CageFree

I've had this debate with people too and truthfully, I don't find feminism to be similar to, say, gender or ethnic/racial identity. I can be an ally to my GLBTQI friends because, as you say, I support but cannot speak for. However, feminism is, at risk of oversimplifying, an ideology or philosophy... and thus you do not have to be female to agree with it.

Thanks!

It seems no guy likes your personality either, given that you can't even hold on to a guy past the second date.

Oh boy, this is a tricky question when you're a historian. I am a 20th century historian but I am also fascinated by Tudor England and the Roman Empire.

NYU has sent some admittances already.

Nope. I got into two UCs during my application cycle.

I have a Lenovo Ideapad ultrabook and I'm very happy with it. It has great battery life, it doesn't overheat, and its performance is solid. They have good deals on their website too.

Looks like I'm part of the "cool" INTJ clique.

Bingo!

Sending PM.

Or... how did anyone have the funds to apply to that many programs? I applied to six and was BROKE afterwards, even though I was working full-time!

I believe advisers have been contacting students. Davis seems to do an early round first for fellowship consideration.

This thread is just ridiculous. No rejection letter is going to be warm and fuzzy. Get over it. If you can't handle a rejection with maturity, you have no business being in graduate school.

Edit: Davis decisions have been made, and advisers are contacting students. I don't think it's officially in the system for a while... it took over a month for me to get the official system message.

A couple of friends of mine are using Rosetta Stone to learn basic German, combined with a German grammar book. If you're disciplined, you can do this.

In my program, this is common. My adviser signs his emails with his nickname so....

Once you're in a program, it's a good way to procrastinate, especially when you have epic threads like the husband one.

Mine was not a generalization about every American. I don't resent kids who through accident of birth and/or circumstance have opportunities (whether it's due to money, being in a good district, having good mentors) and take advantage of them to go to an Ivy League school. I was simply commenting on students who DO have opportunities and throw them away.

Every major has its difficulties. Sure, I don't have the knowledge/skillset to be an engineer, but very few engineers have the knowledge/skillset to be historians. My partner is a STEM person and even though he is a decent writer he is the first to acknowledge he cannot do what I do. Meanwhile, I struggled with high school math concepts when I was studying for the GRE, even though took a few calculus classes in college.... which really only made me realize how long it had been since I had been in a math classroom (1996), and thus made me feel very old. IQ tests, SATs, AP exams, GREs... all those do is show who is better at taking standardized tests. They are no more evidence of "intelligence" than your choice of major or how much money you make.

You seem to assume that every kid who went "straight through" comes from privileged backgrounds. That's most certainly not the case. I went to college straight out of high school, after living in another country for over half of my life, having to re-learn English, and navigating the american system of college acceptance without any guidance or "handouts." I was 16 when I came back to the US... I had never even HEARD of an SAT. Immigrant families often make tremendous sacrifices to ensure that their children will be in a position to reach the "American Dream." My parents moved our entire family back to the US because they saw there was no opportunity for me or my siblings back where I grew up. My family encouraged me to study, but my father was a HS dropout and my mother only had about a semester's worth of college (in another country)... neither of them understood how it worked. My high school counselor tried to steer me toward vocational programs because she thought that being from another country (or having grown up in one) made me unworthy of attending any university, let alone the "public Ivy" that became my alma mater. You know who I actually "resent?" The people who've had every opportunity available to them, and decided not to take advantage. I would have killed to be in a GATE program, to take advanced classes early in my academic career, to actually prepare for SATs and AP exams. Seeing students who are perfectly capable of achieving something just throw it away because they have the PRIVILEGE to say, "I am not going to bust my ass now, I can just go to community college and start my life later," really chaps my hide. The fact that you could "wait" a few years before dedicating yourself to school is the ultimate "first world problem." Those of us who grew up outside the American bubble often don't get to choose when to work hard... we have the one chance, and we take it, so forgive us for not getting that "real life experience" that you believe makes you superior. I didn't have the privilege of putting off college... I had no CHOICE but to "bust my ass in school" so that my parents could see that their sacrifices were worthwhile.

Academia has the reputation of being the place where you learn more and more about less and less... we specialize to such a "ridiculous degree" that we become the world's living expert in <insert niche field>, seemingly to the exclusion of all other areas of knowledge. Does anyone else have an interest in some field of knowledge that is wholly unrelated to your own academic pursuits? I don't mean reading material in related fields... as a historian, I delve into anthropology, sociology, critical theory, politics, etc.., and I also read history outside my own region/period specialization. I mean something that is completely outside your area. I, for example, love watching TV shows and reading articles about astrophysics and astronomy. In fact, I am far more likely to tune into the Science channel than the History channel (mostly because I dislike military history and refuse to consider aliens as historical subjects). My partner was a physics major in college and I ask him questions about black holes, dark matter, etc. all the time. I suppose it gives me a bit of a "break" from being "all history, all the time?"

I am exactly the same way. Need complete silence, which is why I study better at night (like past 10 PM), when everyone is asleep. I get too distracted when people walk by, even if they are outside and I hear them through the window. I also do have to clean before I can start a paper... and in my case it's definitely a procrastination thing. My weird "obsession" is that I have to run all my PDF files through OCR. I can't just read it and take notes... it has to be something I can highlight and annotate directly. I even bought a professional OCR program. My sources are mostly in print so I run ALL of them through OCR, clean them up, etc.. Same with scans... Scanned pages have to be deskewed, cropped, etc.. before I will read them... crooked scans drive me insane.

This thread definitively proves that Stephen Hawking's latest paper is wrong. It is a black hole and no one seems able to escape its gravitational pull. (And yes, I know he did not mean "there are no black holes.")

In in my mid-30s and a 2nd year Ph.D. student. I'm on the older end within my department but not the oldest. I would say my life experience has been helpful in grad school... especially as a T.A..