jasper.milvain

Ok, how bout this. Would you rather: 1) Realize upon re-reading your proposal that you accidentally wrote down a movie quote you were thinking about while writing 2) Have this happen in one of your letters of recommendation.

How about a game to pass the time? Would you rather... 1 ) Find out right now whether you were successful or not or 2 ) Wait two more months for news on the condition that *if* you were successful, you would automatically get a CGS?

This is so true. I don't know if anyone followed the brouhaha in the National Post last year, where Robert Fulford blasted SSHRC for funding a project with the title "Lex Luthor Hearts Superman" about homoeroticism in Smallville. Never mind that the student writing about Smallville ended up getting the Governor General's Award for best graduating humanities PhD student from his school, got a postdoc at CUNY, and just got a TT job. Clearly, it's all just random in the arts. Did anyone else put together a Vanier application? That half-page summary "in language the public can understand" that they require is clearly direct fall out from this kind of arts bashing. It would be horrifying for someone to apply their specialized education to producing a complex piece of research using specialized language. And lord knows we can't trust experts to accurately evaluate their own field.

My proposal begins with an opening quote that I did not provide in-line citation for. That's haunting my dreams, lemme tell you. But a good friend of mine got a CGS despite the fact that she spelled the name of a major critic in her field wrong. Like, really wrong. So maybe there's hope...

I wouldn't do it. If you're going to be teaching, the easiest thing you can do to keep students from seeing your page is to belong to absolutely NO networks. If the grad network just requires a school address, there's nothing to keep an undergrad from entering their address and temporarily switching into the grad network in order to scope out what all their TAs are doing. Unless you're willing to police your profile to keep all bitching about students/marking/papers as well as all compromising photos off of it, it's not worth the risk. We just had a local political candidate have to withdraw from the race because his drunken facebook photos weren't as private as he thought they were. I know grad students are held to a lower moral standard (heh), but you never know.

So last night I was getting ready to go to sleep with my dear, sweet, dim husband, and I told him that a mutual friend had heard 'no' on NSERC, but at least there were still a handful of us in the running for federal money from SSHRC. He looked confused for a second, then said, "Oh, there's still a chance that you won't get SSHRC? I thought that at this point you were just waiting to hear the amount." You will all be glad to hear that I did not kill him, or even get all that snippy. I explained my schools' past success rates, how many of the awards are the big ones, etc. But COME ON! Even assuming that you've been smiling and nodding for the past eight months as I obsessed over all things SSHRC (understandable), why on earth would I have negotiated my non-SSHRC packages so carefully if I already had one? What the hell did you think I was talking about when I went over my non-SSHRC packages in detail with you while we were making a decision on which school I should attend? I am baffled. We have clearly had several conversations where he wasn't having the same talk I was. I'd be more inclined to forgive him if this hadn't followed right on the heels of "Oh, you got into that school? Congratulations! Hey, that means you went four for four!" He was actually in our tiny apartment when the acceptance phone call came. How the &R%#$*& did he miss that one?

Thanks, guys.

Looks like I lost the pool.

You would think so, wouldn't you? But no. I had a friend win a CGS Doctoral last year, and she didn't get her notice of award in time to start right away. They just gave her a double paycheck at the end of May.

I have a silly problem that I could use an opinion on. When I took a seminar with my main letter writer, we had a few classes where we drank red wine to celebrate making course milestones. She brought a specific kind of wine that she likes, and talked it up a bunch. I was thinking of getting her a bottle for her thank you gift, but it's super cheap--like a $14 screw top. Should I add the wine together with a nice scarf or box of chocolates, or is it just creepy that I remember what kind of wine she likes?

You absolutely can. That's what's paying my rent right now. Virdisun, don't feel bad about flubbing a grant application or two early in the game. You're competing against people who have much more research experience and who probably have a flubbed application or two in their own past that they've learned from. I know that my first SSHRC proposal was absolute garbage--it didn't even get out of my department--but my second was successful. Just channel the disappointment into motivation for your work. Here's to the end of the weekend, and mail service resuming! I think I was also too optimistic with my pool choice, though.

I don't think structuralism will get you far. I love reading semiotic theory, so I feel your pain, but you might want to switch methodologies. With your undergraduate papers, you just needed to be able to prove that you could deal with complex ideas, and structuralism worked. Your graduate work is all geared towards getting published eventually, and you need to be engaging in current discussions to get published. If you had to pick a group of people to allow into an intensive publishing worshop, wouldn't you check their samples for proof that they knew what publishable work looked like? It's pretty reasonable. I see that you're currently working on your undegrad. I don't know if you've done a round of applications yet, or if you're accepted somewhere wonderful. If you're not accepted somewhere wonderful yet, you should take the standard piece of advice to pick a few journals that relate to the work you want to do and spend a few hours a week reading through them. Figure out the trends so that you know about them first hand, rather than through 'what they say'. Look at the authors--do they come from the kind of schools you think you might get into? do they have any special knowledge that you don't? In the process of coming up with a reasonable long term publishing goal, you can come to a much better understanding of how you fit into the system, and use that to make a case for your 'unpopular interests', or decide to shift them in a more current direction. Publications are the coin of the realm. If your research isn't publishable, what purpose is it serving?

I have enough French to challenge the test, but I have to learn German from scratch as well. I'm hoping that there will be a reading course. I've always been interested in German, and I'm looking forward to learning to read it. Also looking forward to not having to learn to speak it.

I've used laptops daily for seven years, and as a result I managed to crunch up the vertebrae in my neck so badly that I had constant, debilitating nerve pain in my hands for months. A lot of my young, laptop using friends are also getting repetitive strain injuries, and we're all in our early twenties. My physiotherapist commanded me to get a desk top. If you're going the laptop route, be sure to be nice to your spine! Stand up and stretch periodically, use an external keyboard when you can.

Maybe he decided to do what SSHRC funded academics want and narrow the gap between arts and sciences funding... but chose to do so by slashing the hell out of the sciences. :roll: I guess we'll have to wait and see the spreadsheet to find out if overall success rates dipped this year. I think this year's funding should be ok, which makes me really want to nail down funding this time.

Clearly!

No, I'd heard bad things about UBC sessionals. Maybe it was department-specific, though, and got exagerrated as it got passed along. *shrug*

I had just finished a very serious conversation with my husband about the relative merits of schools A and B when he stepped in the shower to get ready for the Big Decision Talk Dinner. While he was in there, school C called and offered me admission. Telling him that I had managed to get and reject another offer while he was towelling down was very fun.

Unless anyone from Ontario has news, it looks like thepoorstockinger is out of the pool.

Hmmm... I'm not sure if it would be good for psych students. I don't know enough about psych. Certain things like time management seem pretty applicable, but I don't know if the advice about where and what to publish would hold (Are there more or fewer psych journals than lit journals? Do psych articles have multiple authors? etc etc). Even research papers must look pretty different. The blunt, wake up and get working tone would probably help psych students as much as anyone, though. I think committee work is the last thing to worry about after research and teaching. I'm a bit of a committee junkie, and this book helped me realize that I needed to back off and focus on my own work. I kept the position I'm really interested in (chairing our TA union) and took on a really REALLY low effort position as the graduate representative on our social events committee. I just help out a bit at the events I would go to anyway, and being on the committee means I not only get to attend department meetings, but I also get to vote! Since my career goal is to end up at an undergraduate teaching institution, I want to make sure that I have a record of community involvement. I hope that it will make me look like someone who really wants to contribute, instead of someone who is settling after getting shut out of prestigious jobs.

I'm going to the University of Alberta to do Victorian lit. Unfortunately, all of the schools I turned down are also in Canada, so I doubt I helped anyone on this board get off a waitlist.

That would actually mesh fairly well with the research interests of my committee.... hmmm....

I'm going to the U of A in the fall. I did my undergrad at UBC and it's beyond beautiful. Wonderful school. I don't want to be a scaremonger, but those of you heading that way should be aware that BC post-secondary funding is an absolute gong show right now. UBC and SFU are getting cut to ribbons. UBC has been saying that they're not feeling the pain as much as SFU (which lost 30 faculty, 50 staff, and 100 TAships last year) but several weeks ago they sent an e-mail to all their sessionals saying not to count on continued employment. They've had a faculty hiring freeze for a while now, as well. As an added bonus, all TA unions in BC are going into bargaining right after the 2010 Olympics, and the current government has already said that there will be no new money for labour contracts in 2010, so a TA strike is a definite possibility. But hell, maybe the government will change in the May election and you won't have to worry about any of it. And of course, it really is an amazing school.

If you're bored, do you wanna write my MA graduating project for me? It's kind of dragging.

This thead is so good for my sanity. I know that once someone gets a letter, it'll take a few extra days to reach me in Vancouver. As a result, I'm not chaining myself to my mailbox like last year. I've even made coffee dates during prime mail delivery time! So thank you all.