switch

The employees at Enron were small cogs with limited responsibilities in a larger machine. Same thing with the people working for mortgage lenders. Many of them stood to gain nothing but honesty by telling their employers the truth about what was going on in their businesses. They would have lost their jobs. And the Enron crisis and the financial mortgage crisis would not have been prevented. People still would have been hurt and lost significant savings in both places. But lying just to save your own job is pretty small. Sometimes snark is just hurt feelings but sometimes it is fraud and dishonesty. When more people refused to put self-interest before telling the truth then the fraud and dishonesty will be mitigated and lessened. Enron wasn't just the one big guy who went to jail. It was all of the smaller employees who signed off on documents that didn't look right then cashed their paycheck.

This is why Bernard Madoff ripped off so many people, why there was a financial crisis, why there was Enron. It was "smart" to ignore the lies, duplicity, dishonesty, fraud, manipulation, bullying to keep your job. There is so much fraud and dishonesty in these professions because people like you think it's "sophisticated" to keep quiet when you see clear fraud and bullying.

If you don't understand the key term in this hypothetical, then why are you answering my question? Sharing your ignorance is less valuable than you think. It is sad that students are so pre-professional that when they hear of dishonesty and bullying in academia their response is to look the other way. This is why Enron and the financial crisis happened. The people who knew something was wrong did nothing.

The department chair was snarking at a lot of faculty who have less power or who are influential but weren't in the room during the snark attack. Example: He says that this Ivy professor is one of his friends then he proceeds to snark about the placement record of that Ivy department (completely false snark since they have a much better placement record than his department) and he snarks about that particular professor's research area. But he says she's his friend....... With friends like this who needs enemies? He snarks about assistant faculty who don't have tenure, graduate students who are scared to death of him, retired faculty who are dead wood according to him. He snarks about anyone and anything that is powerless, less powerful than him, or likely never to find out about his snark. A lot of the snark is false and self-serving. Like saying his department has better graduate placement than that Ivy department. But he's department chair and all of the grad students in this class are scared to death of him. I am also in this class. Can I do anything to call him out? Stop the snark? Stop the lies and deceit within the snark? Can I tell him he's a snarky person? I am supposed to audit the class of the Ivy professor he snarked about. Can I ask him whether I can relay his snark to her?

From her point of view, you don't sound very mature, hardworking, or helpful. She gave you a couple projects, and you sound like you are intentionally failing because you are very judgmental of your supervisor. Why should she trust you? She told you to contact the customer services guy at the corporation that sold the instrument, and you didn't do that. Why not? It sounds like a no-brainer. Just contact them. They owe you. So what if she's hiring her boyfriend? Big deal? You're caught in the middle of what? Just get your work done. Get your own girlfriend so you aren't judging people who have social lives. You sound like you are intentionally failing, being immature and judgmental about things unrelated to the project, and running to save your career at the expense of showing loyalty to someone who gave you a chance. I wouldn't want to work with you.

Your university purchased an expensive "instrument" and the makers of the instrument won't assist you in making this instrument functional so that you can finish your research? Because they don't have a good relationship with your supervisor? That is crazy. If that is true, and it doesn't sound right, but if that is true, it doesn't sound like the problem lies with your supervisor. A company that sells an expensive instrument should provide good customer service to the purchasers of that instrument regardless of whether they are easy or difficult customers. After pocketing 100,000 or 10,000 or 1,000,000, they owe some pretty solid customer service to the purchasers of the instrument. That company sounds like a much bigger problem than your supervisor. I thought the humanities had crazy people, but this is super-crazy.

I went to the same high school as Mark Zuckerberg but I'm almost his mom's age and I have not finished my PhD. FML. Other fun facts: Peter Orzag went to same high school. Samantha Power went to same college. My former college roommate is married to a former ambassador.

Another obvious thing to do is to analyze the reasons for your poor performance in your upper level mathematics courses and resolve those problems. People study and learn in different ways so perhaps your math courses were structured in a way that didn't allow you to perform to your best abilities in the courses. I get used to different disciplines in a very gradual way, and I like to have a historical view of the discipline along with the straight technical aspects. Figure out the problems that held back your better performance, judge whether you can correct those problems or not (math anxiety? part-time job took up time? Need to use words along with numbers?), and take another course or exam after resolving those problems. Repeat these steps until your grade improves.

Getting a 3.5 GPA from UCLA and a MA from Columbia is not sufficient credentials to get a Yale PhD. Harvard English PhD is one of most selective programs at the university with a 2% admissions rate. You need to be summa cum laude to get admitted. Columbia sells many of its M.A. degrees to the highest bidder; it's an open admissions process for many of its M.A. programs including the MFA. Very very easy to be admitted. Just because you don't listen to NPR or read the NYTimes doesn't mean the rest of us don't. I was inundated with James Franco pieces. James Franco hosting this. James Franco admitted to this. Enough with James Franco! He's all over the place if you listen to the media. If you don't read or listen to the news, then don't make generalizations about what's on the media. The coverage was "extensive." Very extensive coverage. His deferred going to university of Houston for one year. But a Phd in English typically takes 4-5 years. He still will have to finish 2-3 years of his English PhD at the same time he is starting his PhD in creative writing. HE IS CARRYING ON MULTIPLE PHD DEGREES AT DIFFERENT INSTITUTIONS AT THE SAME TIME.

I hope graduate programs are not this judgmental about students who switch graduate programs. You should definitely try to switch if you can, but you need to gauge whether your program will penalize you if they find out you are attempting to leave. I am in a similar position. Try to switch but be careful about who you tell about your plans to switch.

I contacted a few grad directors with my basic statistics to see if I was a viable candidate for their programs. They strongly strongly STRONGLY encouraged me to apply to their graduate programs then........................ I received rejections from these two graduate programs based on the same information they had known in my introductory cover letter. The rejections were not based on new information, but on the same exact information that they told me to apply with. Why are the graduate program directors so confused as to STRONGLY encourage me to apply based on a 3.5 GPA then just as adamant that my 3.5 GPA is good but not great so they cannot let me into the program?

Franco's escapes have been covered extensively in the news, if you look around. The New York Times carried an article. The New Yorker published a profile of Franco and broke the news about his Yale acceptance. NPR did a story about Franco's Yale acceptance. Franco was the co-host of the Academy Awards. There was a joke at the Spirit Awards that Franco was being overreleased in the media because media stories about him are everywhere. You said if Franco is as smart as the typical Yale PhD student, then................ As some people have already argued, his creative writing has not demonstrated the same strengths as his acting. While a layperson might say a drama program is the same as a creative writing programs is the same as a critical literary program, they're not the same. They involve different skills sets and understanding of the mediums, so that movement by itself shows a certain lack of understanding of literature and drama. If he was as smart as the typical Yale PhD student, then why doesn't he release his GRE scores and grades to prove to the public this fact? It is more likely he's not as smart. Admitting someone with weaker qualifications does cheapen the process. By definition, it cheapens the process because he was admitted to a literary critical program without the credentials. He doesn't seem that smart just from the fact that he's taking several PhD and graduate programs simultaneously. Professors don't write five books simultaneously. Research scientists don't conduct five research projects simultaneously. The rest of his Yale PhD cohort is smart, too, but they are finishing one doctoral program (at most two). Regardless of how much money Franco has to throw around, taking all of those courses at the same time doesn't make sense. People are a little unfairly jealous of Franco, but people like you also unfairly rationalize and enable some of Franco's pretty dumb actions, so between the group that unfairly dismisses Franco and the group that unfairly enables Franco, Franco is apparently making out okay.

For the sake of this hypothetical situation, ASSUME that ageism in graduate admissions is real. Basic assumption: ageism restricts the opportunities of older, non-traditional grade applicants............. Given that assumption, what should and can non-trad applicants do to combat the ageism in grad admissions? What are successful strategies for overcoming, addressing, mitigating hte negative repercussions of ageism in graduate admissions? Concrete steps we can take to improve the situation of older, non-trads..................

You could do the following to demonstrate strong quantitative skills: 1. Get a letter of recommendation from a math professor or statistics professor. Hopefully they will say "X got a B in my course, but really demonstrated sensitivity to quantitative approaches and real dedication to the field, so in spite of the low grade, I think X will go far in a quantitative discipline." 2. Take the Math GRE and get a high score.

You think at a safe distance that you would make reasonable comments to a professor, but I am currently in a PhD program, and when my professors contradict themselves, make cynical comments, make paranoid comments, exaggerate for ideological effect, show biases, none of the students say anything to them. Most of the students stop thinking critically during classes with high ranking and tough professors. They are just too worried about their grades and their position in the classes. Often, some students don't understand that Prof. Tough said X last week and is saying Not X this week. It's been very rare in my first year as a PhD student for any student to confront a professor about giving an illogical, incoherent or contradictory response. You think you will make the reasonable response to the professor now, but it's unlikely you will actually do so in the real situation. So when the professor singles out the female student for her clothing or the non-traditional student for their age or "inability to handle theory" none of teh students respond to the sexism, racism, ageism or any other ism. At least not in my cohort. Ageism is ignored. Complicitly sanctioned. I have non-trad students attacking me because they are all of one or two years younger than I am, so I am the non-trad compared to them. They don't notice the hypocrisy, the inconsistency in what they are doing.

I think the adage that women have to be twice as good than men to be taken as seriously holds true for non-traditional students. You cannot be just as good as the traditional age students, if you are a non-trad student. You have to expect that you need to impress everyone twice as much with your abilities and skill set to be taken equally seriously as traditional students. Your goals might have been to be just as good or slightly better, but you need to be much much much better I've seen. I'm the only Ivy, M.A. degreed, published student in my current PhD cohort but many of my accomplishments are ignored, dismissed, and denigrated by faculty when it serves their purposes. They only acknowledge which parts of your experience they want to acknowledge.

Here's one more piece of information about ageism. An article about Madonna confronting age stereotypes. She says that older people are not allowed to be adventurous. A PhD certainly qualifies as an adventure so non-traditional students are viewed as inappropriate risk takers and crazy rather than balanced adventurers. Pop superstar, Madonna says she refuses to fit into anyone’s idea of what a 50-year-old woman should be. She accuses society of suffering from ageism according to online reports: “Not only does society suffer from racism and sexism, it also suffers from ageism.” The singer said that she had no intention of changing her exercise routine or form-fitting clothing to suit the norms of society. Adding that she was not a conformist, Madonna was quoted as asking, “Once you reach a certain age you’re not allowed to be adventurous, you’re not allowed to be sexual.” Madonna, who is now living in the UK with her husband, Guy Ritchie will be 50 in August. <BR itxtNodeId="145"><BR itxtNodeId="144">

The last PhD rejection told me that I had already not finished some other programs and it wasn't worth their while to take a chance on me in their PhD program. I also read on one application recommendation website that anyone over 40 years old should expect ageism and age discrimination as part of the process.

I've had a lot of rejections even though my application is very strong. GRE scores > 1500 GPA > 3.5 Two MA degrees, Ivy league Teaching experiences for 10 years Some publications I've applied to very low ranked schools and still had a hard time getting offers and much much much harder getting funded offers. I didn't have to work anywhere near this hard when I was 24 years old.

I went to Yale undergrad, and you seem concerned with defending Franco alone. But what about your future alma mater? Yale is enabling Franco. So are other schools. I get accosted frequently about my deep deep devotion to my subject matter. Why is Franco exempted from this bullying? Or why am I subjected to this bullying? Plus, does Franco have good GRE scores and grades?

Try to keep your problem to yourself as much as possible. Sometimes it's better restricting personal information.

There is a big difference between literary criticism and creative writing, so why did Franco get the two mixed up? If he wanted to be in a creative writing program, he should have figured that out before going to Yale literary criticism. But if he wants to be in a literary criticism program, he shouldn't also apply to a creative writing program. He's only been in the Yale program for two semesters but he already knows he doesn't want to be there? It's not just the fault of James Franco, however. Look at all of the graduate departments that are enabling him. Yale accepted him although he was perhaps uninterested in literary criticism or not up to the standards of the department. He's leaving for some reason. University of Houston accepted him even though he flamed out of Yale's program and obviously has problems completing programs. What about all of the UCLA professors who enabled him by writing him letters of recommendation? I bet his famous film directors wrote him letters of rec. Yet they also didn't bother to really figure out if he was heading towards literary criticism or creative writing. They are all enabling him just like they enable famous people like Charlie Sheen. In addition, are his GRE scores very high? Are his grades any good? I wonder if he's any good as a candidate besides having a lot of famous people writing letters of recommendation for him.

I'm talking about the very best top 15 programs. I never see non-traditional students in the PhD programs at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, CalTech, etc. I only see non-trad students in lower programs beyond the top 30 or top 50 rankings. And within those programs there are still some traditional professors who test non-trad students. For some non-trad students that is not a big deal, but for others the professor asks essentially, "What is wrong with you that made you such an older student?" There are still a lot of traditional professors especially in the top programs. And fields like mathematics, the sciences, revolve heavily around precocious views of intelligence. The Fields Medal, for example, is for the MATHEMATICIAN UNDER 30 who has accomplished whatever. There is an equivalent medal in economics. The TOP SCIENTISTS have to be PRECOCIOUS, NATURALLY SMART, BORN SMART, EARLY ACHIEVERS.

If I accept an unfunded offer then receive a funded offer later, will there be repercussions/bad blood if I back out of the unfunded offer?