dimanche0829

Congratulations, you're happy. You tested well. Your methods and background worked for you. Consider yourself lucky.

You'll have a long and difficult road ahead if you think you can successfully slack your way through grad school, too- assuming you're even accepted into a program. You're not nearly as clever as you think you are; slacking on any part of the application is just a BAD idea. If you're not even willing to put forth an honest effort to study for an entrance exam, you really just don't belong in the applicant pool.

My 0.02.

Congratulations, you're happy. You tested well. Your methods and background worked for you. Consider yourself lucky.

You'll have a long and difficult road ahead if you think you can successfully slack your way through grad school, too- assuming you're even accepted into a program. You're not nearly as clever as you think you are; slacking on any part of the application is just a BAD idea. If you're not even willing to put forth an honest effort to study for an entrance exam, you really just don't belong in the applicant pool.

My 0.02.

Congratulations, you're happy. You tested well. Your methods and background worked for you. Consider yourself lucky.

You'll have a long and difficult road ahead if you think you can successfully slack your way through grad school, too- assuming you're even accepted into a program. You're not nearly as clever as you think you are; slacking on any part of the application is just a BAD idea. If you're not even willing to put forth an honest effort to study for an entrance exam, you really just don't belong in the applicant pool.

My 0.02.

Congratulations, you're happy. You tested well. Your methods and background worked for you. Consider yourself lucky.

You'll have a long and difficult road ahead if you think you can successfully slack your way through grad school, too- assuming you're even accepted into a program. You're not nearly as clever as you think you are; slacking on any part of the application is just a BAD idea. If you're not even willing to put forth an honest effort to study for an entrance exam, you really just don't belong in the applicant pool.

My 0.02.

Or maybe you're just pathetic.

Congratulations, you're happy. You tested well. Your methods and background worked for you. Consider yourself lucky.

You'll have a long and difficult road ahead if you think you can successfully slack your way through grad school, too- assuming you're even accepted into a program. You're not nearly as clever as you think you are; slacking on any part of the application is just a BAD idea. If you're not even willing to put forth an honest effort to study for an entrance exam, you really just don't belong in the applicant pool.

My 0.02.

Congratulations, you're happy. You tested well. Your methods and background worked for you. Consider yourself lucky.

You'll have a long and difficult road ahead if you think you can successfully slack your way through grad school, too- assuming you're even accepted into a program. You're not nearly as clever as you think you are; slacking on any part of the application is just a BAD idea. If you're not even willing to put forth an honest effort to study for an entrance exam, you really just don't belong in the applicant pool.

My 0.02.

Congratulations, you're happy. You tested well. Your methods and background worked for you. Consider yourself lucky.

You'll have a long and difficult road ahead if you think you can successfully slack your way through grad school, too- assuming you're even accepted into a program. You're not nearly as clever as you think you are; slacking on any part of the application is just a BAD idea. If you're not even willing to put forth an honest effort to study for an entrance exam, you really just don't belong in the applicant pool.

My 0.02.

About a week before taking the gre, I was browsing this forum for info on the new scale and could not get over how many people spent months studying for this thing. I suppose if you want a perfect score then okay, but really... Anyway I just wanted to let my fellow slackers know that you are not doomed if you aren't practicing an hour a day for 6 months. I studied for ~3 days and came out with V: 650-750 and Q: 670-770. Obviously not the best scores ever, but I'm happy. Now, back to xbox

Or maybe you're just pathetic.

Eigen I agree 100% with you in regard to your first post (enough to upvote it). However a good point is raised in regard to there not being enough blue collar jobs available. Thanks to government policies too many jobs like manufacturing jobs have gone offshore. Also, in the trades until a place gets rid of its illegals, it's not easy finding plumbing and electrical work. Getting into the unions (electrical, pipefitters, iron workers, etc.) is an even harder nut to crack.

I do agree 100% though that this loan forgiveness just encourages lack of responsibility, and that there should be better vocational education and policies that make blue-collar work more viable in this country again particularly for American citizens. I can see doing income-based repayment but writing off the debt isn't a good idea.

So in other words, people who decided to not go to expensive schools, work their way through schooling with lower grades/longer time to graduation, etc. to make a stable financial decision regarding their education now should have gone wherever they want, because no matter how much they racked up in debt, they only have to pay 10% of their "discretionary" income for 20 years and it all goes away.

Kinda sounds like its rewarding people who made poor financial decisions, not really helping people who took out affordable loans, and effectively penalizing those who made it through without taking out loans- whether they went to a lower tier school they could afford, or something else.

And in the end, you can't just make that money "go away". It's going to be part of all of our tax burdens to repay the amount that is "forgiven" after 20 years- and with those repayment terms, I'm guessing that will be quite a lot.

I think income based repayment is great. I think it's a good idea to help people that are struggling because they can't find a job to pay off the hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans they took out for their education. But at the same time, it *was* their choice to take out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans for a degree that may or may not be marketable. I know people that went down that road (several hundred thousand dollars for a BA in English? 200k for a degree in social work?)... And while I feel for them, I don't necessarily think they burden of paying back the majority of loans that they took out should come back and fall on my shoulders. Of course, part of the problem (and now something that is hopefully being curtailed) is the fact that people were able to get loans for way more than they would ever, realistically, be able to pay back.

If loans were just about tuition, fees, and books, I could get behind this a lot more- but when they also include cost of living, housing, food, etc. for the time in college, I become less enthusiastic about shouldering that burden.

I agree that it sucks that the movement can't only target those "to blame" and only disrupt their day...but, well, this is how civil disobedience works. You get people to sit up and pay attention by disrupting the daily operations of the system. The movement wouldn't be successful if it stayed out of the way.

Furthermore, if I understand what's going on correctly, the occupiers aren't the only ones to blame in terms of disrupting the city. The NYPD seem to have developed a month-long history of over-reaction and escalation (and here I'm blaming the powers pulling the strings and the whiteshirts, not the everyday beat cops in black shirts who, according to source after source, are largely supportive of the movement). Why, for instance, have they barricaded/blocked off Wall Street, only allowing people through once they've shown a work ID?

And last, I am immensely grateful that the NYPD have not yet [successfully] cleared out the protestors with a "hats and bats" approach. That's horrific. That's what an autocratic police state does to stifle dissent.

I fully support the occupy movement. I see the repeated accusations that the protestors don't know what they want as manufactured by corporate-sponsored media as an attempt to discredit and dismiss the occupation.

I mean, it seems pretty simple to me. OWS is looking for a system where accumulated capital isn't just for the few and isn't built on the backs of the bottom rungs of society. It's looking for, in the words of N. Katherine Hayles, "fair capitalism."

http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10?op=1

Disregard/ambivalence. I feel like there's nothing to support. They have no clear goals and are mostly just a spectacle. I was listening to the radio on my way to school this morning, and Dick Gregory was being interviewed. Here's an 80-year-old social activist who has lived through the civil rights movement and he basically, politely, described the movement as a bunch of spoiled white kids who desperately want to create some sort of 60s-70s type movement. He laughed at those who compare it to the civil rights movement, and cautions the group to try not to do so, because they don't know how good they really have it.

http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2011/10/17/death-penalty-dick-gregory/

Nothing about the system should have been a mystery to you when you signed up for this. You should have known exactly what you were getting into and I'm always surprised by these posts complaining about some major structural component of the program like how many credits of this they have to take or the fact that they have to take these classes in order to move on to others, etc. as if this information was purposely withheld during the application process or they have been deceived in some way. Did you not look at the school's website at all ever and just glance at the curriculum to find out what would actually be required of you? How do you even compose an SOP that demonstrates you're a good fit if you don't even know what you'd be fitting in to? You're only 7 weeks in and if the market sucks that bad for your field than it's not like you'll get a job anyway, might as well go with the flow for a while.

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You really think all that coursework is a stupid formality? You think you're better than everyone else who've done things before you and helped revolutionize your discipline? Even if a seminal paper has little to do with your precise research interest doesn't mean it doesn't hold monumental value over the way you go about conducting research. There's a REASON why these papers become benchmarks in fields and why people today still read and cite them heavily. Having such a narrow view is what causes gaps between related disciplines, and that segmentation only weakens a science.

And I know this is a forum that's supposed to be, more or less, encouraging and all, but why are you even in the program then? If you're going to be this negative and cynical of academia, then get out. No one's forcing you to stay in. If you have to think twice about whether or not this path leads you to what'll make you happiest in the long run, then get out. There are easier ways to make a lot more money than getting a Ph.D.; if you're unhappy with what research leads you to, then there's no point in staying in a doctorate.

And it has only been 7 weeks in. I'm struggling with course work right now because I really don't see the point of all this BS. Course work is such a stupid formality, I just hate how I can't get to work in the lab right away because we all know that's what I'm there for anyway. Just learn the science you need as you go along with research, why all the useless coursework that you'll probably never or hardly use again?

Also, sometimes I bother wondering why I went to grad school anyway. The economy sucks, and it will for a LONG time. We're training way too many PhDs for number of positions available in academia (which I plan on staying far away from). All manufacturing jobs and R and D are being shipped over seas. I'll be educated all right when I leave, but I'll still be poor. I don't see the point of blasting my brains out when it is increasingly likely that none of this BS will pay off. The whole system is f$@%ed beyond belief.

wow, first I have to say, to me, it seems bizarre to have thought about the scores this much!

I understand where you are coming from but wouldn't we all be better off devoting our time to revising further rather than hypothesising on possible score calculations? I bet the guys at GRE would have a good laugh at this. Although, obviously, you are going to be getting a much higher score than me!

I agree though, how else to pass the time... when I took the test I had no idea the scoring wasn't finalised and it completely baffled me after 3 hours to be given an estimated score. I like to imagine the GRE examiners all in lab coats in some high tech facility where everything is chrome ad polished with some giant computer spitting out printed results like confetti...

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I agree with Eigen and Runonsentence: the work should be mentioned only if was relevant to the applicant's field of study.


It might, if the tone of the disclosure suggests that the applicant has a chip on his or her shoulder. For example:

Just because I'm so excited to finally be back in school, I felt the need to post here. Hahaha.

I'm officially taking the Bildungsroman class, though it ended up being my fallback class after Early American Lit was postponed until next term. It's actually a Topics in Human Rights course, and it is really, really way more awesome than I was expecting it to be. I'm not typically super into postcolonial lit, which is what the prof. specializes in, but I was flipping through my main text last night and realizes that the author writes a lot about the relation of human rights discourse to the eighteenth-century novel, which will be sweeeeeeeet (and make a potentially great paper topic!).

I've also spent all morning doing my first assignment for my independent study in theory, and I'm getting that feeling again that this is exactly what I should be doing. I'd gotten so caught up in the application stuff over the summer that I'd kinda forgotten just how much I really love doing this--reading theory and novels and thinking about the two things in conjunction with one another. Ahhhhhh, it's good to be back!

I'm not technically a grad student since this is my last semester of undergrad, but I do take grad courses and am expected to perform graduate level work. I can completely relate. I didn't talk in class for most of last semester because I was terrified and somehow managed to convince myself that my being there was part of some cruel joke of the faculty to show me how much I didn't belong. Completely irrational, but that's what I thought.

I didn't want to end up being that creepy silent girl in the corner (which is so not me), though, so I finally gave myself some tough love and forced my hand in the air during class one day. My entire insides were shaking with nerves. I made up some new words as I spoke, and I don't think my statement actually had a valid point, but that was okay. No one laughed at me, and I was given the same consideration that the other students were given. I still feel like the dumbest person in the room sometimes, but I'm at least trying to be more active this semester. Baby steps.

I'm not technically a grad student since this is my last semester of undergrad, but I do take grad courses and am expected to perform graduate level work. I can completely relate. I didn't talk in class for most of last semester because I was terrified and somehow managed to convince myself that my being there was part of some cruel joke of the faculty to show me how much I didn't belong. Completely irrational, but that's what I thought.

I didn't want to end up being that creepy silent girl in the corner (which is so not me), though, so I finally gave myself some tough love and forced my hand in the air during class one day. My entire insides were shaking with nerves. I made up some new words as I spoke, and I don't think my statement actually had a valid point, but that was okay. No one laughed at me, and I was given the same consideration that the other students were given. I still feel like the dumbest person in the room sometimes, but I'm at least trying to be more active this semester. Baby steps.

I totally feel you on this, woolfie. I'm a Masters student in with all levels of PhDs. Those PhD students not only have a firm grasp of every text we read, but they reference other authors, methodology, and still manage to throw in brilliant insights on top of all that. I sit there wondering how I'm ever going to get through this.

I feel inadequate most of the time. I know I'm intelligent, but everyone else seems to be on a much higher level than me. A big part of the problem is that I'm a writer, not a speaker. I have a hard time expressing myself in front of fellow classmates or professors because I'm incredibly intimidated and all intelligent thought seems to go out the door when I open my mouth. I struggle for the right words and get obviously nervous. Unfortunately, in history, discussion is not only necessary in class, it's a huge part of your grade. It's also extremely important in teaching, conferences, and general presentations.

My advisor told me after a couple classes that I need to talk more. I have big dreams of going overseas to the UK for my PhD so I knew I needed to do something about my skills and this feeling of inadequacy. I joined my university's Toastmasters chapter, started grad counseling, and decided to force myself to talk more in class. It's scary, nerve-wracking, and hard, hard, work every single day. I'm still working through it all, but I'm engaging more in class. I'm not Miss Eloquent - yet - but I speak, no matter what. And it IS getting better and I'm hopeful.

My advice - just keep at it. Plug away and know that others are feeling the same way. It should get better, but you do have to put in the work and find the necessary support.