I'm doing a degree now (it's a foundation degree but it counts!) and I'm very happy about it. We also don't have a uni thread as far as I can see, so here we are.
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I'm doing a degree now (it's a foundation degree but it counts!) and I'm very happy about it. We also don't have a uni thread as far as I can see, so here we are.
I doubt there's enough of you to sustain an entire thread.
This will be Spoonsky's diary in a year or so.
We have a fucking DIY thread, so we're having this. Spoonsky and I will have all the bants in here.
Currently writing a yearly report for the NSF. Making so much shit up 'cause truth is, I've achieved fuck all this year. :cool:
Going to have to start writing UCAS references soon. Weird to be on this side of it.
I'm in the midst of applications at the moment. I'm probably going to apply early to Columbia, but today my dad did one of those financial aid calculators and it said that we'd still have to pay $30,000 a year. Fuuuuck. For the first time in my life I have no idea where I'll be in a year from now, which is a strange feeling.
Not worth it.
I'm at uni for 2 years doing a counselling course, albeit only 1 day per week.
What course are you doing/where are you studying Simon? And is the plan to do a full degree afterwards?
Starting a maths masters this year and I have to hand in a ten page plan on the dissertation topic I've chosen next week after having never even met the tutor yet. :moop:
I've been meaning to finish my dissertation for about 18 months now, but work keeps getting in the way all the time. Really need to get it done by the end of the year or I might have to take some units again due to possible (likely) changes in the course.
I'm in a similar boat. I just need to get it done as having the MSc opens doors but I find the subject matter so fucking boring.
Leave it for a week and go back to it (unless it has to be in tomorrow).
I know you're really dying to go hipster it up in NYC, but you will have plenty of time to do that in your life, plus you will enjoy it way more once you turn 21 anyway. Paying 30k a year for it is not worth it, especially since I am sure you will have cheaper alternatives in other cool cities at a fraction of the price.
EDIT: Would you be taking loans, or would your parents pay? If they're paying then might as well go for it.
Re: the first point, idk actually, NYC is expensive as fuck. Maybe in Queens or something (which would still be cool, don't get me wrong).
I really, really don't want to take on any loans, and certainly not any substantial ones. 30K is probably pushing the far borderline of what my parents could pay. If it was 20K, plus scholarships and whatever my grandparents kick in, then we might be able to fenagle it.
I'm getting increasingly annoyed at the bad English of some of my teachers. It just makes it impossible to concentrate.
So I've started thinking that this counselling course is a bit much to be taking on alongside a full-time job. It's only the second week so there's still time to adapt, mind you. I'm gonna be having to do a placement on my day off though and also get counselling myself as part of the training, so it could get a bit full on.
That's true. At least now you know you will be in college, even if you don't know exactly where it will be located.
My plan after college is to go crazy for a little while and move to a Craigslist apartment in somewhere like Istanbul. Or get a job on a cruise ship, that's a big goal of mine.
Monday: 10-12 English Grammar Workshop
Tuesday: 10-11 Writing the Past Lecture, 18-19 Writing the Past Seminar.
Busy year...
Although I do have to do 3 pieces of coursework from last year, I don't know when those need to be handed in, if they will make me do some extra classes on those etc etc.
Leo just wants to get laid. Bless.
$1 beers, mate. And you can save virtually all your income that you don't waste on alcohol. (If the cruise ships is what you're referring to).
And all the staff are sleeping with one another.
That's because you get fired if you sleep with a passenger. There's a trade-off.
Do you know someone who works on one?
That sounds miserable spoons. Get better ambitions. You don't need to leave land to do something like that.
It's not exactly a career ambition, it would be a way to save a lot of money (relatively, Mr. Big Oil Man) without needing a lot of qualifications, and while still hopefully having a good time. If it was indeed miserable then I'd obviously quit, but I think it sounds sort of fun.
My friend's brother works as a photographer on a cruise ship and seems to be making mega-bucks. It doesn't sound like he was particularly experienced or even talented before he started, so you should look for an in there.
lol at Foe
I have to submit an author biography of 'no more than 50 words' to go in my book. I said I would rather not, because 1) privacy; 2) self-indulgence in books annoys me; 3) unemployment, but they told me earlier that it is MANDATORY. In that case I'll probably just list where I have studied, but I am open to lol suggestions.
Mention this place, we might get a few newbies out of it.
With Lofty as Slim Pickens riding the bomb as the cover image.
:D
Yes!
They sent me a load of stock images to choose from for the cover, but they're all shit, and this would cost me five-hundred quid to licence (lol), so bollocks.
You actually get to choose the cover?
They will pay for a stock photo, or you can use whatever you pay for yourself, and then you give them loose instructions of how you would like to see everything designed around it. If I can't charity case an old photograph out of the archive I'll just ask for white letters on a black background, otherwise they will come up with some right GCSE textbook-looking shit.
I meant that I was surprised you got to choose the cover rather than the other academic that you're publishing it with.
This is for the one I'm doing myself. I'll just go along with whatever for the other one.
"Apart from his academic work, Betts writes a blog at thethirdhalf.co.uk." Academia loves blogs these days. Or make a Hillsborough joke.
I've always wondered why academic books have such shitty cover designs and images. Is it just because they're too broke to get a proper image? You've got to be able to find something.
Use the Spoonsky picture of him an Amigo or the Lofty rollercoaster.
Also - where is the big man?
What's the subject Lewis? Is there any better item for a TTH Competition?
Has anyone ever mentioned that Taz looks like Rowan Atkinson in Mr Bean form?
The title is Duncan Sandys and British Nuclear Policy-Making, and it's about Duncan Sandys and British nuclear policy-making. I wanted to call it The Impossibility of Defence: Duncan Sandys and British Nuclear Policy-Making, but I'm not big enough to go around adding cold opens to otherwise tedious academic texts.
I love it.
Best journal article title I've ever seen was 'The Unbearable Whiteness of Skiing' which was a sociological study on race amongst ski resort staff, I think. I didn't actually read it, just saw it on jstor once.
What's wrong with that formula? It would sure make Lewis' title a lot more intriguing, for one. Otherwise nobody who doesn't already know who Duncan Sandys is will probably look twice at it (which is perhaps what he wants).
Something that is awful though is when writers (it probably happens more with journalistic stuff and pop history books but academics still sometimes do it) use stupid obscure chapter titles that give no indication what each chapter is about.
Agree with that.
On the topic of covers, Lewis, I think you could do a lot worse than just an old black and white photo of Sandys.
The only things that really annoy me are epigraphs. If it's that revealing use it in the text, and if it's irrelevant poetry or a Bible quote just fuck off.
Epigraphs make sense in fiction or poetry, because you're not always going to be able to squeeze a certain quote into the text. I agree with you more in academic contexts.
That's a point. I forgot the acknowledgements/dedications. I covered mine in twenty-six words, and I've seen proper people doing it in half a page. Yet some incontinent sorts feel the need to tell you how the last three years of their life have unfolded and fill it with crappy asides ('and for putting up with my eczema!'). Get lost, love.
Fourth-year students tend to be the most gratuitously overwrought, because it's the biggest thing they've written, by some margin, up to this point.
We get it. You want to thank everyone. It's a fourth-year thesis, not the cure for cancer.
Considering an MBA at my undergrad school; talk me out of it.
Pros: It would be easy to get in, still is quite well-respected (Top 3 in Canada), allows me to enter recruitment next year as a "new grad" after my startup venture (which, apparently, is a big concern - some places only hire people with a degree that has a certain year on it for entry-level positions)
Cons: I know I could crack an Ivy League MBA school, but that requires work experience (which is proving quite difficult currently, given my "not a new grad" status)
Oh, EDIT: Obviously I'd be concentrating in Finance, which is where I'd ultimately like to end up.
You finding something 'quite difficult' must throw you into existential crisis.
If you do choose to use your own image, can you let me hide a Lofty in there?
I hoped you would have seen the Lofty suggestion on the last page.
@Lewis:
If Random is getting a mention for that, I've earned one as well, MATE.
Not really; hiring for this sort of thing is largely standardized, so I see where they're coming from given my lol experiences fucking around with startups.
Just start your own company mate. And then hire me.
I'll just include 'Hi TTH' somewhere and cover everyone.
I found the sickest bathroom on campus!! If any of you guys ever come through i'd be more than happy to take you to this spot, its really nice
I actually haven't yet, but thanks for the idea.
Hey Mok, let me know if you meet someone named Daela at Stanford.
Fb says i have a few mutual friends with her. is she cute? i cant tell because her eyes are obscured in literally every pic. never a good sign
She is cute but also Polynesian so I guess it depends how racist you are.
In other news, I've applied to Columbia University. Hold me lads.
I don't think I have ever done as poorly in a test as I just did on my Optics one. I really can't be arsed with this shit anymore. Two more courses to go still...
Just passed the deadline for applying to a semester abroad (fees paid by the Danish government), my first priority is University of Virginia. Only had four U.S. unis available for my study, applied to three of them. Here's hoping I get in, though I highly doubt it.
Which ones did you apply to?
Why UVA?
The options I had were: UVA, San Francisco State, North Florida and Wisconsin. I researched a bit on the internet and it seemed that the best option academically was UVA, also San Francisco might be too expensive to live in even for a semester.
If I don't get in for America I'm probably going to apply for Erasmus in the UK.
Wouldn't you get housing? Every exchange student I have ever met does. UVA and Wisconsin are good schools.
Depends how much of a priority the academics are. I can tell you that spending a semester in San Francisco, if affordable, would be brilliant and would blow all the other places out of the water. It's the best city in the world.
From the presentation that I was given here at uni, tuition fees are covered, not housing but the Danish government has some extra grants we can apply for if we get accepted.
I didn't mean in terms of social life, no, because I've only ever been there by myself or with my family. The social life within the university would probably be pretty standard, I'd say, except with many more things to do with whoever you make friends with. San Francisco is, block-for-block, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and it's filled with lovely, at times random-seeming places to explore or just hang out in. Even if you never met anyone you could still have a brilliant time just walking around or taking the bus to different places, if you're independent you'll never run out of things to see or do. I could write an essay about it.
UVA and Wisconsin are both good schools and would give the classic American college experience. Madison is a great college town. The schools are huge though; intro classes could have two hundred people in them.
San Francisco State is good too, but the Bay Area is prohibitively expensive. It may also be more of a commuter school with the majority of students working full time.
I have actually heard very good things about Wisconsin and Madison in particular. I'd choose that over UVA if you don't mind the cold.
What the fuck is this bullshit?Quote:
Please read the attached chapter from Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson The Oral History Reader
and come prepared either to
(a) talk about why the personal history of a particular family member or friend should be recorded (i.e. in an interview)
or
(b) talk about an eye-witness interview that would enhance (or would have enhanced) a written assignment
(b) sounds like a rephrasing of "provide evidence that primary evidence is better/more meaningful/etc. than secondary evidence"
They want you to talk about how personal histories are worthwhile sources because over time they become 'distorted', which allows you to churn out even more histories of x by accounting for the personal and social forces that have led to that distortion. For example the eye-witness interview would be subject to all sorts of pressures over time, so it would enhance a written assignment because you could discuss how their version of events has come to differ from other versions, why it differs, what effect those differences have had on the person, how the event is remembered, and so on and so on.
I've just applied to an MSc in International Business + a CEMS Master in International Management. Exciting times; it means I may be at the LSE for a semester, or perhaps with @Bernanke in Sweden.
:cool:
Welcome to our expensive alcohol and beautiful women.
I trust you'll be on your best behaviour when we're out with the AIK lads at Berns.
I've got an interview with Columbia tomorrow. Did you do one with Stanford, Mok?
Is that for early choice or whatever they call it, or the regular application process?
Early decision, yup. If they accept me* I'm going.
*and pay me enough
I apparently have two sets of interviews for the MSc program, but then business schools operate differently.
Quick help from you forriners here. I'm doing a marketing research project where I need to gauge interest for a foreign brand entering the Swedish market, so I need tips. Give me a few "well-profiled" brands. My fallback is KFC or Domino's, but "restaurants" are a bit boring.
Uber seems like a really good idea. It'd be a really interesting shout, because they have a quite non-traditional model and they're moving into a very traditional sector.
We have Uber. :( It's amazing.
I'm trained in this shit and the ones they love are things like hair shampoos, toothpaste etc - products everyone uses, but where their consuming habits are quite hard to break and there's already a clearly defined range of such products in the local market. The brand is therefore everything because let's face it, all toothpaste is pretty much the same. With Uber the attraction is less the brand than the actual product diferentiation.
Got my ass a counselling placement :cool:
I'm also getting my own counselling, which is fun. Genuinely it is. It's fucking fascinating working stuff out. Counsellor has a pretty easy job too as it's mostly just for my own personal growth rather than anything being a huge issue for me. We have to see a counsellor for at least 20 hours to become one ourselves, just to make sure that there's no ongoing issues which might trigger us if someone talks about it in a session.
Uber was a total godsend when we were in the US this summer. Cost around $4 to get to restaurants within a couple of miles and meant we could drink without worrying about how to get back to the hotel. We really missed it in the states that didn't have it. A 5 minute taxi to the airport in Vegas cost $40, whereas in LA we paid $12 for a 15 minute Uber to LAX.
I use it whenever I visit friends in London too - there's just no contest between it and regular taxis. It's quicker, cheaper, more convinient and the drivers aren't arseholes (usually). Taxi companies are on borrowed time.
I assume it has to be a brick-and-mortar place or some sort of consumable, because any consumer durable will end up there one way or another.
How about Bass Pro Shops - there's a strong outdoorsy side to Swedish culture, nej?
Expedited through to the final round of my MSc application, and have a final round interview for my MBA on Friday.
Fuck yes, gentlemen. Fuck. Yes.
Also, @Bernanke: they do a lot more than just fishing gear. It encompasses all sorts of outdoors-y stuff (including selling guns in 'murrica). The stores are an attraction in themselves.
Got both the MSc and MBA offers with scholarships. I really appreciate those of you who took the time to help out with my application essays.
That's outstanding news. Which one are you going to take?
I've already accepted the MSc offer - given my (lack of corporate/real) work experience, and the work terms built into the MSc, it makes the most sense from a future employability standpoint. It's also a really, really cool program blending international work experience, case-based learning, and (probably) the best Career Management team in the country.
Over 350 likes on Facebook as well. Disgusting.
Article due tomorrow. Gave it to my advisor on Friday and so far he has managed to review two paragraphs, which need 'significant rewrite,' his only comment say.
How/why does an article have a due date? Is it part of your assessment?
I applied to Stanford last night. Watch out Mok, here I come.
Don't you have to be Asian (or pass as Asian like Mokkers) to get into the big Western ones?
Not really. Berkeley is quite Asian (I applied there too last night) but Stanford seems pretty diverse.
MokBull, did you have to write all those absurd supplemental essays for Stanford? What is the most significant challenge that society faces today? (50 word limit)
They want you to tweet it, Spoon (ugh).
'Muslims. Muslims. Muslims. Muslims. Muslims...'
I think I'm going to apply here. It looks crazy but I think it would be pretty cool. I did a Skype interview with them last night (at their request - I haven't even finished the application either) and it went well, though I couldn't sort out the cameras and she had to talk to my feet for 45 minutes.
That all might be irrelevant, though, because I hear from Columbia tomorrow. There's no way I got in. There's no way...
Remember reading about that one. Looks interesting although I'm not sold on the computer based shit they seem to be all about. If you want to go 'crazy' go for something like New College of Florida or St. John's College.
Columbia was the early admissions thing right? I take it that's your favorite of the lot?
I wasn't much convinced on the computer stuff either but talking to this girl about it convinced me somewhat.
Yeah. Most of my friends, if they applied early, are finding out on the 15th, I think I'm the first one out of all of us.
Where your SATs etc. in the ballpark? I would assume someone with two Professors as parents is a shoe-in.
Do they still require you to know how to swim?
My SATs were probably slightly on the low end but definitely in the range. I also know how to swim, though I don't think they require it.
The supplemental essays were pretty fire. Make them unique without being the kid that overdoes it
"In the beginning i was a fetus. But now, through sheer determination and hard work, i am LEO"
Good luck man. Is that Minerva thing an online school? Why would you ever do that?
It's not an online school, the classes are just on computers using this interface they've developed (she called it "Skype on steroids"). No campus but they do all live together in dorms, and use each city as their campus more or less.
You'd lose a lot of networking potential through that, and also lose a decent amount of the college atmosphere. I'm not a huge fan of 'experimental' universities at all, its good until youre in high school but past that point you really need to be on a campus.
The word "networking" makes me uncomfortable but yeah, part of me definitely agrees with you. Another part sees the list of cities and knows that it's what I've always been dreaming of, and the education sounds pretty interesting. I don't think I'd choose it over somewhere like Pomona though.
Networking is BS and you definitely don't need to be on a fucking campus. Students in every other country in the world manage just fine without one.
Networking is BS? What planet do you live on?
Same as you mate, same as you. It's not like Spoonsky will be aiming to get a job in a bank or any other field that works that way.
With my advisor gone for the month and me leaving for vacation next Wednesday, I really don't feel like doing anything.
There is probably something to be said for sucking up to academics (especially if he has post-graduate study in mind), but yeah, he doesn't need to be going full-Luca.
On that note, I've just been assigned an exchange term at USydney. I say assigned, but I mean that my top choices (LSE and NUS) weren't available, so USydney is my top choice. NHH is also on my list because of how economics/finance heavy it is, but I'd rather not go back to Europe.
Being able to maintain a network of professional connections is important no matter what job sector you're going for
As much as I want to call you a wanker for that, Mokbull, you're probably right. Look at those of us railing against the idea - Lewis, Pepe, me - all feckless wasters.
Also, how'd the Columbia decision go?
You go to just about the best/richest university in the world. That means 1) many people will have pre-existing 'professional connections'; 2) there are people around worth 'networking' with. It's hardly typical.
Actually, I'd say it is pretty typical. Getting hired/interviews because you know someone who can put a word in is pretty common.
Obviously people get interviewed/hired because they know people. But 'networking' (which is not the same as simply meeting people) is simply not going to be that productive for the vast majority of students.
I'm happy to live in abject poverty, or something close to it, if it means no fucker can ever accuse me of having 'networked' for a single second in my life.
Deferred. Fuck me, not even the closure of a rejection. :cab:
Finish all my sodding applications by January, then wait till April for decision-making time. It's not a bad result as it opens up a lot of options for me and might be better money-wise if I do get into Columbia, but I just want to be done with it.
What does 'deferred' mean in this context? Can you network around it?
That I'll be put into the pool of regular candidates and evaluated again, and that I can apply to other schools like normal now. You'd think they could reach a decision one way or the other about me but it seems like the majority of early candidates get deferred. I blame Affirmative Action.
Why were you an early candidate? Explain the full process if you can be bothered.
Spoon will have to clarify but I think some unis let you apply early if you are really interested in the place and if they really like you they'll take you before the actual process begins. You are not really an 'early candidate,' anyone can apply early. I am guessing unis do this to lure top students before the other universities convince them to go elsewhere via better offers.
Yeah, if you've got a clear first choice you can apply "Early Decision" or "Early Action" - Early Decision is more restrictive in that if they accept you you have to withdraw all other applications (provided the financial aid is good enough), whereas with Early Action you can still wait and see if you get in elsewhere. This has the benefit for you of higher acceptance rates (though not extraordinarily so) and finishing the process much earlier if you get in, and it has the benefit for the schools of attracting top students earlier and also making sure that they get some students who really want to go there. The drawbacks for the student are that you can't compare financial aid packages (this is also a benefit for the universities) and that you have to finish your application much earlier. I did Early Decision to Columbia (they don't offer Early Action, schools usually offer one or the other).
What I was really excited about, just as much as going to Columbia, was being finished with the whole bloody process. Now I have to write a bunch more supplemental essays for different schools, and I won't find out until March 31st or so. That is what fucks me off the most, along with the general feeling of anticlimax - I still don't know where I'll be living for the next four years, and I don't even know that it won't be Columbia.
'The film that they had chosen had been getting rave reviews'
Fuck that sentence.
It was in an assignment that I had to hand in today on English Grammar. I was meant to say what kind of sentence it is and why.
I have no idea what it is, it can't be a simple sentence as there are two main verbs. It can't be a compound sentence as there is no conjunction and it can't be a complex sentence as the only complimentiser links a clause with no verb phrase (The film) to the rest of the sentence.
Either I've gone wrong somewhere in determining the lexical categories of each word or she's fucked the sentence up.
It's fucking me right up, I put complex but I didn't put a reason.
Anyone know a thing or two about this and would be able to tell me where I've gone wrong? I don't think I can wait 2-3 weeks until she has marked it.
I think it's a simple sentence, in a similar way that 'the red cat sat on the mat' is a simple sentence. It's been a few years though and I wasn't the best at that stuff, so I might be wrong.
But there are two main verbs :\
Unless I'm being stupid and chosen isn't a verb in there.
It's some past tense transitive bullshit, probably.
Yo Spoon, idk if you know this much but EA waitlists generally have a negligible acceptance rate (lower than the RD acceptance rate in any case). A lot of schools basically waitlist everyone they don't accept for early. Not sure if Columbia is one of those schools, but i know Stanford is. What are your other top choices?
Whatever kind of sentence that is it's horrible. 'The film that they had chosen' could just be 'the film they chose', surely.
Yes but she's a massive bitch who just wants to make things more complicated in order to fuck with our minds.
Edit: She's on annual leave until the 7th of fucking January so I wont get an answer until then :(
I don't think that's true at Columbia (another kid at my school got rejected for instance), from what I've ascertained the rates about the same as RD. Other top choices are Pomona, McGill, Brown, and Stanford. Speaking of which, I'm in the Bay Area till Jan 2 if you happen to be on campus for some reason.
What happened to Reed? Pomona looks good.
Reed is definitely a solid possibility still, though places like Pomona have eclipsed it slightly. I have a lot of places that I'd be really happy to attend which I think is a good thing, though it could make the final decision more difficult.
Money will probably make most of the decisions for you tbh.
I've had wobbles before - especially when I was ill and probably quite depressed if I'm honest - but at the moment I really can't shake the feeling I might want to quit medicine.
What would you consider doing instead? How do you think you will feel in x amount of years if you did jack it all in? Have you spoken to family, friends, lecturers etc etc?
I felt like quitting uni (for the second time) after my Dad died and even though I've got a shit load of work to catch up on which I have no idea how I will do it (and fuck knows about next year with my dissertation), I'm glad I didn't.
Talk to anyone and everyone you can.
Spoken to my girlfriend. She wants me to at least finish the course and then if I really don't want to do it at that point to find something else. That's probably the right thing to do to be honest.
I enjoy learning medicine - in the main - but the idea of actually doctoring just fills me with dread. I of course accept I will be nervous about it, but I should feel excited and be looking forward to it too and I just don't feel that.
I can see myself enjoying it in 10 years time when I'm qualified as a consultant doing something I enjoy, I just don't know if I can get through the journey there.
I think to stick out medicine you've got to love it - it's got to be your 'thing' - and I just don't know if I do.
To be honest I'd love to do something in food but I know I wouldn't be satisfied with it unless I got to a certain level, which might not be realistic.
I just know medicine will take up pretty much my whole life and I don't want to end up miserable.
If you jack medicine in for baking I won't rest until I've lolled you off the board.
Fuck off :D
Finish studying and apply for bake off.
Done.
Become a vet. That way you can still do medicine-y stuff but if it goes wrong and the patient croaks you can use its corpse to whip up a lovely pie :thbup:
Stick the course out. You have invested significant time and resource in it up to this point, so it would be very stupid to chuck it - especially on the incredibly vague, "but surely the grass is greener, mate" grounds you've cited.
Well there you have it. How soon can you quit?
I do intend to stick out the course unless something changes.
I just don't want to do something so all-consuming if I hate it and find it so incredibly stressful, which is how I feel about it at the moment. The thought of starting my first job makes me feel sick.
I hope when I do shadowing in fifth year I start to feel differently but I'm skeptical.
I know there isn't some magical fairy rainbows wonder job which will fall into my lap if I quit.
I haven't met a first year junior doctor yet who wasn't shitting their pants when they first started. As long as you're not scared of hard work, long hours, people who were always going to die winding up dead and the endless smell of fresh shit on gerontology wards then you'll end up just like they all do; happy with your lot and up your own arse. Stick it out.
How much have you actually done of the course so far?
Isn't there a point where you can some out with a degree but not go on further to become an actual practising doctor?
You'd never make it as a chef, RL, you're far too nice and clean cut to form a coke habit.
And your body is too weak to stand the shifts.
I expected to be shitting it, but I expected to have some positive feelings about it too, and I don't.
I talk to other people on my course and they are nervous but looking forward to it. Regularly hear people say they can't wait for uni to finish and to get started. I'd rather just stay here and avoid it forever.
I think the years out with illness fucked me over quite a bit to be honest, I've really lost a lot of confidence since and it's hard to build back up.
A masters in what though?
You might have been, but it has been a worry with the migraines whether I'll actually be able to do the job even if I make it through the course.
Which is really fucking shit to be honest. It's horrible feeling like you might be limited like that by something you can't fully control.
Also, on the point of not wanting medicine to take over your life - cheffing would too. They work horrible hours. Your Mrs is a teacher now, isn't she? You'd never see her.
I have a really obsessive personality, I reckon I'd make a smashing addict.
And if I did go into food I know I probably couldn't do cheffing as my shitty aching head would explode. I reckon I'd love doing patisserie or something though.
Edit: @Boydy and that too.
Bourdain said it was patisserie stuff that drove him head first into the Heroin as it was so stressful.
I had an interview for a summer job at Tim Kinnaird's (sorry) shop and also did that tart course with him. He was fucking loving life. I could see myself doing something like that, I really enjoy it and I feel like it comes quite naturally.
You would love a course on tarts given you are one
:D
Laughed way more than I should have at that.
It sounds like you've already failed at patisserie then if you only had the interview. I'm glad we've cleared this up. Now, about my arse...
It's a pilondial cyst.
Walked around Stanford today, the place is completely shut down and chock full of Asian tourists. Despite that it's very nice and I'd almost certainly go on the minuscule chance I got in.
@mokbull
Where'd you go? Make circles around the quad like most people do? ANd yeah the asians are there year round
Yeah we parked next to the Humanities center and walked from there in a loop more or less. Didn't quite get to Mayfield Ave. My parents really had to pee and all of the bathrooms were closed except the one in the Student Union, disaster averted.
How much time do you actually spend at the Quad and thereabouts? It's quite magnificent (as are the hills immediately to the south, look straight outta Tuscany).
You never actually hang out in the quad, you just pass it to and from class, which is all around the quad. It's too far away from any of the living quarters to be of any use.
Tresidder, though, thats a spot full of mystique and drama. Legend has it the line for Subway extends infinitely in all directions
Ahhh the hope, then he realises that the most he'll be doing for three years will be marking the ins and outs, then getting shit over exams. Or he could genuinely like that, in which case, more power to the man, albeit he's probably as interesting as a wet fart.
Spoons gimme a college update, how's it looking?
Got deferred from Columbia. Applied to a bunch more places that you'd probably disapprove of. Have a few more applications then just waiting it out till the spring unfortunately.
If he's in audit, he'll hate his fucking existence within months.
Stats? And the most important question, did you apply to Duke?
It's not my disapproval by the way Spoonsky, it's that of society at large. Do you really want to condemn yourself to a lifetime of being friendzoned and watching your female friends getting banged out by 'assholes'? You only get one last chance to not be a pussy and that's in college, don't fuck it up and resign yourself to an embittered life of an overmedicated over educated middle-class self-hating Bernie Sanders supporter.
Your egalitarian fantasies are just that, fantasies. All those idealistic liberal hell holes you build up in your mind, will organize and segregate themselves along the exact same socioeconomic lines you detest so much. But worse, they will disingenuously claim otherwise. You will be marginalized as a provincial ordinary public school kid from Utah. You didn't go to the right prep schools, your dad doesn't have a wikipedia page, and you're not sick enough to make up for it in other ways.
Listen to me. I know what I am talking about. Look at Mokbull, for all his blustering he is still in a fraternity, a former tennis star (if I'm not mistaken) and I would be surprised if he doesn't do all right for himself. This is how life works. You either buy in or you are left behind.
Have a day off, mate.
...I'm so bored at home, I need to get back to law school and hating my life
It's like Merts short absence on here was the deep breath that he took before he opened his mouth to start hurling again.
Have to give him credit, he is really committed to that persona of his.
It's not about sex, it's about status and respect in society. The female attention is an inevitable byproduct.
Stanford is a 'liberal hell hole' but it still has enclaves of 'patriarchal privilege' which can train you to thrive in the outside world (which Mokbull is shamelessly participating in). And besides, the Stanford degree and the associated network you'll develop in and of itself transforms your life into God mode, the same could not be said of some no name liberal arts school.
I'm quite enjoying him.
Unless I've read their style guidelines wrong, I will have to go through my entire manuscript and change 'quotes like this' into "quotes like this" (with similar reversals for quotes within quotes). Why? It looks crap like that, and I will inevitably miss a couple out and ruin the full thing.
:harold:
:D
It probably isn't possible to write a paragraph (or sentence) without using an apostrophe so you'd have to be some sort of anti-abbreviation deviant to manage it over anything longer.
I can"t imagine what could possibly go wrong with that approach.
I did say only if he used ' in quotes which isn't too far fetched in academic writing.
Also, with ctrl f it would highlight all uses so he could change them manually a lot easier.
So back in your boxes.
It"s still pretty farfetched.
Nobody is claiming CTRL+F wouldn"t help, but it"s hardly groundbreaking advice.
Yeah, there shouldn't really be any contractions in academic writing. But there might be some in quotes and that.
It's a massive pain in the arse anyway and goes against everything I've ever learned for quoting.
I have to clear all my own permissions as well. It's a disgrace. I should have just kept it to myself (and Benny hasn't made that Lofty cover for me).
Find and replace all of them to start with, and then find all the instances of "t, "s and replace them back. Five minute job.
There we are, that works.
As long as you include the space to remove any midsentence quotes starting T or S.
Or just chuck the whole thing, what is the point anyway.
BTW we got a high speed camera for the lab this week. Expect slow motion videos of me posting during work hours soon.
You might be able to get an article out of the visible stink lines.
Toby, well played.
Conference paper, article, book chapter, follow-up 'Some thoughts on...' article and conference paper, and then a load of spin-offs about the methodology.
None of which will ever be read or cited in subsequent research.
Oh it will be cited (by myself.)
Also my advisor asked us to heckle an environmentalist that will be presenting at a nearby university in April.
The grant money is finally in so I will be working for the Israeli Department of Defense for the next two years.
Got my ass a counselling placement sorted, starting in the next couple of weeks. Not sure if I've mentioned it on here, but I can't wait.
My friend's brother was 'offered' (told to apply by the people deciding who gets it) a post-doctoral position in Jerusalem and he BOTTLED IT.
If the money was good I would take it (I know absolutely nothing about life in Israel.) From there it is an easy path to Harold's backyard.
Starting my placement next week and I'm looking for insurance options. I've come across a website called 'therapist insurance' and it's just taken me a good 30 seconds of looking at the address to realise that it wasn't 'the rapist insurance'. I mean, I know you can get most things insured nowadays but fucking hell.
Finally handed in my MA dissertation.
:)
I thought you were done like two years ago.
Reminds me I need to fill a form so that these wankers give me my MS at the end of the summer.
I didn't even start this two years ago.
I started this in September 2014 and should've been finished September 2015 but had to get extensions because of the shitty depression and that.
I see. Congrats. :thbup:
Thanks. :)
PhD now? I am expecting you and Lewis over here before 2017.
I don't know.
The guy who was going to supervise me for the one I applied for last year (which I couldn't have done anyway given I didn't get the MA finished till now) emailed me a couple of weeks ago telling me there was more funding available for the coming year. He said I should apply for it since I still have a place there (just without funding currently). So maybe.
Although Lewis' job struggles hardly fill me with confidence for going down that path.
Well done Boyd. It's bloody hard getting stuck back into shit after that sort of break.
What was the subject, Boyd?
I wanna do a PHD one day. One day...
.....
I would recommend setting small goals. Sometimes staring down an entire assignment can feel very daunting, especially at the start. But the more you break it down into manageable chunks, the more you can drip-feed yourself feelings of accomplishment.
Also, one of the big hangups in study is the idea that you're doing it entirely at your own behest. I found that while working with people can be distracting, it's good to meet other students for regular discussion of the material. That way you wind up being accountable to someone other than yourself.
.....
I never found reading alone to be very helpful. I recommend summarizing while you read, then putting away the original document and writing your answer based on the summaries. That's how I used to do it, because just reading or reading/highlighting simply led to my mind wandering.
I don't know how it is for you, but for me, the act of writing really helped solidify it in my head.
Make some notes as you're reading. Writing down even bullet points will help ingrain it into your head and it'll come back quicker when you read them later, hopefully.
I got into McGill. http://www.allthingsninja.com/forums...ult/canada.gif
Congratulation :thbup: What are you studying?
I just underline stuff and make notes in the book I'm reading. Only if I own the book though, obvs.
That said, I used to be a right twat at uni. Just underlining stuff all over the place in library books. What a bellend.
Congratulations, eh.
Canada. :cool:
Does Canada work out much (any?) cheaper for you?
Ahh to have uni to look forward to again :drool:
I was put into lectures and seminars for all the units I deferred last year and one lecturer is sending me emails wondering why I haven't been attending. This despite being sent a letter stating I just had to complete the coursework I failed to do as well as emails after I panicked about all the timetabling.
He's still trying to get me into a seminar to do group work shit that I've already done :\
It is much cheaper. 18,000 CAD which is about $13,000 for tuition, and I don't think room/board is that much..
BUT. I just got into Northeastern (in Boston) with a full tuition scholarship.
https://cdn.fbsbx.com/hphotos-xpa1/v...c2&oe=56BCC34E
Well done :)
At the other end of the spectrum (knock it home, Tobes), medicine is still wank.
I don't think you're autistic mate.
You're Bancini, not Billy Bibbett.
Lewis did that joke before, I think.
It was actually me, I've just remembered. I said one of you and Byron would have to pick a different character when you met Lewis (McMurphy). It was a pretty great joke, really, and yet I don't think anybody laughed. Bastards.
You might just not be as funny as you think you are. :p
On an unrelated note, why do we have both : face: and : facepalm:?
At least I got the good one.
Doesn't include room and board, but still it would be cheaper than probably anywhere else bar the U. It might help with negotiating lower rates at other schools too.
Theme for this week is "Death in Childhood".
Predictably cheerful so far.
Where else did you get in?
The other schools i negotiated with were Columbia and UChicago. Stanford was pretty clearly my first choice, but they didnt have to know that.
Got into the U of Vermont. I'm on fire. :cool:
Bernie would be proud.
Is Spoons in college yet?
You could've at least gone to the effort of reading this page.
McGill's the top choice because I got in, and it's pretty cheap (thx Obama for flooding the world with Iranian oil and killing the Canadian exchange rate).
McGill is alright as a name 'brand' but you would get absolutely fucked in terms of networking and a total lack of top level recruiting for the US market. Better off being top of your class at Utah, not to mention the social life for non-French speakers will be very frustrating. They are not the most accepting bunch, especially since all of the French speaking social elite of Europe send their kids (who didn't quite get into the right schools) there. I know a lot of kids from my high school who went to McGill; Phonics can corroborate me on this.
I speak French tho.
Fluently, like a mother tongue? Regardless you're a provincial middle-class kid from Utah of all places, the French are elitist/pretentious/classist beyond anything you'll have ever experienced.
I'm telling you dude, take the full-ride to Utah and accept who you are (unless you get in somewhere truly worth it).
Don't go to Utah you fucking spastic. McGill or bust. Or Stanford obvs if you get in.
Utah would be so fucking boring if you've lived in Utah your entire life. Go somewhere else, be around different people.
I met a bunch of great people at Oxford who went to McGill. Seems to put out good grads.
I've only visited the place, but it seemed really nice when I was there.
Mert and mokbull, exactly the type of people anyone would want advice from.
Spoon would fucking wank himself into a coma in French Canada.
McGill would be perfect for him.
I was gonna say, if I'm going to "accept who I am" surely I should be putting on a scarf and moving to Quebec. Not everyone from Utah is provincial.
I've just watched The Internet's Own Boy about Aaron Swartz and his downloading of scientific journals from JSTOR, given that all of these scientific journals are not open to public access.
Why is this the case? I guess the writer sells their work to a publisher (to earn money to live/for future research) and that they publisher simply owns the work and attempts to make profit from the research - is this the case?
Would it be beneficial to scientific/medical research in general if all of these journals were completely open source?
Academic publishing is a massive racket, and the companies defend their profit margins fiercely:
And the crazy thing is, academics do the writing, they do the reviewing, and they do the editing. All for free (in some cases, even paying page fees to have their articles published). The companies basically just typeset the things and sell them at massive profits, getting the copyright to boot. And then they bundle together subscription packages so that if you want something important like, say, Nonlinearity, you need to get expensive subscriptions to Goat Intestinal Quarterly.Quote:
In an article that many of you will now have seen, Heather Morrison demonstrated the enormous profits of STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) scholarly publishers. The figures are taken from her in-progress dissertation which in turn cites an article in The Economist. It all checks out. I emphasise this because I found the figures so hard to believe. Here they are again: profits as a percentage of revenue for commercial STM publishers in 2010 or early 2011:
Elsevier: £724m on revenue of £2b — 36%
Springer‘s Science+Business Media: £294m on revenue of £866m — 33.9%
John Wiley & Sons: $106m on revenue of $253m — 42%
Academic division of Informa plc: £47m on revenue of £145m — 32.4%
There have been some steps take to rectify it, with open source journals like PLOS ONE starting to obtain decent reputations, but it's just a massively entrenched system. No academic is willing to kick their career to the curb by not posting their best work in prestigious journals, and so the cycle continues. There's just too much inertia to the current arrangement.
Thanks, @ItalAussie
So, why are academics so quick to give their work over to these publishers? There must be other ways to get your work out there, especially online? Or academics could pool together to create their own non-profit publishing arm?
It always used to amaze me how expensive academic literature was at university. I could buy the complete works of any of the most prolific fiction writers of the day for less than the price of a couple of political science textbooks. I know someone has to pay or the research wouldn't happen, but still.
Because one of the most important metrics of success as an academic is the calibre of journal in which you publish your material. Better journals are more widely read, and ensure that your work is read by the widest possible audience. If you don't publish in the most prestigious journals available to you, you're hamstringing your own career. It's great to have principles, but it's even greater to have a job.
A lot of academics have gotten quite angry about this recently, and there was a boycott a few years ago where a number of top (, top, top) academics boycotted Elsevier journals. But even they said that they couldn't recommend this course of action to early career academics, because they just had too much to lose. The movement gained a bit of traction, and a number of journals started to include open source options.
The other thing that is making this less unacceptable is that most journals will let you put preprints on a public paper repository known as the ArXiv. This means that even if the article is behind a paywall, there will likely be a free version accessible. I doubt the journals love the idea, but if they tried to stop that, the pitchforks would really come out.
On the subject of journal prices, I read about this women yesterday: http://www.sciencealert.com/this-wom...pen-up-science
Quote:
A researcher in Russia has made more than 48 million journal articles - almost ever single peer-reviewed paper every published - freely available online. And she's now refusing to shut the site down, despite a court injunction and a lawsuit from Elsevier, one of the world's biggest publishers.
That's what Aaron Swartz was basically accused/charged to be planning to do.
What a baller :cool:
EDIT: http://www.sciencealert.com/journal-...rticleReadMore
:D
I had an interview at an investment trust a while ago (didn't get it lol) and they had an investment strategy of holding stock in about 30 companies for the long term. They weren't arsed about temporary market fluctuations at all. Elsevier was one of their top holdings.
I got my peer review(!) report back from the publisher today, and the reviewer said publish it as it stands by all means, but it would be better if it made more of an attempt to be a biography of Duncan Sandys rather than just a book about his approach to nuclear policy-making. Was there a particular part of a manuscript titled Duncan Sandys and British Nuclear Policy-Making that left my intentions unclear?
Probably the bit where you left out ': *wanky metaphor*'.
Hard to turn that into a mini-series.
We had a lecture yesterday on non-accidental injury.
Fucking hell it was harrowing.
What's that, self harm?
Child abuse, basically.
I'm on paedIATRICS at the moment.
Oh. :(
It's a little known fact that the day you become a paediatric consultant you also turn into a massive cunt. Gastroenterologists, gerontologists and cardiologists are mostly nice. Respiratory doctors are evil fucks.
The paediatricians at the N and N are the nicest bunch of consultants and regs I have come across on any specialty by some distance.
They call you a wanker behind your back, I guarantee it.
:D
Nah, they are genuinely enthusiastic about what they do, which makes the teaching great. First module I've really loved in ages.
@mokbull I didn't get into Stanford.
Because I'm not a nerd. :loser:
Truuu, so where do you think you're gonna be going? Have you gotten all decision back?
McGill seems the most likely at this point. Just waiting on the Ivies and Reed I think.
Also I'd like to hear your thoughts on UC Santa Cruz and Occidental (because, y'know, same state).
It depends, what do you want to study?
Philosophy probably, or English. Minor in Art History perhaps.
Got the following email this morning, together with a text message and an automated call:
Some alarms were blaring earlier too.Quote:
A person WITH A WEAPON has been reported on the North Campus (700 Rosedale). GO TO a place that you feel safe and remain there until further notice. For additional updates go to emergency.wustl.edu
https://s.yimg.com/cd/resizer/origin...ZyKMqJRpe0.gif
Toggle Spoiler
I was given two options, but the other one had the text in a big yellow circle that looked like a clearance sale sticker. Now I just need the English Speaking Union to admit/realise that they own Lord Cherwell's papers ('Nuffield College has them'; yes, but you own them) so I can have their permission to use them, and we're off. :cool:
Dat cover. :drool:
I asked Nuffield College originally, and they referred me to the English Speaking Union. I'll ring them up today and have a whinge, but if they keep being useless I will probably end up submitting it, hiding behind the 'Every effort has been made to secure the permissions required...' disclaimer, and hoping that nobody bothers suing the publisher (why would they?).
It's a right pain in the arse, and presumably set up to provide copyright solicitors with work (possibly answering the above). The Winston Churchill people charge you by the word if you use anything from his papers, even though 1) the government spent millions on them in the nineties; and 2) half of them are government documents that it owned anyway (which was why the family were originally told to get fucked when they tried cashing in on them in the seventies). Nobody else seems to be as pissy though. They just ask for a title and some context (which I took to mean 'Is it about paedophiles?') and let you do what you want.
And another one:
:drool:Quote:
A person WITH A WEAPON has been reported on the Medical School Campus. GO TO a place that you feel safe and remain there until further notice. For additional updates go to emergency.wustl.edu
Not even close to being worth it. Go to Utah, save the money, go to some football games, join a mediocre fraternity, get laid a bit, maintain a high GPA and go somewhere exciting for grad school. You would get eaten alive by the pretentious wannabe French kids in Quebec.
It's a good job you didn't go into advertising. McGill's really cheap also, idk what kind of upper-middle-class white kid you think I am that I would save money instead of going there.
I get into Reed also, hehe. It's between that and McGill and Occidental. But I'm definitely leaning towards McGill.
The other question is whether to do a gap year or not. Definitely tempted to move to Italy for a few months.
'Sorrentino lied, mom. :('
:lol:
I have been to Italy before, you know.
:(
You didn't get into a school worth the money. That's the reality. Now you can be in denial about it and waste your families money/go into debt, or you can make an economically efficient choice for your future. Everyone I've ever met who went to Reed or Occidental emphasized that it was miserable, they regretted it, and that if they could choose again they would never go there. Everyone there is deep into drugs because there literally is nothing else to do. The girls are ugly, entitled, masculine and not interested in kids from Utah. Best case scenario you'll date a 3-4/10 Asian by Junior year.
Four years from now you will see I was 100% right. You're blinded by your ego (going to Utah would be a 'failure') and your desire to 'see the world' or whatever nonsense Bernie supporters believe in.
I wouldn't take advice from someone who can't even use apostrophes properly, Spoon.
He has a point. Boyd was in a similar situation.
At least Spoons will get a girlfriend.
Mert is a 3-4/10 Asian, so I'll defer to him there as well.
:D
When you came home rather than take the expensive London option.
I'm going to Florence for Erasmus semester in the fall. :nodd:
When President Bernie is sworn in, Mert might actually top himself
In all honesty I kind of agree with you, especially about Reed, that's why imma go to McGill and find a cute French girl instead. :rasta:
Dude you're smart enough that you could get through Utah with a very high GPA, close connections to professors (who would be impressed by your relative intelligence and genuine interest in I'm assuming a niche humanities subject), while enjoying a memorable College Experience (tm) to boot. After that, assuming you are diligent about your grades you could do a post-grad study somewhere sick (coming from Utah would add 'diversity' at that level) and you would have a very nice life / resume (with much less debt on top of it).
McGill sounds better than Utah obviously (in fact my sister might go there :| if Georgetown / Duke doesn't work out) and don't get me wrong, congratulations that's a great school and you should be proud, but I genuinely don't think you would be happier. Utah would give you the chance at a quintessential college experience which is literally invaluable / so fun and it doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. I could even get you a letter of recommendation for whatever chapter you would want to rush down the line (which you should absolutely do).
A letter of recommendation from mert. :rasta:
Back to classes on Wednesday. Left an essay until the last minute again. I should know better by know :uhoh:
Last thing we need is another accountant ffs.
Gambling full time though. :D
McGill should definitely be your top choice @Spoonsky. Occidental sucks and Reed's not much better. The "quintessential college experience" is fine but not that great (the European lifestyle is way better), and at Utah you'd be around dumbfucks. The #1 thing I've profited from by being at a top school is other people pushing me to become better. You wouldn't get that at Utah. Still probably better than those random UC's / Reed, but definitely do McGill if you can.
That's it, I'll go to McGill and bang Mert's sister.
Just got back from UC Santa Cruz and it's literally paradise though. I won't go because it's too expensive / not rigorous enough but it is so nice.
She's too snobby and entitled for you, don't get your hopes up (:arry:). Anyways she should get into Georgetown and Duke is a reach (it'll be interesting to see how much legacy status really matters) so this is all very hypothetical.
I also really don't get the pattern of the schools you applied to.
To clarify what I said earlier, I wouldn't necessarily write your letter of reccomendation but I have friends who are alumni from just about every major national fraternity, I would have them sign their name off of something you wrote yourself so it was legit.
They were mostly good (often too good lmaooo) schools in big cities, of varying sizes. My mom just told me to apply to Santa Cruz because it's really nice.
Not rigorous enough, as if any US university is 'rigorous.' Any top tier school has like a 90%+ graduation rate ffs.
We're in STATE OF ALERT as someone was shot on campus. I'm stuck in a bloody warehouse. :moop:
http://www.kmov.com/story/31774690/w...seen-on-campus
Third 'someone with a gun roaming around' alert in a month or so. One injured person this time apparently. According to my neighbour, who is a professor, it was a drive-by shooting (he could be making it all up of course.)
I thought you were exaggerating in the other thread, Pepe, but that is a pretty harrowing story.
You okay?
Accountancy is a big risk given the robots are coming for it.
I'd do something less processy if you can.
The 9-month process is over, I've paid my deposit at McGill. Feels weird man.
Adios America. :wave:
Awesome Spoon. They will be the 4 best years of your life. I'm almost done with year 3 of 4 and I already have so many regrets, but also so many memories. And I'm a totally different person than I was coming in.
And you already updated your Facebook cover photo. I take back everything I said.
I'm a slave to social norms. :(
Hang on, what are you doing creeping on my Facebook (I know I'm one to talk)? If you're going to do that just add me.
I tried adding you like 4 years ago and you never accepted so eventually i withdrew my request and now i just watch you
I'd say you smashed it. Spoons. :cool:
I reckon I've seen most of those through what my friend's wife shares. They're normally accompanied by profound comments about reforming the education system so that people stop voting Republican, and what claims to be a picture of 'Bernie' protesting man's banishment from the Garden of Eden.
About 36 hours from being done with my last exam (that I am completely and utterly fucked for) of 1L year.
It has been, easily, the worst most miserable experience of my entire life. The issue I have with the word miserable in using to describe the last nine months is that it is relative, so that your understanding of the word is grounded in your experiences of what misery feels like. The misery I am referring to is so far beyond anything I had ever experienced prior to coming to law school, I don't think it's possible to comprehend unless you have gone through something similar. I have spent the last 8-10 hours of every day for the last 6 weeks studying dense, uninteresting, idiosyncratic material, essentially on my own with little to no social interaction, and to show for it, I will be absolutely delighted to have done average relative to my peers.
People used to tell me, don't go to law school unless you really are passionate about the law and an obsessively well organized and industrious student. I thought, meh, I'm pretty smart, I've done well in school, shouldn't be too bad. It's bad. So bad. I don't know what life would have been like if I had just been another Duke kid in consulting, but I can't imagine that it would be worse than this.
I'm off to bed now, and tomorrow I will wake up again and probably pull an all-nighter going into my 9 AM, 4 hour exam. Rant over.
I well say, my sister in law went to study law and she felt the same way, the first year absolutely broke her mentally.
Living the dream, eh. Reckon you'll continue?
It's a piece of piss.
Although I've no idea about the yanks with their juris doctors and pop quizzes. As a postgrad thing do you just get bombed with 3 (1.5) years worth of work in 1 (like the GDL)?
Of course, I'm not some pussy quitter. This is the price you pay for a lifetime of prestige, socioeconomically segregated and safe neighborhoods and an attitude of sneering condescension towards the peasantry. My parents did it, now it's my turn.
I have a job this summer in the legal department of one of the top 100 largest multinational corporations in the world. I'm doing fine. But it's fucking brutal.
Lol piece of piss? You're graded on a curve alongside probably the top 1-2% smartest kids in your generation in the country, law school is a lot of things, but it's not easy.
It's 3 years, but pretty much you get the core actually important classes out of the way in the first year.
I'll admit I have no idea about the US system with it's class rankings and all. Do you need to be the x best in your year to get a job? At the end of the day, unless you are doing it for intellectual curiosity, which almost nobody does (I did, I'm an idiot), you only need to do enough to get the bit of paper (or whatever you need at the end). You don't need to read those 3000 articles on the native land rights of Australian aborigines and how they can sit within a system of private property, or whatever else. Does the US even have the more esoteric stuff we call property law (I think most/tinpot places actually split it into equities and trusts and land law)?
They probably just make it beastly to prepare you for life in a large American law firm, which, as far as I can tell, is absolute, well, misery. Good word.
An 8 week placement in a law firm was enough to convince me that I had absolutely zero interest in pursuing that as a career. What a soulless existence.
I bet I could don it. No pussy meltdowns either.
Effectively you need to score median to have a reasonable chance of getting a reasonable job (unless you qualify as 'diversity' which I do not), and you need to score top third if you want to be competitive for a top job. Think of the smartest, most sociopathic, most type A, hardest working people you have ever met. Put them in a room, and then have them compete academically against each other for their chance to snag a 160k/year job at age 25. That's what law school is like in the T-14.
I just keep my room / desk clean and work in my room for the most part. It's at the point where I think the process of going to library wastes too much time because that's maybe 30 minutes of getting everything together both ways, plus lost time for getting food, going to the bathroom, refilling water bottles, etc.
It's not sustainable and I'm utterly spent at this point. 100% dependent on nicotine and stimulants, blood pressure is through the roof and my resting heart rate is probably in the 80s. If I had to do it for one more week I don't think I would make it.
23 hours left.
We don't get any time off before exams to revise, shit sucks.
Most examinations boil down to technique. Once you crack how to get marks, the rest should flow from there.
Too right. I'll organise a strike.
Technique is king, until you get to mcq exams.
We have two multiple choice and extended matching papers (120 questions in total I think) and a short essay exam (8 shorts answers in 2 hours).
Then two days of clinical exams.
Torture.
Yes, you need to know the facts. However, there are clear ways to get marks on examinations in accordance with the mark scheme. Once you understand this, it should be much easier to mould your response accordingly. My final accounting exams included a nine hour exam over two days, without actual questions (they were buried in the narrative and you were meant to identify what needed to be done) and a requirement to pass all subjects examined or you failed the whole thing. My approach was to work out how it was marked and structured my response on the days accordingly. I ended up in the top decile for all papers, largely because I was totally confident about the way to approach it and what I needed to do on the day. Everything else flowed from there.
It's just not applicable to my exams. They are multiple choice and short essay answers to very specific questions, you either know it or you don't.
GCSEs and A-levels certainly (it's something I always bang on about when I've done any tutoring), but med exams...nah.
I do keep forgetting that medicine is special. I suppose it's probably best for patient safety. After all, we couldn't have people passing exams on the basis that they've fluked their way through a multiple choice test.
I dunno why you're being such a child about this....not everyone's exams are the same as yours and that's OK. They don't all "boil down to technique". I imagine plenty of other subjects are similar, they just aren't what I happen to be doing.
History exams have a technique to them in that you're basically just writing an essay, which I realised far too late is simply a case of producing formulaic shite; but unless you know what they are going to ask you then you won't get very far without enough knowledge to cover several eventualities. I was usually better at exams because I had the knowledge to wing most things, but I was too big a twat to wind myself in and stick to an essay formula.
I was the master of blagging good marks with limited knowledge during my academic career, but I was always careful to pick subjects with subjectivity and essays and shit. I got A* in English lit A Level despite not completing any of the books, and barely reading more than about 50 pages of half of them. Got A in English Lit AS exam despite comparing the female characters of Great Gatsby to those on MTV's My Super Sweet 16 cus I thought I was fucked so wanted to at least have a laugh as I failed.
If I had done a science subject instead of Politics at uni and put the same amount of effort in I wouldn't have even passed first year.
I just can't learn dry facts. The decision to bin off learning any anatomy was an early one.
The modules where knowing the 'perspectives' is more important than actually answering the question yourself used to do my head in, since it would inevitably mean having to memorise one bloke calling x revolutionary, one bloke emphasising continuity, and another bloke being a twat and refusing to take sides. There is no point in having that in schools.
'On the other hand, Cill E. Bastard believes that the most likely explanation involves so-called "Cultural Marxism", which he argues...'
My exams where all about making sure the units matched. I think I've studied twice since I reached higher ed.
Is there anything more pointless than academic conferences? Have to go to one on Sunday and I'm dreading it. Eight hours drive too. :sick:
Which is pointless at that level (and as stand-alone university modules really). You might as well just learn a list of dates.
They're nothing compared to professional exams. You'll survive.
Got to have a "Professionalism Committee" meeting tomorrow, due to ongoing high levels of absence because of migraines.
Can only go and tell them the truth - I really have done everything which could be expected and more to try and get on top of them - and see what they say. I'm not naive and I understand that there may come a point I have to accept that the illness I have just isn't compatible with being a doctor, but even if that's true I'd at least like to (try to) finish the course.
It's really fucking gutting having your potential curtailed by something you have a limited degree of control over.
That's incredibly rough. Surely they'll have measures in place for dealing with that kind of situation? :(
I guess the problem is their remit is to put out safe doctors, and part of that is having had a certain amount of teaching and clinical exposure. Just passing the exams (which I always have up to this point) isn't enough.
If genuine that blows, hope they look past it. We had a family friends kid who always wanted to be a pilot and spent his whole life working towards it, until it he failed like a routine vision test very late in the process (Allegedly after passing it a few times through guessing- at least that's what the rumor was) which precluded his acceptance into the Air Force.
Well, into the fire...
You have constant, random migraines? Surely that's caused by something?
Not really. I have a few things which make them worse, like stress, but no cause as such. Just another of the many failings of my weak and feeble body.
Meeting went OK. They were understanding as far as they can be, but there is a threshold at which I will be considered by the exam board regarding whether I can pass the attendance/professionalism module for the year. They tried to be kind about it but I think basically if I hit that I'm fucked.
I truly hope the best for you. Fingers crossed.
Thank you :)
http://www.theguardian.com/education...isled-students
You probably should have read it, really.
The headline total amount always seems a bit academic to me, since the majority of people won't pay it off and will have it written off after 30 years regardless.
He should just leave the country and never pay it back.
It's effectively operating as a graduate tax, so presumably we can stop whinging about it now.
It turns out that I have nine GCSEs. Why did I think it was twelve?
EDIT: BBBBBCCDE, if you're interested.
Are you counting English Language and Literature separately and double science as two and all that jazz?
EDIT: A*A*A*A*A*A*A*A*A*A*A* if you're interested.
I just thought eleven/twelve was normal, but could never remember what I got them all in, so I found them the other day. My CDDE at A-level (and an actual U in AS-level Geography) was probably worse.
It's all about just getting yourself to the next stage where you need to be. They don't actually matter very much, in the grand scheme of life.
Hopefully you won't need the last one by the end of the month.
Been in child and youth mental health/eating disorder service this week.
Absolutely fucking soul destroying.
Say hi to Magic for me.
Turned up to sit in a clinic this morning at 9.
Dr is on leave. He lectured us 2 days ago ffs, he must have known he had students, just send us a fucking email.
Get told another Dr has a clinic at 930 so decide to hang around. 'Actually it starts at 1030'. OK...maybe I'll go.
Said Dr turns up as I'm leaving and says I can join him but first patient isn't til 1030. Spent the last hour in his room on reddit and watching him sign prescriptions.
1030 comes. 1030 goes. Patient has DNAd.
Next patient should be at 11, hope is waning.
This happens far too often as a med student.
Yesterday afternoon I turned up somewhere for another clinic, got told they would inform the Drs I was here and to sit and wait. Checked after an hour if anything was happening (it wasn't, cheers for telling me) and left.
Sounds like every visit to the doctor.
My doctors surgery was rated top 10 in the country. It's the absolute tits.
New Brazzers film?
Is that you?
Why did I think you were Asian?
You're from somewhere in Essex, right? I think I'm getting you mixed up with that other poster who used to be from Southend who was around your age.
I thought AD was one of those white kids who thinks he is black.
No, that's me.
No, apart from you. I thought we had another one.
We've got that brown kid who thinks he's white? Merk or something.
Bruhnaldho thinks he's black but, I believe, he's whiter than Phonics.
My sister scored 99%tile on her SATs (although lower than me :tongue:), seems like she might be going to Duke too #genetics
Sorry to let you down there Spoons.
Aw. Is your sister basically a clone of you?
Apparently 2250 and up is 99th percentile, so that's not too impressive, especially given how loaded you are. Nice try Murt.
Oh, she'll be a senior in HS?
Remember when mert's parents cried because he didn't get into an Ivy?
:D
Does she have any higher aspirations than Duke, or is she set on that?
I think I've brainwashed her pretty successfully to apply early decision (which is binding) to Duke. Her "soft' qualifications, grades and extracurriculars are way better than mine (although I had better test scores) so realistically with current admission standards she would probably be an outside shot for the Ivies. She's realistically probably in the Northwestern/WashU/John Hopkins/Emory/Vanderbilt/Georgetown range, might get Duke/Cornell/Brown/Dartmouth on a good day, and maybe squeak like a Columbia/UPenn/UChicago if she got lucky. Objectively probably best to fall back on the legacy status and not take the risk.
Duke is as good as any really, at least reputation wise.
Yeah, but our women age well. Yours all turn into Dolly Parton
It is for stuff that matters (ie jobs.) Nobody gives a shit about rankings.
Duke runs Wall Street :D
I'm so fed up of medicine at the moment, finding it harder and harder to convince myself it's what I want to do.
Obviously it's worse at the moment because of exams and the migraines make everything much harder than they need be, but I'm just constantly so stressed and tired. Never get to see my girlfriend either which sucks.
Looking forwards I can see that being a consultant in something I enjoy is somewhere I would like to get to, but the thought of another year at med school and foundation years...just don't think I can stick it.
To be honest, I'm just really unhappy and I don't want to be any more. Maybe if I'd not had to deal with all the health problems and shit it wouldn't be like this but I have and it is. I don't think I can cope much longer.
Sorry to whinge.
You're welcome to vent here. I wish there was more we could do, but I think it's safe to say we're all definitely on your side, and wish you the best. :)
Is that the same girlfriend you've had since you were like 13? You might wanna consider ending that, i guarantee you that itself adds a lot of stress to your life and tbh you need to experience some years alone if you've been with someone for that long.
I'm doing an MBA. Narrowed it down to two Universities here.
Which ones?
Is the father in law paying? :eyemouth:
I would listen to mokbull, his advice is always sound.
I'll bare it in mind.
Mokbull is generally a dirty liberal and by default probably has totally misguided ideas about how to behave in relation to women, but here he is 100% correct. A girlfriend is a huge social crutch, which is great / supplements your psyche if you know how to exist without one, but potentially breeds crippling dependence if that's all you've ever known.
Did either of you actually read his post?
Well, RL, if you stick at it for long enough, you can become a consultant and move over here (Guernsey). A friend I went to uni with was recently sort of head hunted by one of our consultants. He's only just becoming a NHS consultant (obs and gyne - I have no idea how abbreviate that) and has kids so he wasn't that interested, but he didn't realise the pay was something like 3 to 5 times more. The robbing bastards are onto a right good racket here. Probably even better if you are a GP. No commute and a beastly, if expensive, way of life to boot. Even direct flights to Norwich.
They're right RL. You should 100% end the long term relationship that you are happy in.
I visited Northeastern in March because it was one of my higher choices. I can't comment on doing an MBA but that's a pretty stark choice of lifestyles in Tucson vs Boston. Personally I'd opt for Boston and I think most British would too, but idk you really and maybe you're tired of the east coast. Tucson is a pretty cool city too for what it's worth.
Fuck Boston and everyone pretending that they're Irish.
Seconded.
I went to Dublin and there was a Bostonian family in one of the pubs telling any fucker that would listen how Irish they were. The locals thought they were absolute cunts, it was all over their faces.
I refer to myself as "Irish" when outside the UK, and it's usually met with GAA banter or declarations of Irish ancestry.
It's because we're great.
Boston is a great city, I would go for that one. Never been to Arizona, mind.
Tuscon, Arizona has maybe the best hotness : low self-esteem ratio female population in the entire world.
I'm serious, it is fucking outrageous, only place close is maybe like Tier 3 state schools in the Southeast and there the girls are way dumber / religious / only into frat guys.
I'm not saying he has to do anything, but it's so easy to get lulled into a sense of complacency, ESPECIALLY when you're with the first person you've been with. At what point is it simply the fear of life without the other person keeping those two people together? That's not how a relationship should be.
Of course I don't know the specifics of RL's relationship, but I know so many people who are in love with their high school girlfriend and who live half-lives because they're so afraid of losing them. I don't know, I feel like life is about constant self-improvement, and unless you've had the life experiences of a 30 year old by the time you're 16, you're stunting your growth.
I'm doing it online, so the location of the campus means nothing to me.
I knew you'd pop in here to have a go, mert, and I've done my fair bit of research on the topic. Arizona and Northeastern's business schools are quite highly ranked nationally. I also shortlisted UNC but they require attendance at "online classes". That may sound fine on the face of it but when I'm in China one year from now, I don't want to be listening to lectures in the middle of the night.
The University of Liverpool also have a pretty good MBA but, well... they're scousers.
Finally got drunk enough to look at my grades...I did slightly above average. Looks like I'm still on track to get a good job woo, etc.
Also why do an MBA program somewhere shit, it's such a waste, why not make the effort to do something that actually adds value?
Nothing better for your growth than wanking yourself to sleep every night.
It's a combination of several factors.
A lot of the top ones require campus visits which I won't be able to do, or live classes which will kill me when I'm +12 hours from The US time zones. Both of my final choices seem to be quite highly ranked, though. It's not like I'm doing it above an Indian restaurant or something.
Are you planning a career move of sorts?
Nah, it's just that I'm going to be moving away from the lab eventually so it's been "suggested" that it will be beneficial to get myself qualified in another area.
Because I'm moving from the U.S. In one year. Doing it online gives me the freedom to complete assignments as I please and continue to earn money by working.
Well you only get 6 years for a working visa and then it's either green card or leave, so I decided to hit the road. I could live in DC permanently because it's quality, I can't lie, but there's more opportunity in China. I'd rather not be here for a Trump presidency anyway, so it's fine.
But, could you have taken the green card if you preferred that? I'm assuming the missus is happy to go to China.
Yeah, I could have just done a work-based green card. Are you here on a student visa or do you have permanent residence now?
Everytime I speak with someone here they can't get it in their heads why I'm not doing green card / citizenship. I might regret it in future, who knows.
Still on student visa. Looking more and more likely that we'll move elsewhere once we graduate, but we'll see.
I don't think it's that insane. I mean, I guess you could get the green card and then fuck off to China, having the US as a backup just in case.
EDIT: Wait a second, I'm confusing green card with citizenship.
Yeah, with the green card you have to live here 9 months of the year.
Where are you considering going?
We'll see. Probably France/Europe. Or Mexico.
The U.S. will lose its two best immigrants :cool:
Indeed. :cool:
Part of it is the lack of opportunities for us, but we also seem to like leaving here less and less over time.
Lol at non-Americans:
http://totalfratmove.com/why-america...ritish-person/
"Total Frat Move". A top class article source, no doubt.
The second most recent article on the website was titled "Patriotic Tunes That’ll Have Your American Boner Fully Engorged".
:D
Got my IB scores back, officially going to college.
:dance:
Good work, lad. :)
AD you were studying law right? Where will you be working next year? I applied to a bunch of the Magic / Silver circle law firms in London.
Failed one of my exams. I can resit it, but to be perfectly honest I think I'm done with medicine.
Would you say... *snigger* Would you say you're sick of it?
Yes THANK you, master Betts.
Dr Betts, if you don't mind. I stuck it out.
I wish others would BANTER with you about this. It just looks like I revel in it.
In my shit Uni life, as I still haven't completed two units from the first year and only managed to complete one of the four units they gave me last year next year is going to be extra shit.
I'm having to do attendance for the first year stuff (Britain and Africa which is alright and American History which I hated) which I was exempt from last year, attendance for the second year stuff I didn't do (Writing the Past which is massively shit, Sounds of English which is gay and Forensic Linguistics which I like) and I have to pick another four new units for the second year from the following:
Vocabulary
Learning & Teaching Language 1
Language and Species
Language in Society
Research Methods in English Language & Communication
Syntax
Learning & Teaching Language 2
History of the English Language
Language Competences in Career Development
The Slave Trade
Introduction to Digital History
USA 1861-1961: From Civil War to Civil Rights
Britain at War: 1688-1815
'The Rise of the West', Big Questions in Global History
Making History: Public Work Experience (lol)
Crime & Society in England 1550-1750
Propaganda in 20th Century war and politics
The Age of the Cold War 1945-1991
Politics and Culture in 18th Century England
Nation and Identity: Newly Independent States in Interwar-Europe, 1918-1939
Making a Historical Documentary (lol).
I assume I'll have to pick two English modules and two History. If so I'm leaning towards: Language & Species, History of the English Language, Britain at War and either the Propaganda module or 'Nation and Identity'.
Seems a waste to give up now. It's only an exam. Get involved.
How much longer would you have to go, @randomlegend?
If I passed the resit, another 8 months or something.
To be brutally honest, I think there's as good a chance I kill myself as I get to the end if I carry on.
Jesus. If that's the case, probably bin it, yeah.
What else are you thinking of doing?
At least you would finally get something finished amirite?
Fuck :D
Jesus. :D
Because I've already had the maximum allowed time away from the course (two years). I have no options left.
Bake some god damn cakes.
So, after a 14 year hiatus I am back at uni studying to do event marketing. I already run gigs etc so hoping this fills in the knowledge gap I have in dealing with larger events. It's still £1 a pint in student unions right?
Just my opinion but if something is making you that miserable then nothing else can make it worth it. Bin it.
What have you achieved of note in your life?
Did the misery last for a few years?
That's a lot of weight.
For what they charge, the quality of food universities serve is outrageous. Then again, nobody forces anyone to drink two litres of Coke with their dinner.
I dropped out of uni the first time due to something similar (does this board attract mentals?) and it didn't help anything. Assuming the same issues are still there (the migraines?) then your sense of self worth is just going to drop even further being out of work/at home all day.
At some point you really need to talk this over with your girlfriend/family and come up with a plan.
I know I'm a very capable person, I have a good brain and I'm sure I'll find my way.
Medicine just isn't it.
There's no point in flogging a dead horse, mate. If you hate it that much and have no motivation it's impossible. Why force yourself?
On the other hand, one of my childhood friends has just finished her 10 year training (and traineeship?) to become a qualified doctor and she's delighted, probably going to be on decent cash too. Her sense of self worth must be so high right now. Total opposite of RL, but we can't blame him for that. Right?
Yeah those FRAT LADS are so kind to obese foreigners.
Part of it is surely mental. If you spend your time thinking "I can't do this, I can't do this" then you will, inevitably, not do it because you've convinced yourself of that fact.
@randomlegend, lad, what have you done so far and what would be ahead of you to get to the end of it? I'm not saying you should or shouldn't do it at this stage, but get the facts down in list form so they're there in front of you.
Yeah (I'm the same with a few exceptions), but it becomes a problem when miserable becomes the norm as it seems to have with RL.
@RL, is it mostly that migraines are too problematic or are you having some problems with losing interest in medicine itself? If you've definitely lost interest in it then it sounds like the best thing you could do, if you're in a position to do this financially, is take some actual time off (rather than academic leave with the spectre of school always waiting at the end) and do the things you enjoy, clear your head out, read some good books, and then think about what else you'd like to do with your life. I'm sure it's not easy to come to terms with though.
I've definitely lost interest in medicine, I dread every day. I'm sure part of that is because it's been such a struggle (because of the migraines) but that's how it is, I can't change it. I know it's the right thing to do, I can't go back. I'll lose my mind. It's just scary to suddenly be 24 having spent the last 6 years essentially achieving nothing and with no idea what to do now.
I want to be getting on with my life, not starting again.
You're closing doors on yourself by not finishing. Even if you do decide not to do medicine, having a medical degree is so much better than not having it. The only thing you're doing by pulling out now is limiting your life options.
I know a significant number of people who have changed their life and career path at 24 or older.
If that's where you come down, don't think that anyone will hold it against you, or that you don't have time to find another path. And don't think that you've wasted your time - experience is valuable, and you know yourself better for what you've done. If the lesson that taught you is that you don't want to do what you thought you wanted to do, that's a valuable lesson.
I'm not saying you should definitely do this, but it's important that you don't feel trapped within your current situation.
Pulling out does tend to limit life options lol
After reading over everything i'm flipping on my original advice. Finish the degree and then move on. It's better to have it and never use it.
Says me with an unfinished honours degree in primary teaching and a mechanical engineering qualification I never use.
There's a guy in my Italian class who's an absolute doppleganger for Mahow, including his behavior. His name is even Nico or something ethnically similar. It's remarkable.
Take a picture. He's probably a cousin.
How's the first few days at McGill? Have you gotten alcohol poisoning yet?
I'm not at McGill, I deferred a year. The class is at Utah, I'm taking it to occupy myself until New Years when I fly to Italy to make a man of myself.
There must be easier ways to come out.
If I were gay TTH would be the first to know.
Oh yeah I remember that. 4 months not doing anything though, damn. I suggest you sink hundreds of hours into a role-playing video game
You must be a bore if you think that not going to school/college/work = not doing anything.
Then again, I dropped out of school when I was sixteen and only got back to it when I was like 21, so yes.
It's 4 months of waiting before doing something. You could find loads of stuff to do, but it just seems like an unnecessary weird limbo phase
He can, like, experience life man.
I know what you mean, and it's not exactly ideal. I'm going on a tour of Japan in November with my 90-year-old grandmother and taking my other grandmother to Vermont to see my aunt in October, both of which logistically made it difficult to plan anything substantial before winter break, but, y'know, they'll probably die soon so that takes priority.
My plan is to read a lot and avoid the internet as much as possible. I'm sure soon enough I'll find some project to occupy me.
You do photography a lot yeah? Idk how one starts a photo project but I would assume you'd go do a photoshoot and submit some pics to magazines / newspapers etc, maybe start making some connections. Do that! I wish I had started producing music back in high school instead of spending dozens of hours a week on Football Manager, but at the time I didn't really know that that's what I wanted. You might not have serious professional photography ambitions atm, but cultivate what you enjoy now - you never know when you might want to take it a step further.
Sit off and enjoy yourself, Spoon.
Back at college next week, and I'm starting to worry about burning out.
Work 40 hours
College 5 hours
Clients 3 hours
Children's counselling 8 hours
Essays 2 hours
That's 58 hours per week I'll be doing. Essays will probably average a bit less, but fucking hell. I'm a bit worried, especially considering the type of work (counselling training + debt advice proper job) isn't the type where I can go down to third gear. I'm hoping my paid job stays pretty quiet.
Good job it only takes you an hour to fall in love with somebody.
Finished paying off my student loan now. In fact, due to the derpy way it's paid, they now actually owe me some money :baz:
Fuck knows how much I still have left to pay. I must be due the annual statement soon, but I suspect it could be another few years before it's cleared.
I'm going to have to pay my fees this year as I'll be redoing year 2, unless I can get student finance to accept my compelling personal reasons claim which is a bit shit.
Also, I've had to re-tweak my original ideas about what I was going to study because it would have meant doing fuck all in the first semester and then stretching myself in the second.
Semester A
Writing the Past (A&B) -15 credits
Language and Species - 15 credits
Language and Society - 15 credits
Britain at War - 15 credits
Semester B
Writing the Past - 15 credits
Sounds of English -15 credits
Forensic Linguistics - 15 credits
Britain and Africa - 15 credits
American History – 15 credits
I hate Writing the Past, American History and Sounds of English so they're going to be mega shit but I did like the little of Forensic Linguistics and Britain & Africa I did. Semester A is the best on paper if only for Britain at War though, that had better be good.
Britain at War can be summarised succinctly as: "We win."
Britain. :cool:
1688-1815 too. Reading about how we donned the French is going to be a highlight of course.
So you're starting with the Glorious Revolution? Excellent.
You'll have the more inconvenient moments in there like the American War of Independence and the lesser-known War of Jenkins' Ear, but we can dismiss them as anomalies and get back to glorying in our brilliance.
As you say, smashing the French about will be a particular highlight. I think it was Lewis who said it previously, but you have to admire the way we just kept going back for more until we finally beat Bonaparte.
So now he takes the "we."
Of course.
On the subject of the Irish Republic's Army, I watched a lol-worthy programme on RTE a number of years ago about the prospect of Jack Lynch launching an 'invasion' of the north when the Troubles kicked off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNCL4pL36Ok
Not only is the premise of the film laughable, it makes some incredible statements like the prospect of 'ethnic cleansing' (this isn't Bosnia, mate) and the Irish setting up a refugee corridor through south Down. Anyway, the end conclusion is that if the Irish had tried it on, the British would have sent the RAF in and they'd have promptly hammered them before the Lynch government collapsed.
It warms the heart to know that the Union is safe.
I'm sure you have more in common with Wayne Rooney than Horatio Nelson.
I'm checking what the sub-editors have done to my book so I can let them print it, and, not only have they binned all of my Oxford commas (probably a publishing blood feud that one), but they have changed all of my inverted commas into those ones that I hate.
Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma.
Did they make you pay for those too?
First week done of my course and i'm absolutely loving it. Aw so delighted I made the decision to do this.
Hope everyone else is enjoying it.
Somebody, please, think of the Oxford commas!
I'm putting them all back in. Let's see who wants it more.
It asks you to keep changes to a minimum. I never started this war, lads.
Christ :face:Quote:
Assignment 1:
Language in Species Debate. The debate will take place in week 9. More information regarding groups and times will be available on studynet.
Worth 40%
In your groups, you must argue for your school of thought- Is language an accident or an adaptation? PLEASE NOTE YOU WILL BE MARKED INDIVIDUALLY FOR YOUR PRESENTATION, DEBATE CONTRIBUTION and PRESENTATION SKILLS.
Key articles and reading are provided for you on StudyNet in a separate folder, but please feel free to read more or different articles.
Use this reading to outline your argument and line of defence.
Each group will present their theory behind language development for 15 minutes. This should include key theorists and references – basically you will be following the key theorists argument and rationale behind language development (whether you believe it or are entirely convinced by it yourself isn’t important here!)
You will have 15 minutes to present your theory to the class. You MUST use power point presentation for this AND SUBMIT YOUR SLIDES INDIVIDUALLY ON STUDYNET BY THE 25th November 2015. PLEASE ENSURE YOUR NAME IS ON YOUR SET OF SLIDES SO I CAN REFER TO THEM WHEN YOU GIVE YOUR PRESENTATION. You will be assessed on your presentation skills as well as the overall content and understanding of your argument and how much you take part in the following debate. Each group member will receive an individual mark.
Each group will present their side of the argument for 15 mins. During this time take notes on what the other group are saying as you will have to think of some challenging questions to throw at them! When doing your background reading for your argument make sure you read the other school of thought too to in order to prepare for potential questions changing your argument! Please have 2-3 questions prepared before the debate to use to question the other team’s argument/theory, you can always think of more during their presentation! After each team presents their argument, we will have 20 mins for discussion and questioning etc. I will also have some questions for you as well as your team mates so be prepared for your rebuttal. I WILL CHAIR THE DEBATE SECTION TO ENSURE EVERYONE GETS A CHANCE TO QUESTION/RESPOND.
Structure for the Debate
Opening Statements - Each team will be responsible for an opening statement which should take about two minutes per team member and no more to deliver. The purpose of these statements is to lay out the outline of your case in a persuasive manner; you should introduce each of your strongest arguments. These statements must be typed as a power point presentationand submitted to Studynet no later than TBA
Make sure that each team member covers some other aspect of the team’s debate position [there should NOT be a lot of repetitive points made by several team members—coordinate your presentations!!]
II. After each opening statement (15mins), each side will have the opportunity to put the other team in the hot seat, by asking a series of questions for a period of up to TEN minutes PER SIDE. This is the time to: first, defend against any attacks made on your team’s position and second, go on the offensive yourself. Don’t hold anything back during this round - take advantage of all the weaknesses you have discovered in your opponent’s argument during the PRESENTATION. DON’T just rehash the points you made in your opening statements!
Assessment criteria:
Content
All of the information that you present should be accurate and you should demonstrate clear understanding of the topic (through reading, referencing sources, examples etc). You and your team should demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of all aspects of the issue and should discuss all of the points that best support your case. You should not be expected to bring up points that do damage to your case - that is the job of the opposition.
Preparation
Each member of the team is responsible for giving a well-constructed statement of 2 minutes and a half or so in length. You are permitted to bring into the debate: note cards, outlines, books and any other helpful resource. You should also be prepared to make a closing statement of approximately one minute that emphasizes your most important points.
Argumentation
The arguments you make during the debate should be logical and demonstrate a clear analysis of the issue and should be supporting with evidence (i.e. reading). Appropriate emphasis should be given to your strongest arguments, but you shouldn’t harp on only a single point for too long. Finally, you should demonstrate that you have heard and understand your opponents’ arguments by meeting them head on and giving your best counter-arguments.
Skills: eye contact, voice, tempo
Moves for creating a graduate student union have begun. Love the objectivity of this FAQ released by the 'Provost.'
https://provost.wustl.edu/graduate-s...-unionization/
I've got a timetable clash between Language and Species and Writing the Past and I'll need to drop one.
I'd rather cut Writing the Past and then replace that with ‘The Rise of the West’. Big Questions in Global History in semester A which sounds pretty shit and then do Propaganda in 20th century war and politics in semester B which would be great as I love propaganda.
It's likely that they're going to make me cut Language and Species though (the history module is a deferral) which means I'll hopefully replace that with Vocabulary which really is the best of a bad bunch left.
:drool:
I'll try and remember to cite it when I do my mid life crisis Masters in about 15 years' time.
:cool:
I'll ask my library to buy a copy or twenty.
Send us a free signed copy.
You got anything to say about Islam in there?
If you read it backwards it says 'Muhammad was a paedo' over and over.
I'll try and work it into my Reforming Islam course, then.
That sounds like a hairy topic for a university. Have you had any bomb threats?
Speaking of Arabs and bombs, I've just spent about ten minutes, possibly longer, waiting outside of the only toilet on this floor of the library. I heard the toilet flush three times and the hand dryer used twice. And it's not like they were all in the last minute or two. First came a hand dryer about four minutes in, which I thought was odd, but whatever if the Chinese don't flush in their own flat, why would they do it in the library. Then a minute later a flush, again, odd, but whatever I just want to piss. Two minutes later another flush, followed by a hand dryer. Then another flush, then a minute or so wait before some little tosspot Arab walks out. Didn't even have the balls to look at me. Cunt.
Sometimes you got the shit with the late blooming kidney ejaculation, and you gotta go back for more. Err on the safe side
Then take that to the proper toilets downstairs.
Yea and piss yourself on the way there too?
Ne chance. Its 3 minute walk against a 20 second one. For a 10+ minute shit, its selfish to not make the walk, for a 20 second piss, its not.
I feel like there was always also the option of you walking up the stairs and going to the other bathroom, but whatever
https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/TKJ99MD
Doing research for my counselling course. If anyone fancies filling in this quick survey then that'd be pretty cool. Takes about 30 seconds.
"completely anonymous"
So this is what I have to do to complete my semester:
20th December -2000 words.Quote:
For this assignment, you should critique the following statement: Historians ‘are in fact the only people qualified to equip society with a truly historical perspective and to save it from the damaging effects of exposure to historical myth. If professionally trained historians do not carry out these functions, then others who are less well informed and more prejudiced will produce ill-founded interpretations’ (John Tosh & Sean Lang). Discuss.
28th December -
Answer one of the following questions, 2500 words.Code:*What role does social class play in relation to a speaker’s use of language? Include a discussion of research in this area to support your answer.
*Explain both code-switching and diglossia, and the reasons why speakers may practise such phenomena.
*1 in 5 people feel they are discriminated against because of their accent. Give an account of the research that examines people’s attitudes to different accents, and the consequences of such attitudes.
*It is often assumed that men and women speak the same language differently. Include a discussion of the various approaches (with your main focus on social constructionism and Community of Practice paradigm) to researching language and gender to explore whether this assumption is correct or outdated.
3rd January -2500 on one of those questions.Code:1) How have historians explained the consequences of the Glorious Revolution and why do they continue to disagree on this issue?
2) How have historians explained the willingness of men go to war during the eighteenth century?
3) How well did Britain deal with the consequences of the demobilisation of its armies and navies between 1688 and 1815?
4) How were the lives of British women affected by the wars of the eighteenth century?
5) What factors affected the British state’s ability to tax its citizens between 1688 and 1815?
6) What factors account for the hostility towards financiers and stock-jobbers prior to the 1760s?
7) What were the arguments put forward by Linda Colley to explain the emergence of a British identity during the eighteenth century and how have they been challenged by other historians?
8) To what extent did military ideals and influences shape the development of British society and culture during the long eighteenth century?
3rd January - A 2000 word (+ or - 10%) write up of the picture choice task that was carried out in class.
So shit.
Thinking of the accent one for the second assignment so I can lol at the Scouse accent and probably the third question for the History one.
What does everyone else at Uni have over the Christmas period?
I have a load of pish on 'historical myth' if you want it.
Sure.
How are you going to approach it? The full passage from The Pursuit of History makes it sound a bit stupid, because that 'responsibility' is set within the idea of producing an 'interpretation of the past that is relevant to the present and a basis for formulating decisions about the future', which, as educated guesses (at best), would be marbled with prejudice in order to make up for a lack of information, and obviously made to fit the historians' prejudiced definition of what is 'relevant to the present'. That is to say, made communist.
She told us this:
I'll probably just talk about what historians go through, piss all over David Irving and other nutcases but then talk about how great Terry Deary is probably.Quote:
This statement can be broken up into three themes:
1. 'only people qualified': this is referring to the training that professional / PhD historians go through. Think about how and why professional historians work as they do.
2. 'damaging effects' refers to bad history. Think about David Irving and other distortions or misuses / abuses of history.
3. 'others who are less well informed'. Are professional historians the only ones who can / should write history?
1. I'm not sure what 'training' means, or why 'professional/PhD historians' are necessarily better. There are ethical and professional standards that you have to adhere to insofar as you can't mis-quote people or make shit up; but you are free to derive a narrative of your choosing from the facts/original materials, and they are always going to be prejudiced in reflecting your own interpretation. Some are obviously more convincing than others, but the credentials of the author are pretty irrelevant (how could you earn a PhD otherwise?).
2. Who decides what is 'bad history'? David Irving distorted sources (David Irving v Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt), so that was more a case of worthless history; but 'bad history' could simply be a shitty interpretation, and they do not necessarily have 'damaging effects'.
3. That goes back to the first one, and the logic of it equates the strength of any argument with the reputation of the person making it.
Historians need to wind it in, basically.
Well she mentions our first lecture where she talks about the academic training they go through (PhD, first major piece of work and 'Academic rigour'), peer review, teaching, archival research and 'engagement & outreach').
So basically make them feel more special about themselves.
That 'engagement and outreach' shit will eventually kill the subject by rendering all research worthless unless it gets on the local news.
You see, Lewis, the great thing about history is that it teaches us about who we are today.
My old supervisor got fifty-two grand of taxpayers' money to make an interactive map of the old nuclear weapons storage facility at RAF Barnham (now an industrial estate, such is its historical significance), which the university banked, mentioned in a press release, and then forgot about when it denied him research leave to write the book that the entire project was meant to lead towards.
But did he have a blog? That level of engagement and outreach is VITAL these days.
There was one geezer who used to (probably still does) list his Guardian/whatever comment pieces in his publications, but he was a known whopper. He threatened not to be on my upgrade panel because he didn't like the tone of my e-mails, so I told him that I didn't want him on it, and then he insisted on doing it. Way to go, mate.
Had a pretty beastly timetable clash with stuff that couldn't be moved.
After weeks they've come up with a solution.
I'll be dropping Britain and Africa (a first level module which I had to defer) and picking up Nation And Identity: Newly Independent States In Interwar Europe, 1918-39. I wanted to do the Propaganda unit but that clashes too.
Still, I'll get to learn about how Poland was raped by others.
I'm so skint so I've been chucking my CV at everything this week. I've also got an eye on summer events that I won't be able to afford unless I get a proper job (stewarding 2/3 times a month doesn't really help that much).
Rumor is that the union that the grad students were supposed to sign a contract with has dropped us, since apparently now that Trump is in charge there's no point in even bothering. Lol at that. Meanwhile, the administration is planning to stop calling TAs TAs and instead make them sign up to some sort of 'teaching practicum' so that they can get around the fact that a court decided that TAing is indeed labor.
Isn't it because Missouri is about to become a right-to-work state?
Could be, but that's not what was said. All of this from third parties though, I am still waiting on clarification. In any case, it doesn't look to me that the move towards unionization will get anywhere over here.
When I tried to get some teaching responsibilities the stuff I could have done was covered, so I offered to undercut the existing 'Associate Tutors' and do it for free, but they said it was against the rules.
Darn those regulations stiffling business(men)!
I think it would be good for me to teach a proper course before I graduate but I am not sure I can be arsed. I know my advisor would be cool with me teaching his undergrad course, but it is fucking Heat Transfer. If it was Thermodynamics I'd be all over it.
The same small group of suck-ups took about ninety per cent of the seminars, so it was a racket, and I was probably blacklisted when I told their leader not to add me on Facebook.
:D
As a PhD student are you not required to teach? Here, in the Humanities, everyone teaches as far as I know. Between that and adjuncts they really are taking the piss charging $60,000 a year. But hey, they are building a larger cafeteria in the library!
It was optional, but you were only eligible to do it once you had upgraded from MPhil to full PhD status, and I sort of fucked myself by doing that as late as possible.
I can't get my head around the American system for it. I'm reading the Harvard Graduate Program[me] site, and the first three years of their seven year PhD (ten years maximum) appears to be doing what you would have been doing on a specialist History degree had you not merely 'majored' in it alongside remedial spelling, road safety, and the pointless conversational French that you have to improve as a post-graduate. I applied for a couple of American post-doctoral positions years ago, and because I didn't have any coursework transcripts to send them I had to attach notes explaining why ('Here in the civilised world, Hank...'). What a stupid system.
Oh yes. My gf's last course was last semester, during her fifth year. All of her literature courses (might be all of her courses) were mixed undergrad/grad courses. Can't think of anything more lol than that. She also needs to show 'proficiency' in two other languages (apart from English and French) and take two exams (which seem to be basically the same.)
As for me, I still have one more fucking course to take, for a total of twelve. I think two have been worth my time.
Her department has also invented a new lol 'post-doctoral teaching fellowship,' which is a lecturer with a fancier title which allegedly will be useful in 'the job market.' It's all a disgrace.
You would think that any post-doctoral position was useful in the job market (since they are so competitive), so that will probably just roll the teaching and administration load from about four positions into a new one, thereby freeing up the salaries from the three redundant people to be put towards giving the most senior layer of management another personal assistant.
Or for the new Center for Diversity and Inclusion.
For the first time in like 2 years (fucking hell) I've actually submitted an essay without the need for an extension. Now it's only an essay plan but it counts for 20% in said module and I've also geeked out quite a bit on it. That's largely because it's a plan for a historiographical essay on how Poland (there were 10 nations to choose from Finland, Yugoslavia, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Irish Free State and Poland) consolidated power as a new nation.
Looking forward to doing the essay too. Planned to talk about the May Coup/Jozef Pilsudski, minorities in the nation, peace treaties/nationalism and border tension/military/Polish-Soviet war.
It's probably still a good thing to do. Teaching is a good thing to have on the CV, and it's actually quite fun.
It's really exploitative in the US. PhD students and post-docs cop the worst of it. The system is really top-heavy: the big-name professors can absolutely make bank, but everyone else is expected to basically dedicate their life to slaving constantly.
There's advantages to liberal arts, but I've generally been of the opinion that if you go to uni, you should know why you're going, and therefore you should be able to start specialising immediately. As a rule, US PhD-level courses take you a little further in their discipline than the Australian or UK systems do when you're finished coursework, but at the expense of keeping you there for a half-decade longer than anyone ever should be. But cheap labour, so there's that.
The system everywhere is broken, but there it's really broken.
:D I've seen a few of those. I like to think most committees see through it, but they get so many people applying for jobs that they're barely able to give it more than a quick glance. So who knows?
Do you mean that they count for more when you come to apply for jobs, or that they allow you to develop a better subject knowledge/understanding? My secondary supervisor went through Yale, and whilst she would bear the first one out, I would need to be convinced of the second.
I know, but as I said, I am not sure I can be arsed. I think I rather ride my bicycle.
I'd say adjuncts are the worst off, with postdocs in the sciences not far behind. I honestly believe they should strike, it was not too long ago that I read that 82% of all the courses in the US are taught by adjuncts. If they organized a bit they could really wreck havoc and I don't think a decent salary and a bit of job security is too much to ask.
Btw, I really enjoyed my two years in a liberal arts college, although that one had engineering and I only took one course outside engineering. The level of education was miles above than the one over here.
Grad courses at decent universities in the US go further in terms of material than a standard UK or Australian degree. Obviously there are plenty of individual fluctuations.
It's a non-issue, because a post-grad student in Aus/UK will learn relevant stuff independently over the course of their research degree, but there's no doubt that (on average) a US student who has finished their PhD coursework has covered more ground than someone starting a research-only PhD after a focussed undergraduate course. Obviously there are exceptions, etc., but the material does go further. If you do a coursework Masters degree after a standard undergrad course, you've probably covered about the same amount of territory worth of coursework.
I can only comment on the sciences, of course. That's an important caveat.
Yep. The academics in Australia and the UK are pretty organised, but I think even a whiff of unionisation in the US is pretty damning in a lot of places.
I honestly don't know how you'd fix the system though. I don't even really know what a fixed system would look like.
There is probably something in that as far as a broad knowledge goes (I always wonder how you would approach teaching those 'World History 500-1500' survey courses that they all seem to offer, and which I never encountered), but thesis topics would surely end up about the same. They have to meet the same basic requirements, and, on a more practical level, by the time you are good enough to be submitting it how many people will there be in your department capable of telling you new things about it?
Yup. If anything, I think the standard for British and Australian PhD theses is a bit higher than US theses, judging from ones that I've read and people that I've talked to. Because it's only part of their training, it doesn't quite have the same magnitude as the "this is everything" monographs in our system.
They're still very good, of course, because all PhDs further knowledge etc., but I think there might be more expected on our side.
What qualification are you working towards?
English Language & Communication and History degree.
What I do after that I don't know. The plan was to do a PGCE to become a Primary school teacher but I'm not so keen now.
You must have the most limited vocabulary of anyone ever to have studied for a degree in English.
Surely that's the point?
So I have to select my units for next year in the next couple of days and my main decision is dissertation or not.
Choices for English for the year are:
Child Language & Communication
Chunky Language: Investigating Formulaic Sequences
Meaning and Context
Forensic Phonetics
Global Englishes
Clinical Linguistics
Language Processing
Debates in Pragmatics
Gender in Language and Communication
Communication and cultures
Two from each list are needed and I'm thinking Child Language & Global Englishes and Gender in Language and one of the others bar Debates in Pragmatics.
Then History:
Dissertation (10,000 words)
Extended Essay (5000)
Everyday Lives: an Intimate History of Twentieth Century Women
The 1956 Suez Crisis: Causes, Course and Impact, 1945-1962
Popular protest, Riot and Reform in Britain, 1760-1848
Migrants and Minorities in Britain: 1688-1850
The American Pacific Rim: Colonisation, Conflict and Connections, 1800-present
Bodies and Sexuality in the Early Modern Period
How Victorians Saw the World Abroad
Princes and Paupers, 1760-1820
Witch-Bottles to Wishing-Wells: The Material Culture of Everyday Ritual
Thinking with History: Applying Historical Insight to Real Life Issues
It's two from each list (or just one from the second if I choose the dissertation) and I'm thinking either Dissertation/Extended Essay & Everyday Lives with the Witch Bottles and Bodies if I don't do dissertation.
Part of me is worried that I wont be able to do a dissertation and I have no idea what I'd do it on. The only sort of idea is propaganda within comic books.
Then make it happen. E-mail him as soon as possible (preferably right now) saying that you are sat looking at your options, and that you would like to do a dissertation on whatever it is (throw in some shit about wanting to test yourself on an extended piece of work), and ask if you can have fifteen minutes of his time to meet and discuss whether it would be viable, and, if so, to get some advice on possible approaches. Don't ask him to supervise you now. Go and meet him, make it look like you're interested, and the question of supervision will inevitably come up if he considers it a goer.
Well we had a module choices fair type thing today and I sat down and spoke with him for a few minutes.
He reckons it's viable and he gave me a few ideas.
I'm not going to do a dissertation on it (I'll do the 5,000 word extended essay) and tie it in to world war II probably.
What kind of job would you expect to get having covered those type of topics at university?
You could have become a teacher after a couple of years of college instead though, no? Definitely sounds like a varied course, I wouldn't know where to start with some of it!
The coursework for the module is a 4,000 word assignment which is a case study of one L2 speaker of English (your choice who this person is) and assesses (primarily through interviews) to what extent he/she is a core member of their culture. As this is worth 100% you submit a first draft by Week 8 for me to give formative feedback on so you can improve and edit your draft before final submission.
In terms of topics, we cover the following from an ICC (Intercultural Communication) perspective:
- facets of the concept of culture
- stereotyping
- cultural practices
- data collection (to help with your assignment)
- language and identity
- verbal and non-verbal communication
- Othering and barriers to ICC
- Conflict and face theory
Ugh, I guess that module is out.
I wanted to give med school a last shot after I'd got treated for my depression, in the hope it was the depression making med school shit rather than med school making me depressed.
It's still just shit though. I just wanna leave and do something else, but given all the years that have gone into it and all the effort it seems nuts to throw it away now. I feel like I'm probably going to fail anyway since I have absolute no motivation, so maybe I should just jump before I'm pushed.
How long do you have left? If you do finish, do you want to be a doctor? What alternatives do you have or have you though of?
More importantly, if you binned out of it now, how much debt would you have accumulated for nothing?
A year left, but the thought of finals makes me want to just do myself in now.
I don't really care about the debt, to be honest.
No I don't want to be a doctor. I have no idea what I would do instead.
Do you want to be a doctor? No point in finishing if you don't. Also, just because you have done something that makes you miserable for a while doesn't mean you have to keep doing it forever just because 'I've already invested so much in it.'
No, I really don't want to be a doctor. But the reality is if I leave now I'm 25 with essentially no qualification beyond A-level (I think I'll have some trash-tier unclassified degree in Medical Science or something).
Really what I want to do is work with food.
Then quit and go to catering college for a year, get a job as a pot washer and work your way up.
Just accept that most of the next year is going to be shit and do it. It'll be character building.
I'm not sure working in a kitchen under extreme pressure is the ideal workplace scenario but I'd rather my baker had a breakdown over my croissant than my doctor during my open heart surgery I guess.
It's not that I find it too 'stressful', I just hate it.
Aside from hating it, have you got the ability to pass and come out of it with a proper qualification? If yes, I'd personally consider hating something for one year and getting the qualification just in case it was something you ever wanted to go back to.
If I stick it out, then I'll be a doctor in just over a year.
If I'd enjoyed it up until now and was only now hating it I could stick a year, but I've been at it like this for years now. It's so soul destroying. I really am sure I don't want to be a doctor to be honest.
If you quit now you're just another faggot with a whisk. If you become a doctor first then you have a ready-made gimmick, and you can lie your way into opportunities by claiming to have ended your medical career to follow your true passion.
People would actually lap up the whole 'the chef is a doctor so you know its healthy' shit.
Chef? Let's not get carried away here.
As soon as he starts though 'Dr Christian' would muscle in.
I have two 2,500 word essays due on Monday afternoon and I've got absolutely no motivation to do them. Doesn't help that I only need around 30 marks on each to pass the units.
Explain both code-switching and diglossia, and the reasons why speakers may practise such phenomena.
How well did Britain deal with the consequences of the demobilisation of its armies and navies between 1688 and 1815?
They're not even that hard but I really cannot be arsed :(
That second one is the sort of topic you pick without actually thinking about, and then when you come to doing it you realise you've actually committed to writing about unemployment and bread prices.
I have to renew my certs before August. I really don't want to do it like last time, where I took about 6 pages of notes per chapter, mind maps and command references (:sick:).
I got 15/21 on my pre-study gauge test so think I'm in good stead, I have all the experience now unlike last time.
#engineerlife
Of course I meant to say does anyone have any studying tips.
Adderall.
Just cheat.
Take the text you need to learn. Read it multiple times. Then start to condense it more and more, but with each stage test yourself to make sure you're not missing out any crucial information. Ideally you'll condense it to the point where you have just one page of notes that you can remake as soon as the exam starts. From there, its easy street since you've practically got all the material in the exam with you.
Beware primacy & recency - revise the stuff in different orders as you'll tend to remember the first/most recent stuff, while the opposite will be harder to recall
Remaking a sheet of notes during an exam sounds like exam technique failure 101. How can you afford that time?
It takes about 2 minutes. I wouldn't do it for a maths exam or anything, but noting down a sheet of keywords and dates really doesn't take long.
Aye, but if you know them well enough to rewrite a crib sheet, surely you can just remember them for the course of the exam? I can sort of understand going in with outline essay plans/structures for certain questions/topics if that is how you are being tested, but even then, by the point you've lodged it in your brain well enough for it to be there at the beginning of the exam, is it really going to leak out before the end? I can understand why it might be preferable in terms of making sure you cover everything, but then I go back to the original point about time.
Possibly, but I've found having prompts helpful. If I've got my notes condensed anyway, then I might as well jot them out while they're fresh in the memory from 5 minutes ago. It makes planning your answers so much easier as well. There's no point risking your mind going blank.
End of year deadlines have all pushed back a week because there've been problems with IT services, apparently. Hasn't effected me in the slightest, but I'll definitely take it.
Someone kicking off next to me in the library because they've fucked up her login. She's just shouted "I JUST WANT TO PRINT OFF SOME FUCKING SHAKESPEARE" :D
What's the consensus on swearing in a dissertation title?
Bollocks to it.
I'm a bit worried I'd get my head chopped off by ISIS, but I like it.
‘Fuck Islam!’ Rejection of conservative Islamic ideology through a punk-inspired pursuit of Western Muslim identity.
I think that's alright.
"Swearing is not only fine, but encouraged."
Wasn't expecting that back from my tutor.
I like it.
Socio-Cultural Anthropology. - ANTH 202 - 001
Modern History of Islamic Movements. - HIST 240 - 001
Intermediate Italian Intensive. - ITAL 216 - 001
Introduction to Moral Philosophy 1. - PHIL 230 - 001
'mon. :cool:
We must have covered three of those here. Ask them if you can skip a term.
Four courses only? Are you on trimesters?
Looks good, Spoon. The variety should keep you interested. Is that a first year of four?
Do you actually learn anything at North American universities or do you just waste your life (and money?) on a series of introductory non-courses?
He's studying in Canada.
But yes, there is a lot of time wasting. But the College Experience.
Has Canada detached itself whilst I wasn't looking?
Anyway, it was more of an honest question than the pithiness perhaps suggested. What do you end up with? Is it just a 'college degree'? Presumably there must be some subjects where you can't spend your time pissing about taking foreign languages and existentialism on the side or does that all have to happen postgrad?
Just noticed you wrote North American, my bad.
Depends where you go and what you study, but there are usually a lot of general education requirements. The first two years tend to be a lot of intro classes to all kinds of stuff. The last two years it depends on the student, really. You can take advanced courses if you want, but you can also get away with taking the bs ones for the full length. All degrees have space for 'pissing about taking foreign languages and existentialism on the side.'
The science and math ones are a lot more specified and intensive. Even with things like philosophy you can get pretty intense in the last couple of years if you choose. Me I don't know exactly what I want to study most, so I'm taking a year (I have enough credits to graduate in three years, but I'll do four because why not) to piss around and see what's shit and what's interesting. But yeah, my courses at the moment are setting me on the fine path to Starbucks.
@Pepe the Italian counts for six credits. But 4-5 classes is pretty standard, especially four in the first semester while you sort your life out / join a million clubs.
Fuck the haters, Spoon. Enjoy it, because what comes next is not pretty whatsoever.
Engineering is more specified since the ABET requirements need to be met. That, however, does not make it more specific. If anything, it gives you less leeway if you really wanted to get deep into a specific area.
Four classes is a good number. I probably wouldn't go any higher than that if possible. It just makes you put less attention into each of them.
Graduated on Sunday. Existential as fuck. Enjoy this shit, Spoon, and do as much as you possibly can.
I could do electives on my course. Did both on History, which really opened my eyes to how boring historians are.
I did a couple of English Literature modules and donned the shit out of them. English Lit is really great because you can argue any old shite so long as you back up what you're saying.
The hidden message of the book is that Scout Finch was actually black herself, as is shown...
The world would be a better place if higher education was strictly vocational.
My students had their final exam the other day, and I've just done two straight days of marking. I'm concerned I made the exam possibly a question too long. Still, there's a good spread between 50 and 100. Possibly a couple more fails than I'd like, so there may have to be a little bit of scaling.
Trying to do a 'Sounds of English' assignment for Monday.
http://i.imgur.com/n0azE19.png
I have no fucking idea what any of that means in the last 2 columns.
They mean that you should be paying more attention.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/i...M5UBgBRPHJYnGg
I tried, it went in one ear and out the other.
The subject is complete shit and makes me feel like a drooling mongo because I just don't get it.
Said goodbye to my counselling coursemates yesterday, after two years of studying together.
It was totes emosh.
I got 85% on my history dissertation and 65% on my English dissertation. I was expecting about 10% less for each, so obviously I'm rather chuffed. Overall I got a 2:2 by 1% which I should be able to appeal and make a 2:1. Unfortunately Sussex give second year a 40% weighting, where as I believe most universities usually give 25%. 25% would have just scraped a 2:1. I recognise I left it far too late to pull my finger out after mucking about in second year, but there have been events that have made the last few years extremely shit at times.
That is good. What was it on?
The role of religion in Nation of Islam and Five Percent Nation engagement, using hip hop lyrics and interviews to show that it wasn't important.
Just reading through my dissertation feedback now.
"Please get in touch if you would like to discuss trying to get this published -- we'd need to get it read by a black power expert, but I think there is significant potential here."
If I get fucking published nobody will be able to dispute that Team Refuge are the biggest dons.
I love the idea of having a title that reads 'Black Power Expert'
That'll be me soon enough.
Appeal was successful so got the 2:1, which is a relief. Graduation was actually quite fun too. I was expecting to be crap, but the fat bloke from Goodness Gracious Me is chancellor and he was pretty good. The clapping gets a bit much though.
Well done Offy. What are your plans now?
Cheers, mate. I wanna stay in the area. There are loads of creative roles around so hopefully I'll find something soon because I've only got another month and a bit that I can live rent free. Suppose I'll try and get published on the side as well but the 'black power experts' are busy until Autumn term starts.
Played Onshore.
My exam is next Saturday and I've been putting in about 4 hours roughly a day for the past 2 weeks. At the weekend I did an 8 hour stint. Fuck this.
Can you believe work have booked me in on another full day training course 2 HOURS AWAY 6 days before my exam? Absolute cuntery.
I'm nearly finished my course notes, I'll have to revise the shit out of them (about 60 pages of key points), do the practical stuff, and finally take 3 practice exams, maximum twice. All that in about a week. :sick:
What's your exam on?
I was going to say routers as a joke but it's actually routers.
Why is that a joke?
I did a Cisco course on Networking at college. Was a piece of piss.
Put the yellow cable in the yellow input and you'll be on a winner. Revision. Pffffft
I'm sure you did.
It sounds absolutely riveting.
It's not really, especially because I've done it before, albeit with some minor changes. It was kind of exciting and NEW WORLDE last time but it's just repetitive unnecessary bullshit this time round, again bar the new stuff.
Wish I'd went for the next level up or a different specification of this level but I'm a lazy shit cunt so...
Back visiting Oxford. I couldn't live here, but it's a really lovely place to be and think about research.
Passed my exam. :cool:
87%. :(
Worth a read- https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/08/...us-university/
It would be funny if it wasn't so depressing.
Exaggerated by someone with an axe to grind. There's lots of stupid stuff on uni campuses, but it's easy to avoid. You have to go looking for it and deliberately engage with it.
Never let it be said that lefties are the only people with a ridiculous victim complex.
EDIT: Also, the second paragraph suggests that they've missed the point of their studies. Anyone who suggests that they "believe" in some kind of objective standard of art will be asked to back that up. I doubt an undergraduate is even capable of making a cogent argument for that position which depends on anything other than their own subjective experience, which kind of undermines their point.
Pronoun badges?
Anybody poncing off to study journalism in America is liable to be posh as fuck, so they're probably a massive fanny to begin with.
NYU is probably as bad as it gets to be fair.
None of that nonsense existed in the two places I attended as an undergraduate, but it does exist where I am right now. Might be that I just barely missed it time-wise.
Disagree. At Stanford social forces compel you to take part. It's 100% pushed on you, especially for organizations that aren't specifically minority rights orgs. The last couple of years of school, I'd say at about 50% of meetings that I attended, when you introduced yourself, you had to give your preferred pronoun alongside name, field of study etc. If you're the one guy out of 30 to not give preferred pronoun, people judge you for that. Pretty inescapable.
SOAS was heading that way in the last year I was there (2012), having been fine to start with, by now it'll be absolutely riddled with it. And I avoided absolutely everything (though being a politics student didn't help as +-75% are gobshites).
It's a worthwhile exercise in terms of broadening your mind, albeit you get the odd legend like this geezer who just used to say 'It's all their own fault'.
How many actual Oriental/African professors are there at the school, compared to whiteys?
Many more whiteys (including a shitload of continental Europeans), but enough Asians/Africans, mainly in their local subjects like languages and so on. Humanities and social sciences were very white.
Occasionally you'd see the professor of Yoruba mooching around in his Fred Flintstone-esque national dress, or a Buddhist monk here and there.
I was only confronted with the left wing nutjobs in 2008 protesting that if the government could afford to bail out banks it could afford to give them free tuition.
I avoided absolutely everything, though, including all events of every description outside of the course itself.
I've no idea what they're like these days, though.
Malcolm Caldwell setting himself up as the best-known Western cheerleader for the Khmer Rouge before being murdered by them sums SOAS up nicely.
'Frats' are still the worst part of American universities.
Frats at a lot of schools basically just produce Mert clones, so i'd agree, but there's a lot of frats/schools that are not like that at all
#notallfrats
I'm sure there are some fine ones out there, but most are filled with twats.
At least it keeps them all in the same place.
I would argue that it is all frats.
There's been a few moments of madness from the student union since I've been at UEA (banning Blurred Lines as it's a RAPE ANTHEM, banning Sombreros for cultural appropriation, having a bitch-fit to get gender neutral toilets) but nothing that bad.
I don't think I could give my 'preferred pronoun' with a straight face.
Banning sombreros?
Cultural appropriation mate.
When I was there they tried to stop the bar[s] showing the Six Nations on account of Royal Bank of Scotland being involved in that filthy Canadian oil stuff, but loads of people moaned and they BOTTLED IT.
Blurred Lines is rapey af, tbf.
Even if it is, who cares enough to try and ban it? Who was it that tried to stop Delilah being played at Wales rugby matches again? Lol.
'Cultural appropriation' really is the worst explanation to give for a manufactured grievance.
It must be fucking exhausting being angry about everything all the time.
Someone should go round all the ethnic society meetings turning the lights off on the basis of technological appropriation.
After more than a half dozen years of reading the uni thread, I begin uni tomorrow. :cool:
(although really I'm just moving into my dorm room and classes won't start for another week and a half.)
Which frat are you joining?
How are you settling in to your new surroundings Spoons?
O Caaanadaaa
Classes have started!
Anthropology is awesome, I'm really excited for it. Italian is fun and nice because there are 20 people instead of 300 like my other classes. Philosophy seems a bit dull but we'll see. English is weird because it's exactly what my parents teach so I've grown up surrounded by these books without every having read them myself; but it should be fun. And there's a "Natives of the Americas" class which seems interesting enough but I might drop because it goes till 5:30 and I don't want that much reading.
Kinda weird that there's nobody left to legitimately post in this thread these days. I guess I've got another year left kinda.
Spoonsky take a heavy math class. Just do it. If you really hate it at the end of the semester don't take one again, but just do it once. Trust me.
Just donned my proposal. Which I should, since I left it until my fifth year. :eyemouth:
Accounting.
A nice introduction would be a proof-heavy linear algebra class. I also loved number theory and set theory, so if you're into that, take a swing.
Everyone should have to write proofs at some point in their formal education. Not because it's intrinsically a specific skill they'll need, but because it's the most demanding and yet unassailable form of constructing a logical argument.
Most people just can't think in straight lines, which is what proofs demand.
Passed my resits and going into final year :)
Absolutely buzzing my tits off, to be honest.
I thought you hated it and were going to quit before it kills you?
Things change. My mental health has improved dramatically. Found a speciality I actually really enjoy which has given me a reason to do it again.
Let me have my moment. It's been a fucking hard journey.
Well done.
Genuinely pleased to hear that and that you're enjoying it again.
That 'speciality I actually really enjoy' is booting people off of disability benefits. Still happy for him?
First day back, lectures 9-7. Fuck this shit. :D
5 weeks into my solicitors course and I'm bored senseless.
I could never imagine myself studying anything related to law. I like the discipline in general, but having to study the specifics and stuff sounds so incredibly boring to me.
The academic side is very interesting (undergrad was great) but this course is designed purely to get you ready for practice so a lot of it is about procedure, solicitor's code of conduct and other tedious practical issues. It's sadly just a case of learning stuff as opposed to having to come up with any sort of original analysis.
AD, gimme your business card so I can shout 'I WANT MY PHONECALL' when I get arrested for doing something dumb.
To what extent has the monarchy been central to British identity in the period 1500-1660?
To what extent is British folklore connected to the British landscape?
To what extent has the rural landscape of Britain changed in the past five hundred years?
Not sure which to pick.
Not sure why they have a hard-on for the landscape.
The first one is the least terrible, and you won't have to read about the Norfolk four-course and poetry.
I'd have done the one about folklore and the landscape, but then I like that kind of thing
@Spoonsky mate, you dodged a bullet not going to that Reed shithole. :harold:
First semester DONE. Best feeling in the world :cool:
4.0 I presume?
No clue yet. Wouldn't be surprised if I got a B in one of my classes, but I don't really care.
I got an article published the other week (it should have been up months ago), and it turns out that 'Every author at Routledge gets 50 free online copies of their article to share with friends and colleagues'. I don't have any of those, so my actual mates might as well have it if they are interested in Harold Macmillan and appeasement.
Independent scholar. :cool:
Yeah. 100% un-owned. Free to bring you the TRUTH.
Did you have to pay to publish? Last one I did was like $2000 per figure if you wanted them to appear in color on the print version. I had about eighteen. :harold:
They want a few hundred quid for colour figures, and you can pay to have it open access (lol), but us independent scholars don't need any of those.
Good stuff Lewis.
Second semester started yesterday, though I'm still figuring out exactly which classes to take. Did really well grade-wise first semester, should be harder this time around though.
You in the academic job market, Lewis? Or getting out while the getting is good?
I tried to get into it after finishing, but I haven't bothered going for anything for well over a year. The competition for post-doctoral positions is mental, and, even with all applicants being equal (which I'm not saying they are), my proposals to write about white men and missiles were never really in line with what universities/funding bodies prioritise. I still have loads of old notes and half-written things that I will do stuff with, but mainly as a means of getting it out of my system and having some fun with it, rather than expecting it to get me anywhere.
Surely "white guys with missiles" is topic du jour nowadays with an orange mentalist with his finger on the button?
The idea was to use olden days case studies to develop a better way of analysing 'irrational' foreign policy preferences, so I was well ahead of my time.
I don't really know how post-docs work in the humanities. Could you take a sideways jump? I know the Peace & Justice studies crew always seem to have funding at Sydney, so it might be that straight history isn't the easiest way to go?
I tweaked my proposals for applications to related fields, but you are still ultimately writing about the same sort of stuff (and if you find a specific project that somebody is running that you think you could contribute to they have already promised the role to their PhD students anyway).
The problem (for me at least, although you could argue it is a wider issue) is that funding in the humanities is almost entirely decided by the extent to which your research can reach beyond the academy, and most application forms devote as much space to demonstrating how your research does that as they do to your actual research proposal. This might be the case with all fields, but in the humanities there are no obvious industrial applications for our stuff, like there might be for your research, so that essentially means relevance to public policy (or bullshit social history). That left me having to tout my project[s] as the beginning of the end for traditional foreign policy analysis, which, even if I believed I could contribute towards bringing about a different way of looking at certain things, probably just made me look like a Toby-headed twat.
This is why your Peace and Justice cobbers will always have money, because they will be able to present their work to a bunch of NGOs and the like, and, even if it never has any actual impact (ugh) beyond that, the university can say 'Hey, a team from...' and rake in more money off the back of that. What little money there is goes to projects on migration, women in warzones, and shite like that (this is also why every teaching position in these subjects 'particularly welcomes applications' from people doing gender and post-colonialism, because that is where the research funding is). Funding for foreign policy projects is pretty much restricted to supranational institutions, conflict resolution, and terrorism. My stuff, nuclear stuff... You might find something if you were working on proliferation, and there will be a fellowship at an American university somewhere named after a maniac to support your work on containment/kicking Iran about; but that is all 'Political Science' and International Relations stuff, and they tend not to want honest historians and their actual academic standards (plus that is not my area).
The military life isn't for me, but yes to the other two.
Just come to the US already. We'll go tailgating together.
It really sucks that academia is a tough ask for you (if that's what you were set on - sucks less if you weren't, of course), but it's good to hear that you do have really good options available.
If STEM could be turned into STEAM, can't we just go a step further and make it SHTEAM so that Lewis can be cool like Ital and I?
I think it's a tough ask for anyone when supply far out-weighs demand. It's harder for me in that my areas are unfashionable, but even if you are on trend then you will still have forty people going for every job, and half the ones you will go for will have already been promised to somebody in the department.
My wife is on the same boat. Her 16th century research meant that she could only apply for seven positions in the whole country, five of which where for 'generalists.' Everything goes to Francophone and/or women/migration related shit.
:sick:
Mine read more like this:
'We don't give a fuck what you do as long as you publish' basically.Quote:
The Department of Mechanical Engineering at Rice University invites applications for two tenure-track/tenured positions effective as early as July 2018. We seek faculty members who will develop a dynamic and innovative independent research program and will excel in teaching at the graduate and undergraduate levels while embracing Rice's culture of excellence and diversity. Excellence and scholarship in teaching and research are the primary selection criteria for a search in all areas of Mechanical Engineering, including robotics, solid mechanics, dynamics, fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and controls. Applicants should have a PhD or ScD in Mechanical Engineering or a related field. The positions are open to applicants at the assistant, associate, or full professor level.
Why do you like the 'nuclear stuff' so much?
He likes big butt[on]s.
Humanities doesn't seem to be as 'publish or perish' as the sciences (it fucking can't be given half the useless cunts in lecturing jobs), but what pressure does exist is in bringing external funding in, so it sounds like the reverse of your cashed-up environment.
You need to bring external funding in? In the humanities? That sounds fucked up.
I personally am equally as interested in 'conventional' military and political history (albeit all higher-end statecraft stuff), but as far as applications for things go my thesis, book, other book contract (which won't happen now, but was happening then) are all on nuclear stuff, so that was all I could really go for with no real way of demonstrating my wider knowledge.
I meant more like, what about it interested you in the first place? Why study that and not 16th century French peasants?
I don't know really. My original PhD application was going to cover more general stuff, and then I just narrowed it down to nuclear things as the most interesting. I had never actually studied any Cold War stuff at BA/MA level.
You won't get sacked for not doing so, but if you want to climb the ladder your promotion prospects will be heavily-weighted towards the externally funded research projects you have been involved in/managed, since anyone can just write bollocks for desperate publishers. Those adverts make you read between the lines for it, but others (Mrs Pepe) just say it ('high-level research' is also code for it).
Does externally funded = you found someone willing to publish your book, or do you also need to get money to get students and whatnot? I guess I don't quite understand what externally funded means in the humanities. I think most tenure requirements over here are basically publish 5-7 articles and 2 books, at least in literature.
It basically means getting people not affiliated with the university to fund your work. So you might get a government grant (through some research council) to research Lesbianism in the Syrian Civil War, which you then use to fund your work generally, and that is good; but you might also hire a research assistant, and possibly even fund a couple of extra PhDs on loosely-related subjects (Fetishism and the Derg: 1974-87). All of which either subsidises the university directly (since your research assistant and PhDs are all on the books and teaching and getting more funding per head), or at the very least gives the university new people to improve its research output. Other sources - fellowships, travel grants, etc - all get chucked in as well.
I posted before about my old supervisor getting fifty grand to produce an interactive map of an old base that is now an industrial estate. It was the most pointless project ever, but the funding bodies have to justify their own existence by taking academia to the plebs, and an interactive map of something nobody cares about technically fulfils that requirement (see the earlier point about bullshit social history).
External funding trumps publications as the key academic metric now. Publications are simply a mechanism to improve your chances of pulling in grant money.
Science is exactly the same.
EDIT: Hence the month of January every year in Australia being almost uniformly dedicated to grant-writing. Ask me how my day's been.
Is it for the same reasons? I can see the point in science, since you might need loads of money, but you have to wonder with humanities research whether not getting the money - but having an extra year to actually do the work instead of writing grant proposals - would be a better trade-off for the majority of funded projects.
No one gets external funding in the humanities over here. Well, at least not in literature. They just write whatever shit they want and the university takes care of paying students, who do most of the teaching anyway.
In my department it is indeed the case that external funding is the most important metric. The requirement for tenure is to bring in three times what you were given for startup, according to a recently hired professor. The admin loves it since those grants are used to pay the tuition of graduate students (the full $65,000 per year each of us allegedly cost) to the university. That's the reason they were all chimping out at the plan to tax stipends - they would've needed to decrease or completely eliminate tuition, which would've meant less money going from THE TAXPAYER straight into their gold coffers.
The places I've interviewed for are teaching-focused (they only give Bachelors) so they don't care for external funding, but they do require some publications.
In the end, it's because universities are businesses who primarily prioritise the bottom line, which makes sense to a certain degree. Publications can increase prestige, which can have some limited effect on student enrolments and strengthening grant proposals. But grant money is cash-in-the-pocket bottom line to a university, with no indirectness involved.
I'm not commenting on whether I think this emphasis is right or not, but across the board in academia, grants have become the primary success measure for an academic. Which is annoying, because there's such a huge element of chance involved.
I don't know whether it's true, but we once had the daftness of the system explained to us with the example of Brian Cox almost single-handedly making Manchester the most popular destination for Physics applicants, but none of it actually mattering because BBC work isn't part of their funding equations.
I've been told by people who studied there that he's actually not a very good undergraduate lecturer, interestingly enough.
Would people know who he is without the telly work?
Just applied to three Masters of Architecture programs in Canada. (Sorry Spoon, but not McGill.)
I decided to do it a couple weeks ago, and I wound up sending in an 80% complete portfolio where images from the final project don't even match. 😎
Don't worry--I have a bunch of F's from my most recent degree (that's another story), so that's going to go down well with the Admissions committees.
Pepe, is there a way to repackage mechanical engineering as a social justice issue for Mexican-Americans?
There is probably something about a Big, Beautiful Wall that could be said.
UBC in Vancouver, Calgary, and Carleton in Ottawa.
I'm hoping for Calgary because it'd be possible for my fiancée to keep her job.
Are you an architect now? What does a Masters get you?
In China you probably just need to know how to use a ruler.
Over here it's two years of studying a Masters followed by 3,720 hours of practice signed off by a licensed architect. The hours are broken down into different categories, which each have their own minimums. It takes most people 3-4 years to get their license.
So I'm looking at seven years minimum starting from this September at best, which puts me at 38. 😒
Digital rulers.
Just had the most awkward/shit lecture ever.
Meant to be on the start of the Irish free state and the lecturer said it had been a while so she was nervous and would probably stutter a bit. There was more stuttering than coherent language, I also couldn't look at her face when she started stuttering for fear of laughing. She was also from Northern Ireland so didn't know Irish so couldn't pronounce Irish language which was in the lecture which was odd as the main lecturer for the unit is proper Irish and fluent.
Probably hates her so wanted her to fail.
Mahow laughing at people stuttering when talking in front of a room...
I bet her lecture constituted a better example of the English language than that post.
There is a spectrum that goes across the worth of the subject area and how bad a writer the historian is. You start with people who have to be good writers to make their stuff stand out in crowded fields, and you end up with the frauds who write about the subject itself or race or some other shite and who couldn't tell you their names without confusing or contradicting themselves. Irish history sits more towards the latter end of that spectrum (precise position dependent on how much of a whinger they are).
Where do BOMBS fit in? :henn0rz:
That sort of thing is well-written insofar as it is normally formal and not full of made-up terminology. Obviously not everybody has six Best Poster titles under their belt, so quality writing is still rare.
Some of the stuff I had to read for politics/IR was properly badly written, but then 95% of academics in that are stealing a living.
Most academic writing in general is awful. Some even do it on purpose, the frauds Lewis mentions. My wife's writing has been criticized for not being 'refined' enough just because it is not full of made up bollocks. I usually get good comments on my writing, but my competition is the Asian crew, so yeah.
I bet she writes in wingdings and fingerprints.
So what you're saying @Mahow is that she had troubles.
😎😎😎😎
Being a university lecturer is a bit of a rough gig, especially when you're starting. You're basically untrained as a teacher, and you're not even remotely hired on your ability to teach. You've had extensive training as a researcher, been hired on the basis of your research record as a researcher, to do research. Oh and by the way, you'll have to teach basic elements of your field - a task you've never been trained for - in front of a hundred students, the vast majority of who don't care and will never understand the real subtleties. And, while we insist that it's an important part of your job, you're on a hiding to nothing, because good teaching has little career impact, but bad teaching scores can scupper your promotion and career opportunities.
Now, I actually enjoy teaching, and my scores suggest that I'm decent at it. But it's still a really weird feeling for me to be doing a job I'm largely untrained to do.
How much research do you do versus teaching?
Pretty sure I'm going to fail finals which is a pain. Only allowed one resit which would be in June I think.
Had an absolute bitch of a first term with migraines so although they are under control really well now, I've been playing catchup all year and am not prepared enough.
Oh well, give it my best and see what happens.
Best of luck with it! Hope it goes better than you think.
Well I don't think the first two days went as disastrously as expected, other than one station which was being examined by the consultant who supervised my previous placement and will haunt me for the rest of my life.
My thought was I'll be resitting and that this was a practice run so if I do scrape a pass it'll be a nice bonus.
It's election week and usually I either skip Uni those days or I somehow miss it all.
Yesterday I did not. Loads of dickheads with flyers and some proper shit school-esque posters all the place to try and garner votes. There was either one twat dressed as the blue Power ranger (green or black only ffs) but with no helmet.
31, Hertfordshire.
I'd love to know what nickname the other students have secretly given you.
All good I'd imagine.
This is more likely though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2xE-f-_dkQ
Mahow being older than me surprises me every time I hear it.
I'm not getting too excited yet but I think there's a slim possibility I might actually pass this.
We had a ridiculous station today though. Had to talk about 3 different types of catheters (tubes for going up piss holes) and answer questions on them. Just not something we'd ever need to know, have ever been taught or would have thought to look up.
I'd be surprised if I got more than about 10 out of 25. One guy reckoned he saw his marksheet and he'd got 4 :D
So are you a doctor now?
I have the last of my clinical finals tomorrow and then written finals in two weeks. If I pass I'm a doctor. If I fail I resit in June. If I pass the resit I'm a doctor. If I fail again I'm a binman.
Thank you. Will give it my best.
Team Doctor. Doctor Club? Club Doctor. :cool:
Doctors vs Engineers :drool:
Shame that Boydy bottled joining the CDR. We now have to wait for Spoonsky to grow some pubes.
Pepe is an engineer and a doctor. Surely he wins?
I wrote Dr Foe xoxo on my lab coat pocket at uni, so clearly I am too.
Still two months as an engineer exclusively.
Club Doctor.
Ah. I didn't bottle it. No one would fund me. :(
Team binman :cool:
I got into the University of British Columbia's Masters of Architecture program, which is the most competitive program in Canada. It's ranked #27-35 worldwide depending on the list, which is the highest in Canada.
Made it in first round. 😎😎😎😎😎😎😎
Aren't you a fully grown adult man? Everywhere is expensive if you're a career student.
Yeah, I'll be 31 when the program starts.
I haven't been in school for three years now.
Vancouver is about 25% more expensive than Edmonton, where I currently live. I won't be working either as I won't have time for it, so I'll need student loans. I've got no savings from working three years as it's all gone to getting my fiancée's massive student debt down.
Is she going with you?
EDIT: That was a dumb question.
What's she going to do?
Panda. :cool:
Well exams have all been examed. I survived. Honestly no idea how they went. Couple of weeks of blissful ignorance until results.
Fucking hell waiting these results is getting to be torture. About 6 days to go.
I'm defending my dissertation on Monday. Can't wait to be done.
I hate knowing that some bugger already knows. Just tell us you vicious bastards...
When I did mine they told me that I had passed before we even sat down, and then we just had a nice chat about how mega I am.
Unfortunately medical exams don't work like that. Have to pass every individual thing rather than passing across a year.
I already gave everyone my draft. My advisor said it was "excellent." The rest of my committee are two old profs who don't give a shit about anything, another one who told me that since I already have a job there is no way anyone says no, and two other ones who have been here for a year, so there is no way they give me any trouble. I'd say my certainty of "passing" is about 99%. I'll still have to do my presentation (things work a bit differently in engineering,) spend an hour fielding their TOUGH questions, and then I'll be good to go.
They said mine was excellent, so I said 'I know', and then I think they were too shit scared to ask me half the questions they originally wanted to.
:D
Academics are a hard as fuck bunch.
They'd probably never come across a burly northerner before.
Somebody claiming to be a Greek army officer e-mailed my old supervisor asking him to ask me for a copy of my 'highly praised book' which he needs for his thesis to earn a promotion but apparently can't buy with his credit card (something something Greek economy). I don't have any spare copies, but I'll send him a link to the actual thesis. What? :cab:
UPDATE: Greek in question appears to have posted similar sob stories elsewhere. Unless he has been in officer training for seven years (learning that queer march they have), it sounds like shite. Whatever. I'll still send him it.
Reminds me, I need to give my copy back.
:lol:
@Adramelch, mate, you have some explaining to do.
Passed the written, failed the clinical. As expected to be honest, although I can't pretend that I wasn't hoping I might have just sneaked it.
Oh well. Onto resits.
Shit one. I'm sure you'll pass the resits.
If (when) you do, is that you finished? Do you still want to be a doctor any more?
If/when I do that is indeed me finished, and I would start work as a doctor in August.
I want to at least give it a go. Looking at friends, I think being honest with myself I'm not sure I have enough MEDSIN IS MY PASHUN in me to put up with how shit life will probably be for the next few years. Long-term if I got where I want to go (being a paediatrician) I can see myself happy, but it's a lot of years of sacrifice away. Maybe I'll end up loving it, IDK.
If I start and I hate it I'll find something else. Medicine degree is a good thing to have in the jobs market, or so people like to tell you at least. Might get me on the Lidl graduate scheme at least.
I think Pepe was talking about the weird march.
What the fuck is this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4Ej1vK8hCg
How are the people watching not laughing?
Yes, the lol march. I totally get why people would resort to extreme measures to read Lewis's book.
Every aspect of that is deeply silly.
UPDATEUPDATE: I e-mailed him the link to actual thesis and said I would answer whatever questions he had, and he replied - three times - thanking me and asking me to send him what spare books I do have about the British nuclear deterrent (which is also none). Nigerian scammer. But wait. He also included a Greek postal address with a description of what the street/place names mean.
When I was nine my grandad, who was an engineer on merchant ships, set me and my brother up with some similarly-aged pen pals in Ghana where he did some of his work. Why I don't know, but their surname was Yorke so he mugged us right off telling us that they were related to Dwight Yorke (we told everyone at school as well like cunts). Anyway, after two letters of generic 'Haha no lions here mate' pleasantries we got identical letters asking us for money and - weirdly specific for a relief appeal - a fucking walkman.
Finding out your grandad was a madam for scammers must have been a bit of a moment.
He's apparently been dogged by rumours since the eighties that he had/has another family somewhere in Africa, so it's hard to know what to make of it all (I should say that he is actually my step-grandad, but I once made a big deal about that being a stupid term so I have to live with it).
Do the hard yards for a few years and then relocate somewhere they pay you an awful lot more than the NHS.
I had a friend who has just been made up to consultant and he was offered* about 5 times his salary to come over here (and do basically nothing).
*he is/was based in a hospital where doctors from over here sometimes go and he was tapped up by a consultant, but never followed it up.
I knew I would pass, so I was alright; but I also assumed I would get some corrections and/or minor re-writes because everybody does (not least because what might be clear to someone who has been reading your work for three years might need further clarification for others), so I had priced in having to go away for a month or whatever before re-submitting it. Actually passing on the day was mega. I had to rush around getting it bound and submitted to the library and all that, and it meant that I was the only person from my entry group graduating that summer. I bet some of them are still at it.
I had about three hours worth of corrections to make, which I knocked out the next week. I passed with no problems, but I don't know how anyone could ever feel confident walking into a defence. It's not like I've had a dozen before and knew basically what to expect. I was pretty much clueless.
At the time, I thought it didn't help that my examiners were probably two of the top half dozen applied mathematicians in the world, so I was absolutely petrified about having to face them down in an adversarial examination. But it turns out that worked very much in my favour, because they had nothing at all to prove, and didn't need to me to explain any of the broad details, as they already knew it all. We spent about ten minutes tops on all the background stuff before diving into the real content.
Submitted the final version today. All done. :cool:
I was confident because my thesis was literally the first study of its subject, so it wasn't really possible for any examiners to question its originality or where it sat amongst the existing literature (I know everything has to meet a level of originality, but some claims are debatable). With that in mind, and having been told by other people that it was well written and researched, I figured - short of some weird unforeseen failure - that I would just be pulled up on were minor interpretations and mistakes I might have made.
My supervisor also put a bit of stock into getting established people to do it for the reasons you mention (I did my upgrade with two people who weren't specialists [him being the only one in the department] and it was painful). His additional theory was that having an internal examiner with a more established reputation would provide some sort of home advantage under normal circumstances, but you can only really test one at a time.
Someone in my year has to do their written papers again because (he does his papers on pc due to dyslexia) an invigilator accidentally deleted one of his papers.
I'd have burnt the fucking med school down.
Fuck that shit.
thinking about doing a pgce
'I bet you didn't think I'd like Crowded House, did you? Well I do. I like them a lot.'
Don't dream it's over is quality, alright.
Falmouth.
More like Failmouth if he's turning up.
I'm going to use this thread to vent occasionally about lecturing.
I set the world's easiest mid-term exam today. I told them precisely what week each of the two questions would test. I made the questions practically identical to in-class examples, with some small tweaks. And I let them bring in a formula sheet. At least a dozen of them forgot to bring in the formula sheet entirely, and the sheer range of wrong answers I saw when going through the scripts was dire. It truly is one of the worst things I've ever seen from a class.
Maths seems like one of those degrees you would only do if you were right into it (and therefore likely good at it), unlike humanities stuff that people do because they sort of like it, so people fucking it up feels like it should be unusual. Is that fair?
It's all signaling anyway so who cares, right?
just use a calculator losers
How many books sold is that?
No idea.
It's a bit different here. Basically everyone in science, engineering, finance, etc., has to take first year maths. It's considered such an important skillset that it's not optional for most students. Which means that most of our teaching is actually to people in different degree specialisations, which tends to lead to a little bit of laxity in study. After all, they're "not here to study calculus"; they just want to build bridges.
But this particular class are meant to be the smart ones, so I have no idea what went wrong. Even an utterly basic amount of revision should have done the trick. They clearly didn't revise in any way.
Have you considered the possibility that you're just a shit lecturer?
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Who knows. Maybe some other class had something in a close time-frame which distracted them. Or maybe they are a particularly lazy bunch. Some classes do seem much better than others. You'd imagine that they should all average out, but that doesn't seem to happen.
What's the class specifically about? Maybe dreadfully easy to you isn't so for others
It's first-year linear algebra, but the first mid-term test is supposed to be a freebie. It's nothing they didn't see in high school. And given that good high school grades are a prerequisite for doing the course, it's reasonable to assume that they've seen basic vectors and complex numbers before.
The crazy thing was the number of students who didn't bring in a formula sheet, after I told them about it in every lecture leading up to the test, and in two seperate announcements on the course website. I don't know what more I could have done for those kids.
That’s the sort of Zinger you don’t see on many Forums.
Shit, looks like I will be asked to teach Fluid Mechanics. That's the one I am a bit crap at. Will have to brush up on my Navier-Stokes.
I failed first year maths because I was high all the time. I think I failed exams that were exactly like the one you're describing. I imagine it's fairly common amongst first years everywhere.
In hindsight it's pretty embarrassing that I didn't ace the entire first two years of uni, a good part of it is an open goal.
I finished my first year at McGill. Everything went pretty well and I enjoyed my classes even though some of them were really big.
I feel like that fake James Milner twitter posting like this.
Pepe. :cool:
Didn't even have to pay the $2500 I owe for health insurance. :harold:
Resits this Friday and next Friday.
I'm a million times more prepared than last time, but fucking hell it's still so nerve-wracking. Especially given it's basically do or die now - either I'm a doctor in a month or I've got almost nothing to show for 8 years of effort.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
I'm sure you'll be fine. Good luck though.
Thanks.
Well resits are done and I finished my last half day of catchup placement earlier today. I will never attend anything as a med student again - one way or another it's all over. Results the week of the 9th apparently.
Fuck me it's been a long old journey but I'm proud I managed to stick it out to the end whatever happens, although obviously I'd really like to pass.
Congrats dickhead.
Hope you passed.
Well done, RL. Hope you passed. How do you feel it went?