every day that I'm here. I know exactly what I'm getting into, job-wise, and I'm okay with that.

And P.S. I got my sweet, soul-crushing corporate gig with an undergraduate English major. If you know how to market yourself, a undergraduate humanities major is INCREDIBLY useful for business-related jobs and job-searches. Most humanities undergrads, however, hear so often that their majors are useless that they don't even bother to learn how to market their valuable skills. This is something we should put serious effort into rectifying. If we collectively learned how to market ourselves better, we might not have to endure so many lectures on our so-called "useless" educations from boneheads who can't compose an email to save their lives.

I met with a professor that I'm going to take a course with this semester as a non-degree seeking student. He asked me about my interests, I told him, and he said I should consider joining their program and getting an MA -- this fall. He explained that the cohort entering this fall was much smaller than usual, so they do have room.

First off, I'm really shocked. It's exciting, and completely unexpected. I'm a little hesitant though, and here's why:

School starts in about 2 weeks. I'd have to throw together some sort of application (the graduate director said that I would be accepted, this is just a formality) really, really quickly.

No funding. I know this is the norm for an MA in many programs, but I was told that a lot of MA students find funding in this particular program. Something might become available in the spring, but this semester, I'd have to pay out of pocket. Luckily, I got an appeal for in-state tuition approved, so that would cut it down to about 1/4 of the total costs.

I hadn't planned on it at all. Since I'm interested in forensic DNA, this was going to be my year to take a lot of biology, genetics, and criminology courses and strengthen my background. I was told by this professor we could make my thesis into something centered closely around my interests, but I think in order to do that well, I'd need these courses as background.

It is a very exciting idea, but there's a lot of uncertainty. Has anyone else experienced getting a really late and/or unexpected offer? What did you do?

Every professor I've spoken with about writing a SOP has really stressed that this is not a great way to start the piece out. One called it too "folksy", and my research advisor told me that every time someone talks about how they grew up watching Indiana Jones or they loved digging around in the dirt when they were a kid he seriously questions if they know what graduate studies entail and if they really have any clue what archaeology involves. Plus, he said that it's so cliche and overdone, and it does nothing to set you apart. I've been told to start off talking about why you want to pursue and advanced degree and your research interests and goals--don't waste time talking about something that has nothing to do with your capability to pursue an advanced degree.

I am not a graduate student yet, but I live a very frugal lifestyle as an undergraduate. I worked 5 part-time jobs at one time and sound as many scholarships as possible to fund my tuition. I bought books online and later sold them. I would share with other students - for example, I would swap books for a semester if we were enrolled in courses we already took. I also took out textbooks for months at a time at the library. Older versions of textbooks worked just as well for the most part.

If I went out, I would drink before and then only get drink specials. I know a lot of them in my town on all different days of the week.

Oatmeal and pasta are my staple foods. I don't buy meat.

I never go grocery shopping without COUPONS! Every time I go grocery shopping, I save 50% on everything by using coupons. I buy 100 or so on eBay for $1 and match the coupons up with the store's weekly ads. I get many free items or items for cents. For example, yesterday I got 2 BIG boxes of Frosted Mini Wheats and a dozen eggs for $1.50 total.

Friends help each other out. I have friends who can fix bikes, cars, computers, a friend who works at the movies and lets us in for free, friends that work at nightclubs and let us in for no cover, friends that work at coffee shops, restaurants, etc. All of my friends work together and help each other out. For example, one person gives another a free haircut if he fixes her computer. Find a talent and use it! Whatever you do, DON'T use that person if he/she is not your real friend!

Watch out for student discounts and military discounts if applicable. Also looks for discounts through organizations. For example, APA members can get discounts on car rentals, hotels, insurance, Dell, etc.

Thrift shop! I almost never buy clothes full-priced. Plato's Closet is a great place to buy and sell used name-brand clothing. Once, I got a dress for $20 that was brand new with tags, originally $60. Nothing was wrong with it at all!

Hope that helps.

Well, some people agreed that we ought to start a thread for Fall 2012 applicants. Here it is! This thread is intended as a place for us to talk about the process, our progress, and general back and forth.

This thread is not a place to ask about your odds of getting in somewhere, your competitiveness as an applicant, etc. We are very happy to provide suggestions about these sorts of questions, but please don't hijack this thread to ask them.

So, how's it coming, everyone? Where are you in the process?

I wonder how long this thread will be by the end of the upcoming cycle...

So glad my GA is going to be as high as it is, 35k =)

Strict budgeting. I spend $45 a week on groceries, have a yearly book budget (and separate budget lines for research costs, conferences, etc.), and at the beginning of the month I take out $100 cash from the bank which is all I allow myself to spend on luxuries (this includes going out, buying lunch and coffee, purchasing personal luxury items, etc.). The key is to figure out a yearly budget, cut what you don't need and create mechanisms to force you to stay in that budget like avoiding the use of your debit/credit card on luxuries. If you can see how much you're spending its a bit tougher to over spend.

Three key things:
1. Learn to cook if you don't already know how to. By this I mean learn how to do more than just throw something frozen in the oven. Chinese takeout is cheap and awesome, but what costs you six bucks at a greasey chopsticks place be made at home for $1.50 to $2. I can make two portions of mushroom risotto for $5 if I want to be real fancy.
2. Be smart about groceries. For health/environmental/cost reasons we only eat meat once or twice a week. I never, ever buy meat unless its on sale. Then I break it down into individual servings and freeze it in bags when I get home. Chicken breasts are affordable if you buy them at half off. The only pre-frozen food we have is "good" quality frozen pizzas that we buy eight of at a time when they go on sale for less than $2.50. It's not a replacement for cooking, it's a replacement for ordering a pizza.
3. Investing in some decent but cheap coffee making equipment is crucial for me. At home we use a stove top moka pot and a stove top milk frother. The end result is the ability to make something that approximates a latte on the cheap. At my office I have a driver (Abid sells them as "Clever Coffee makers" I think) which lets me make coffee in my office without having to go buy it for $2 or waste beans making an entire pot that either won't be drunken or will be drunken by someone who won't chip in. Coffee station coffee always ends up being so bad since people go cheap with it that half the people on a floor go buy coffee elsewhere whenever they want it and go broke. If coffee is important to you it's worthwhile to just drop the money on good beans and equipment from the get go in order to save money on getting it from a coffee shop.

There are all kinds of options for education beyond high school...community colleges, technical schools, vocational schools, trade schools, and maybe even apprenticeships if they still exists in some fields. So college is a choice, sure a BA or BS is pretty standard nowadays as far as job requirements go, but it's not the only thing that will get you hired, if you have major problems with the structure of higher education then college isn't the place for you and you have to make a living some other way...that's on you though, not the system. Not everyone loves every single class that they are required to take, I too had those "why exactly do I need this?" moments, but generally speaking I cannot agree that taking away everything but the "core" classes from a Bachelor's degree is even remotely a good idea. The point is to end up with a well rounded education, to become knowledgeable in subjects beyond your ABC's and 123's, to be able to draw on that knowledge in all aspects of life. If we did change to core classes only what happens if you change your mind? I wouldn't be qualified to do anything else because I only studied biology classes or history classes, no math, no social science, no languages, no this, no that....sorry, that's not a Bachelor's degree and that's not the kind of education you pursue as a college student. Like I said, there are other options if college isn't for you. If you're in higher education only to stick it out and complain about costs, class requirements, and length of time, that's not the fault of the school or an indication that the entire system needs some kind of major stripped down overhaul, it's more likely a sign that you should get out and move on to something else.

And as for the lower cost for "bullshit" courses, how would you determine what's a bullshit course and what isn't? Isn't that a little subjective? If you're an art major but are required to take a math class, which I guess you wouldn't like, so that would be the bs class? But if I'm a math major and have to take the same class why would that class be a different cost for you then me? The credits are still worth the same no matter the major, you're still taking up space in the room, you're still getting the same instruction, and the same resources are being consumed by you as by me. You're saying that the required classes that you feel you don't need should be discounted for you? That would mean that just about every single class offered would cost differently for every major...what if the class is completely irrelevant to one major but a little more relevant to another, like a calculus class would be useless to an art major but it would be less useless to say a psychology major (I'm sure there's math involved for research statistics and what not), but still not completely necessary as it is to a mathematics major. So how much would the calculus class cost for the completely irrelevant major, the somewhat relevant major, and then the completely relevant major? Help me out with this.

Well, definitely glad I could give you a chuckle...but no, I am being quite serious. I will give grad school credit in the sense that they don't offer bullshit classes nearly as much as undergrad, though. In undergrad, waaaaay too much unnecessary nonsense. For example, I needed to take two English classes, a math class, two art history classes, and at least one elective every semester. I think I know how to read and count by the time I get to college; I think if all I had were core art classes (okay,I'll bend and say give me one obligatory art history class), my degree would not have been as expensive and I wouldn't have needed to be there as long. That degree could have cost thousands less and took maybe one year less to obtain without the cushy nonsense classes.

But colleges have to make money somehow, so they tack on unnecessary courses and say they are required credits in order to get the degree being sought. But like I said, I think colleges could probably convince people to take those unnecessary classes by offering an incentive. That way, they can milk a little more money out of each student while maybe only losing a tiny bit if they offer a reward in the form of lowered tuition the following semester. But hell, colleges aren't interested in losing money, so they'll throw a year's worth of extra crap at you and call it required credits. Helping students to learn is a priority, but so is wringing a student's wallet dry. I wonder if it won't be too long before four-year degrees turn into five-year degrees.

On the other hand, I also understand that, more and more, you need a college degree in anything in order to even be considered for the crappiest, lowest-paying janitor job in town. So I think it's kind of a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of thing.

I think I did bad in my aesthetics class. Dammit, the last thing I want to do in art school (besides being there at all, of course) is needing to study and take written exams. I took more than enough art history classes in undergrad that were worthless and this class was equally ridiculous. We even got a quiz on the first day of class and were still taking notes the day of the final and were expected to have stuff memorized from those notes because that information would be on the final!

I'm not going to be an art historian, so I fail to see why I need more art history classes. Especially something as specific as aesthetics - my instructor was a smart and funny guy, but I don't give a damn about the triangular forms in Raphael's 'mother and child' paintings. I love how colleges jam-pack their programs with completely useless classes - I bet if you cut down on the BS in any program and at any degree level, people could get their degrees a lot faster. But then the school can't milk you for more money, so they keep you there and tell you that dumb shit like dolphin hugging and glass blowing are required credits for a geology degree.

IMHO, I think the bullshit classes should all be electives and maybe offer an incentive to take them. Like if you take that class and do well, you get a little shaved off next semester's tuition costs. Or the class itself costs less than core classes. It was the bloody "normal" exam and notes classes that made me not get straight A's more than once in undergrad too. But that's a rant for another day. My GPA in grad school has gone down from 4.0 to 3.6 in less than a year and I know it's going to go down even more once I get my grades for this year's summer semester.

My new favorite way to answer (just tried it out for the first time yesterday):
Clueless person: You're a linguist? So how many languages do you speak?
Me: It depends. By 'speak', do you mean 'able to read literary texts', 'able to watch TV', 'able to buy fish at the market', 'can tell you about the case system', 'can tell you what the phoneme inventory is', 'learned in class', 'done field work on', 'wrote a paper about' ... because each of those has a different answer.
Clueless person: ...
Me: See, the thing is, it's not really about the number of languages you can speak...

No matter what type of learner you are - hearing, seeing, experimental – LangLearner words and phrases to be learned quickly.

"So you're a proctologist huh? So how many . . . uh . . . you know what -- never mind."

I'm just repeating what professors say about this place, but maybe they say that about their resident state no matter where they are, and maybe they wouldn't say that if they were at UF. Oh, and UF won't accept me to transfer. It's really strange that University of Maryland did.

Oh, a lot of debt. But the good news is I don't have any debt now because I had a scholarship throughout the time I wasted here at FAU. My understanding is that MIT, ect. turn away students with GPAs above 3.8 all the time. I know of people with high school honors GPAs above 5.0 who got rejected to their undergraduate programs. I actually got through to MIT's computer science graduate office over the phone once, and they told me that, even if I enrolled in another graduate program and later applied to theirs, my undergraduate performance would still be heavily weighted. My original plan was to start somewhere else and try to transfer there. Another flaw in that plan is that I do not have the educational foundations or research experience to excel in graduate school at this time, especially if I enroll as a non degree seeking student in a decent one.

Oh, and I need to leave Florida. The culture here isn't exactly one that encourages discipline in academia. Or any form of intelligence.

I can see why you're tempted to show an adcom that you've overcome something crushing, but here's why I'd still recommend you resist the impulse, even though you applied to this program before: I think that too many people get their SoPs bogged down with trying to explain away what they see as imperfections in their profile.

While the SoP is the ideal place to explain something glaring to an adcom, you really want the document (as others mentioned) to be a positive one that focuses on your accomplishments and potential. You don't need to tell an adcom why you're better than a rejection—you should tell them why you're a kickass applicant, period.

Yes, yes, and YES. There are so many animals that are abandoned at shelters, and you could give them a new home and all the love they need!

You sound like an applicant who both gets rejected year after year and one that gets accepted even multiple acceptances. How was your fit within the program? Maybe the profs you applied for weren't even taking students and/or retiring. That's why contacting is a must. Also, when I was applying I got into places that I visited and ones I didn't visit so I am not sure it helps but I doubt it hurts to visit. You have a good chance if you pick the right profs and right schools. I hope you get in your dream school with unheard of funding.

Definitely try contacting programs and asking for feedback on your rejected applications. You may not hear back from all of them, but many (even most?) programs are really happy to offer you advice and let you know what portions of your application hurt you in the admissions process.

And I agree with the above posters that it was most likely a demonstration of fit that hurt you, since you have an excellent background from undergrad. Do a bit more research/reaching out this time, and make sure your SoP demonstrates how you see yourself fitting into the departments you are applying to.

Good luck, and keep your chin up!