koolherc

Hey TripWillis. The first quarter was a tough adjustment psychoemotionally but things are looking up a bit! Glad to hear it's rewarding for you! I told you that I went to the grad center for my MA, yeah?

it's amazing the variety of concepts that people have pulled out from reading Kant because his writing is so bad. They assume there must be some deep insights in there when he's basically saying that we have to construct concepts based on faith and throw reason out of the window.

Wow, I disagree with a lot that's been posted here. Flights to Europe ARE expensive. RV tents are expensive. Couchsurfing (the webpage), and knowing when the best time to buy flights is, knowing about rush tickets, knowing what the FAFSA is, and knowing how to apply to college all requires a type of access that goes beyond dollars and cents and incorporates a privilege that comes from being the dominant culture with access to and power over information. Yes, the grand majority of graduate students are privileged. If your parents were professors, that makes you privileged. Let's not let the shifty nature of the term "middle class" deceive us. Is middle class a family of four on 25k a year or is it a family of two on 100k? Both are considered middle class to many people. In NYC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art charges a suggested donation of $20+ per adult visitor---that is, technically, you only have to pay a quarter to get in. I know plenty of native, inner-city NYers (from the Bronx, Queens, etc.) who've never gone to the Met, even though they could do it for free, and would enjoy it. Even going into Manhattan only requires $2.50 on the train, but there's still a mental privilege and presumption that is required. SeriousSillyPutty also made some good points, though I disagree with some of the language (" "postive" role models").

My semester doesn't start 'til the last week of September. All the more time to tortuously draw out my relationship issues, to freak out about not having an apartment yet and how little money I have with which to move, get said apartment, and buy things like a bed and food once I'm over there. Also, since my classes start at the end of the month, getting a room/apartment sucks 'cause either I'm gonna have to pay the whole month of September or be homeless for about five days until October. Also, all the classes I want to take are offered at exactly the same time slot on the same day!!!! It's like they're already trying to politically sabotage me! *stands by the window with a rifle, ever shifting the curtain ever so slightly in order to peek out*

Choose where you apply based on the scholars who work there and how you think they'd respond to your work. E-mail some of them. I definitely emailed professors and executive offers at programs and asked them straight up "Will my studying X here be well taken?" The pompous responses from some of them vs. the encouraging responses from others helped make the filtering process a lot easier.

I occasionally teach at a non-profit prep program for high schoolers and I get confused for a student all the time. I'm 26.

Henceforce,

I wish I could be a professional student. That would be cool... Nice

Oh, btw, nice avatar xdarthveganx! I've been reading a lot about "Red Emma" recently. I definitely plastered my SOP with all kinds of language that I wanted to be sure that a PhD program would accept me for, anarchism (as per Emma Goldman) included. I was intentionally frenetic, jumping from Shakespeare to Chomsky to Daoism with reckless abandon. Edit: it worked pretty well

You should write about what's important to you. In my SOP, I mentioned some interviews I did of OWSers & bystanders, but only quickly as an exemplar of some larger issue I was trying to describe. I gave it just the amount of attention that I found proportionate to my interest. "Radical political beliefs" aren't tangential if they are actually central to your interests/beliefs/etc. If you're willing to hide your true self in your SOP, what about when you're in the program? Will you be hiding yourself then? If a program won't accept you because of whatever reason, then you probably don't want to work there anyways. And other places that are eager to hear about that kind of stuff will fall over themselves to court you. Be yourself and you won't have to not be.

I'm not religious per se, but I find it helps if we think about and realize how often other faith-based systems (eg. concepts of morality, abstract rights, social norms, science we don't understand the inner-workings of) figure into our own thinking.

Walter Benjamin is another one that trips a lot of people up. A basic knowledge of French helps with most of those other guys though.

linguistically speaking, that's a fascinating phenomenon^. Where is the student from? What kind of English dialect might they speak?

^Super duper excellent post.