Good Advice for Prospective Grad Students

“tell graduate students their work is boring and no one is interested in it.”

That’s what seminars are for.

Here’s another good one based on a student last year: don’t spend your entire time here complaining how awful the university is, call the department head a liar to his face, generally inconvenience everyone, and badmouth the department head to his grad students for hours on end.

“tell graduate students their work is boring and no one is interested in it.”

Don’t do this, or the equivalent, if you are interviewing for corporate jobs either. Or after you are hired. Because you might piss off everyone who works with you, and you’ll just have to go to medical school after all. Luckily for you, your six months in the corporate world — which you got because of your winning personality, in the opinion of someone who was not bianca steele — will immensely approve the appearance of your application.

But John, grad schools are not palaces. At least not where I am from.

Hill forts are too early for feudal, if indeed that is a term that should be used in this context.

Its the lack of luxury that makes it hard. Otherwise Wall Street would be perfect.

(I am sorry)

I’ve known admitted grad students to do, roughly, the 4th and 7th things mentioned above. There were no repercussions, though (one problem with guaranteeing funding to all admitted students …)
Also, there was the time when a prospective student got drunk and fell asleep at a reception for admitted students. But, hey, the whole admits-weekend period can be pretty tiring.

MF: “definitely;” “feudal:” it didn’t used to be parties that were make or break. We looked at simple things, like spelling.

Oh, I don’t know, sure it sucks for them individually, but I’ve always thought that people who telegraph their unpleasantness fairly early on are doing their potential employers/professors a favor. It’s a much better situation than, say, when folks seem superficially nice at first but then become major pains after the institution has finalized its instructional and/or financial investment in them.

one problem with guaranteeing funding to all admitted students

.. not a problem if you have your recruitment weekend before final decisions about who gets admitted. That’s what we do and I highly recommend it. Yes, it’s a bit more money up front since you’re paying for more students to visit, but think of the long-term savings not just in stipends, but faculty time and sanity as well.

MattiJ

I have a theory that there’s a special kind of guilty pleasure involved in using derogatory language yet protecting oneself against consequences.

Yep. Whenever I want to indulge in it I find the nearest English person and start telling them how wonderful England is. I get a delightful flustered-spluttering-outrage from them without any feelings of guilt on my part. It’s fun. (England, not Britain, there are Scots and Welsh people who think that their bit of the UK rocks).

Yes, I did think of that dsquared, but under the circumstances I didn’t think the commentor or the post had in mind married lesbian department heads and lesbian grad students either.

We’re assuming are we that all department heads are male, and all grad students are male?

I recently pulled up – for no good reason – an econ job market rumor mill thread (don’t remember where/which one) and the level of sexism on it was seriously disturbing.

I recently pulled up – for no good reason – an econ job market rumor mill thread (don’t remember where/which one) and the level of sexism on it was seriously disturbing.

Economics has a higher percentage of male students than lots of physical and engineering sciences and there is a reason for that …

‘all grad students are male’

or that conspicuously obnoxious behaviour is more common among male grad students?

In “Yvain” the protocol was to kill the master of the castle, hide in the palace during the medieval three-day mourning period, and then marry his wife. I don’t wee why this wouldn’t work in an academic setting.

Also, your horse should be cut in half by the falling porticullis while you’re riding it, slightly injuring your heel in the process.

Feudal! Feudal! Feudal! Luther is feudal! Dante is feudal! Boethius is feudal! The petchenegs are feudal! Jagiiello is feudal! ADM is feudal! It’s everywhere!

“Economics has a higher percentage of male students than lots of physical and engineering sciences and there is a reason for that …”

I’m not sure that’s really true anymore, if it ever was.

Why did you choose to go to a faggy econ school?

John, there’s delightfully crude satire, and then there’s mere boorishness, and 32 and 35 clearly fell on opposite sides of that line.

It seemed funny at the time, but I guess it wasn’t. I was putting myself into the sexist economics student role to enthusiastically.

Around 1525 Jagiellons ruled Poland, Lithuania, Bohemia, and Hungary, though the realms weren’t united. This despite their famously late marriages and low fertility.

Anyway. dsquared, data?

You got the causality reversed. That’s why I went to grad school. (No, not really, but anyway…)

Another for the list: avoid going to social gatherings beforehand that may involve the interviewers (eg a national physics students society meeting); its hard to muster the necessary gravitas when meeting your prospective head-of-department having seen him drunk, doing the conga the night before.

I, for one, will never use a word that specifies gender again. Better safe than sorry.

Cryptic ned

Good policy. Who knows who you might accidentally offend by using crazy words like “wife” or “husband”. Truly that sort of behavior has to be stopped.

“So even when someone is telling a SPECIFIC story they should not use words that specify gender? Really?”

I’ve long had a rule—that, upon consideration, I admit I haven’t followed for several years—that I avoid mentioning gender and race and similar when describing something or telling a story unless that fact has specific relevance.

This may seem excessive, and avoiding mentioning gender is difficult, but most of us are so culturally sensitive to these kinds of things and are biased with stereotypes, that it’s helpful to explicitly go against the grain.

I had a friend/roommate who I had been complaining/venting to for weeks about a coworker. One day, my friend visited my work and met that coworker. Later, he told me how astonished he was to discover that my coworker was black. Why hadn’t I told him, he asked me, with an incredulous tone. This was in the eighties.

In the same sense that most of us, today, rightly recognize that my friend was at least a little bit racist and this was revealed by the obvious fact that he thought that knowing the race of my coworker was perhaps one of the single most important things to know about him (and thus he couldn’t imagine why I hadn’t mentioned it), it’s worth considering that the very same dynamic applies to the almost universal need to know the gender of someone as a key fact. When we insist on knowing the gender of someone second-hand, we’re doing so because our thinking is very sexist and knowing this fact establishes in our minds a huge range of assumptions about them. This is the very foundation of sexism.

It’s good to work against this. It’s good for people to discover that they merely assumed someone was male simply because gender wasn’t specified.