shai

My friend, I guess you're not familar with religion, are you ? It's one thing to be secular (like myself) and not believe in anything. It's abolutely another to say that there isn't anything new coming up in religion. The fact is that religion has been studied long before any of the "hard" sciences and will probably still be here after the academia will find a new bon-ton science and leave chemistry behing.




Are you aware of a small field called the philosophy of science ? How nothing is really real (except for mathematics) being that the ideas, methods, as well as the scientific tools, are all based on a few persumptions ?

and by the way - no need to be arrogant. if you were as secure in your field as you would like to seem, you would have no problem with people in other fields talking about original ideas and struggling.

I agree with the above poster. you're a douche.

and seriously, it's the lecturer you should be complaining about not the student.

If you had a real life job and your boss took a nasty customer's side instead of your, you wouldn't have been oh-my-godding about the customer, but how awful your boss treats you. why the difference ?

Checking the Ithaca Craigslist would be one option. Looking for open rooms in an occupied unit might help with getting honest answers about what the apartment is really like, rather than just getting the landlord's pitch: http://ithaca.craigslist.org/

Off-Campus housing is another. I recently met someone from that office, and she was energetic and dedicated to helping students: http://dos.cornell.edu//dos/ocho/

International Student Services Office might have helpful advice, or mentors who you can talk to. Duh, if only I had followed through and BECOME a mentor this year, I might be able to offer you formal help!: http://www.isso.cornell.edu/

Also, talk to your department. Ask to be put in touch with current students, postdocs, or young faculty. Some of them may be looking for housemates, or have friends who are. They'll probably be very honest and willing to help, since you'll be their friend and colleague for the next few years!!

Talk to people. Get in touch with landlords, current tenants, or someone you might be able to sublet from via email. See if they'd be willing to talk on the phone, or via Skype. Everyone has a camera, at least on their phone, so ask if they'll give you a photo tour of the apartment (may work better with current tenants than with landlords).

All of this carries the caveat that I haven't done a long, blind move, but this is what I would do. I charted this out for myself when I thought I might be leaving Cornell for Madison or Boston. Also, you can PM me with specific questions.

I agree with the above poster. you're a douche.

and seriously, it's the lecturer you should be complaining about not the student.

If you had a real life job and your boss took a nasty customer's side instead of your, you wouldn't have been oh-my-godding about the customer, but how awful your boss treats you. why the difference ?

http://www.phdcomics.com/book.htm

ok, this may sound ridiculous, but what about clothing? as a TA, will i be expected to look semi-sharp? i went to a small undergrad-only school so i'm clueless here...

It completely depends on the school.....

The easiest way to get round this is to set your bloody status. Perhaps to "wonders whether their should be there."?

"His" used as gender-neutral sounds odd to me, I don't think I've ever heard someone using that. "Their" is fine and what I was taught in school.

sD.

I agree with the above poster. you're a douche.

and seriously, it's the lecturer you should be complaining about not the student.

If you had a real life job and your boss took a nasty customer's side instead of your, you wouldn't have been oh-my-godding about the customer, but how awful your boss treats you. why the difference ?

I agree with the above poster. you're a douche.

and seriously, it's the lecturer you should be complaining about not the student.

If you had a real life job and your boss took a nasty customer's side instead of your, you wouldn't have been oh-my-godding about the customer, but how awful your boss treats you. why the difference ?

I agree with the above poster. you're a douche.

and seriously, it's the lecturer you should be complaining about not the student.

If you had a real life job and your boss took a nasty customer's side instead of your, you wouldn't have been oh-my-godding about the customer, but how awful your boss treats you. why the difference ?

Having had a "real life job" (um, and working is academia is not?) - I can tell you that in these kinds of situations, when you encounter a student who is out of line and is trying to screw you over to get a better grade, and your superior hangs you out to dry and gives in to them -- you complain about both the student and the lecturer. The two are not mutually exclusive. Same as I would complain both about a jackass customer and my jackass boss. The situation in academia is sometimes much worse than in "real life": you often depend on the instructors you TA for to fund you, advise you (i.e. meet with you on a regular basis, read your work, suggest new directions you should take - generally look out for you and try to advance your research), ultimately approve your dissertation, help you network and write recommendations for future jobs for you. It might not be the case here, but relationships between students and faculty can be very convoluted and they are often very frustrating. People need to vent. That's what anonymous forums are for.

I agree with the above poster. you're a douche.

and seriously, it's the lecturer you should be complaining about not the student.

If you had a real life job and your boss took a nasty customer's side instead of your, you wouldn't have been oh-my-godding about the customer, but how awful your boss treats you. why the difference ?

Depending on at which school you're attending, the quality of the undergraduate population will vary quite a bit, as will the quality of the grad student population..

I hope you read what you've written again from an outsider's perspective and realise how elitist and douchey you sound. As an undergraduate in a high performing research laboratory taking graduate level physics and chemistry courses, I experienced this elitism from the first-year graduate students every year and it was quite satisfying to stomp on their faces come exam time. Just because you've gone through an additional selection process doesn't mean you walk on clouds and are a higher authority on a topic than one of your pupils. There will always be undergraduates, college dropouts, and high school dropouts who are more qualified than you are in some subject material.

I understand that your cohort's behaviour serves to solidify your sense of kinship and shared experience, but it's kind of petty and antithetical to the basis of academic intellectualism to criticise a population based on hierarchical orderings of goodness. Perhaps you should all discuss your latest poetry stanzas regarding the flowers of Spring or whatever it is you do instead of practise ego-inflating elitism at the expense of others.

You dig?

I will admit though, that the student you mention is completely out of line, though I don't know what his age has to do with it. It sounds almost as if you have disdain for him for being older than you and for being in an allegedly inferior social position at the same time.

I’ll try to be brief on this, and more info is available upon request.

Why do students try to test you? To know the full story, undergrad freshman surveys at my school are tag-teamed by three grad students. The lecturer is a PhD candidate, and the two TAs are either MA students or PhD students. The lecturer handles class twice a week, while the TAs get students in smaller discussion classes once each week.

An older student (claims he’s 28) in my class recently sent the lecturer several nasty emails about me. Eventually I got the emails and these skewer me, claiming I’m a big jerk in class, I’m incompetent, and that political affiliation factors into the grading criteria.

The student has an attendance problem (and this is something my university takes seriously because of student retention stats and whatnot). Had he attended classes with some consistency, he’d know what he did wrong on his essay, and know that he didn’t follow protocol by approaching me with any problems he has with the class.

I don’t particularly like the way the lecturer handled this. He upped the guy’s grade to placate him, and I agree with that to an extent. But doing so kind of reinforced the student’s ridiculous claims, which the lecturer did not even address in his return email to the student.

Luckily for me he hasn’t been back to class in three weeks now. But what happens when he does return? Should I talk to him? Should I point out how I graded his pathetic essay? Or should I just ignore him?

Three years into it and 90% of my evaluations from previous semesters are amazingly positive. This kind of hurts and I believe the student is trying to place enmity between the lecturer and me…to exploit some kind of weakness in the system. What do you guys think? Why do students test us? I’m beginning to believe that this student’s worldview makes him resistant to any information that conflict with it. His essay was a rant against the government, and get this, the student claims he’s military retired at age 28. C’mon!

YES!

And you know my last two by now, I'm sure:

- do I have to exchange sexual favors to print
- and is the library beautiful?

They will reimburse you - no school wants a reputation for stiffing potential grad students.

I just got in and I live abroad. One of the departments I just got into suggested this: combine the trips. Schools have a certain amount of money to offer (this one offered $300), but if you got two departments to pony up money, that's 600, etc. That will make a much bigger dent in the cost of traveling from overseas. I originally wasn't planning on visiting but now I'm considering it.

I found this posted on the Who Got In Philosophy 2010 Blog and thought it was pretty good- "Hitler finds out about his philosophy grad school applications." Then it made me wonder if anyone else had things like this to post. It's always good to make fun of ourselves a little bit.


Hitler finds out about his philosophy applications:

a. Don't you think that alcohol is pushing it ? I don't know how old the guy is, and if he ever drinks. Also, alcohol tends to be pretty expensive...
b. I come from Israel. Wouldn't a CD / book of alocal band/author come out as interesting ? what do the amreicans in this forum think ?

a. Don't you think that alcohol is pushing it ? I don't know how old the guy is, and if he ever drinks. Also, alcohol tends to be pretty expensive...
b. I come from Israel. Wouldn't a CD / book of alocal band/author come out as interesting ? what do the amreicans in this forum think ?

Dear Schools,

Haven't heard from you in a long time.

Is it something I said(or wrote in my SOP)?

Me

Wow, that is fast! Thanks for the data point - one is definitely better than none right now

*resumes intense staring at phone*

Walk up to the hottest girl i know and kiss her!

They actually do not meet.
They draw a circle on the ground, climb on top of their building and throw the applications in the air. All applications within the circle qualify for the next round. Then they repeat the game until the desired number of candidates has been reached.
In more traditional schools they make paper planes with the applications and the ones which fly further are selected. That's why I tried to do as much as possible online, so that my aircraft is lighter and thus flies better. This is why some people with lots of published papers get rejected if they send the papers along with their app: it just makes the plane crash.