thestage

While this is certainly true, a large part of me can't help but realize that the fact that this is an actual, serious argument for the procurement of a PhD, and one that people aren't likely to question, is incredibly depressing.

god the boulder undergrad scene is obnoxious boulder is kind of weird in that it is associated with both extreme SUP BRO!!!111 ASU style frat idiocy and exuberance-of-youth hippy everything. and then on top of that it's one of the more educated (by metrics) cities in the country, and CU is a top tier state school. anyway I dunno I can't say I've done the everyday commute to Boulder from Denver or anything, but if you're not on the 9 to 5 and don't live on the wrong end of town, it can't be that bad, right?

Colorado suburbs are as depressing as any other suburb. If you don't want to live in Boulder for economic reasons, look to Denver instead, which is much closer to Boulder than I think people unfamiliar with Colorado commonly think (though I do wonder if you'd feel like a bit of a pariah not living in Boulder, which is much more of a bubble than most college towns.)

Most certainly. But for the record I would look at this as a very depressing trend

But we're not talking about undergraduate degrees, we're talking about the MA. I don't think that STEM undergraduates have an inherent advantage, because there are only so many STEM jobs. Those degrees are direct paths to entry level positions in those fields, but if there are X jobs and X + More Than X degree holders, that is quite irrelevant. In the broader job market, Mr. Boss Guy at Cubicle Encorporated isn't super interested in why you think chemistry is a more productive field than history. So there's that. But that changes quite substantially at the MA level, where there will never be more postgraduate degree holders in STEM fields than there are, at the very least, entry level positions, whereas the humanities MA does not at all offer a clear path to employment. If we get to the point where the BA is so assumed and so valueless that general employment people begin to look to MA holders as they once did BA holders, then yes, I would assume the MA would hold objective value. But I would have to be shown that that is indeed the case--and if it were it certainly wouldn't be something to be celebrated, as in that scenario you aren't earning anything with the MA so much as you are propping up the complete depreciation of what you already have. And of course we'd be further locking people from lower class families into the lower class, unless the government starts to offer financial aid for graduate studies to the degree that occurs at the undergraduate level, which has about a zero percent chance of ever happening.

I question the validity of any of these unnamed studies that don't control for ability. And so does he, for the record. And of course I'm being elitist--we're talking about elite degrees. Objectively. Do you have an MA? Congratulations, 95% of the populace (or whatever) doesn't. What's your point? If you are questioning my assertion that smarter, richer people are more likely to earn an MA than poor or stupid people--well, I don't know what to tell you. How many poor people are realistically finding the money to earn an MA? Or prioritizing an advanced degree? How many people of below average aptitude according to any number of statistical indicators are both seriously persuing a post graduate degree, and then getting past admissions committees? I'd advise you to look to the same kinds of studies you are referring to. Also unmentioned in this thread: subject matter. An MA in a STEM field, I would think, is almost certainly going to give you an economic leg up as a direct result of the degree. In English? Where there is no clear employment niche at all?

I just didn't see them. Big, big difference between a BA/S and an MA. The first is, at this point, an assumed degree. You might not have one, but you will feel the need to justify yourself if you don't. It's a general education thing, a proof of competence (though it of course isn't even any of those things in reality). It's basically a modification of that old adage about marriage: at least someone, somewhere didn't find you completely awful. An MA, by contrast, is a professional degree, entirely unassumed, and comes with the (popular) taint of academia without the ability to actually find employment in academia. Of course you might be right anyway, but the correlation between undergrad and MA degrees is pretty suspect. I won't pretend I have evidence, but none of those claims seem all that extraordinary to me. Of course you can't measure 3 in any broad, objective sense, and 1 and 2 assume that richer and smarter people, respectively, are substantially more likely to earn an MA than poor and stupid people, but those assumptions themselves seem pretty innocuous.

Five people? Really?

That says nothing about the degree itself. What it says is as follows: 1. People from higher income families tend to earn more than people from lower income families 2. Smarter people tend to earn more than stupider people 3. People with some measure of dedication and/or personal drive tend to earn more than people without those qualities Crucial element: the MA itself does not confer any of those things

Better Rilke, and a real favorite line of mine, from the first Duino Elegy: For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear, and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains to destroy us Your translation mileage may vary.

from the you know you're a lit nerd when department: I wanted to make sure I got that quote right, so I googled it. problem is I just typed in "tomorrow" and actually expected that to be the first result.

hey wait here's another obvious one for app season tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time

HEY I GET IT

All art is quite useless I'm sure you all know the source

Latin, for the record, seems to usually involve the Aeneid. At least I've had multiple professors in multiple fields indicate such.

I would bet just about my life savings (I guess I wouldn't be out much) that any German translation examination would at least include Goethe.

Whelp, baring something crazy this is the end of the road for me. Another year, another go, I guess--many of my deficiencies are correctable, but I can't help but feel the road ahead is extremely long and tiresome. I wish my undergrad was of any use.

Well, there's one acceptance posted now. Is it real? Can anyone claim it? rainy_day said the acceptances weren't supposed to go out until the end of the week, but it is very possible that whoever told him/her that was themselves mistaken. This is pretty much it for me, so I'm on high alert here.

god not another week of this

My guess is that because they delayed the deadline by five days, they are delaying announcements by that same period of time. Nevermind that none of the committees are meeting in December anyway.

Man, my email has been down all day. So glad I didn't apply to Harvard, I would've jumped out a window by now.

Four acceptances, I believe. But yeah, either way--it's a done deal.

There's a second acceptance up now, though it says it came from "Yale Divinity School" Mistake, or troll? Combined with the other one... ok now the divinity school has been corrected. pretty sure if you didn't get a call from Yale it isn't looking good.

If you haven't heard back from them yet, you did not get into the MFA program. They've already sent out acceptances. And yeah, I tried for the joint as well. I figured that the joint applications would be looked at holistically and a decision would be made on whether to admit to that particular program, and then if the application was rejected it would be referred to each separate department. Turns out that's not the case--they actually just send the app to both departments (makes the application fee a 2 for 1, at least), and if both happen to admit you, then you get into the joint. I wish I would have known this beforehand because it sort of affects the SOP, which I wrote as an answer to the question "why do you specifically want to work in both of these fields simultaneously?" So now the PhD adcom is looking at an SOP that spends a good portion of its limited space discussing my creative writing. You know, in case getting into Cornell needed to be more difficult.