11 posts tagged “academia”

• Turned down four party invitations for this past weekend. I already went out on Friday night with a friend whom I haven't seen for months, so can't go out Saturday and Sunday again.
  
• What the hell?? The sun comes out and all of a sudden everybody wants to party? There is no sympathy for the swamped *sigh*.
• More parties this week. Mandatory attendance for two of them:
  
• Wednesday going on a cruise around Manhattan, already paid for it and invited guests so can't flake out.
• Saturday office picnic - department funder is going to show so need to start preparing small talk material. Com'on I'm totally worth my paycheck!
  
• Saw the American Ballet Theatre production of "Sleeping Beauty" at the Metropolitan Opera House last week.
• TOTAL DISASTER!! Of course Gillian Murphy is still the best, but there should be a law against bad choreography.
• Finally finished "Bush at War" by Bob Woodward. Must blog about it on VOX.
• Poor Colin Powell, he never had a chance. How can rationality prevail when the president trusts his own "gut instincts" (aka "truthiness" ala Steven Colbert) more than reason?
  
• I beat God of War on PlayStation2! Yay!! Even with a glitch at the end, I still prevailed. I am now the new God of War!!
• No wonder the gaming industry has a hard time breaking into female consumership - Kratos (the protagonist) is really ugly. If it weren't for the cool Greek mythology sceneries I would totally ditch this game based on his looks.
  
• My first sole author manuscript got rejected by the journal *sob sob*...
  
• It was a really prestigious journal, and it was a special issue, so I was glad that they even decided to send it out for peer review. Got some helpful comments back, totaling 11 pages - pretty rare for reviewers to write this much. So ultimately it turned out well, will work on revising the paper and send it out to another journal.
  
• Finished entering all my dissertation references into EndNote - 385 thus far. Now I just need to finish READING all of them... damn it.

The New York Times has an obsession with sex. Not hot, erotic, passionate sex. Rather, animal sex. Survival of the species sex. First they wrote about caretakers in the China Panda Sanctuary showing pandas in the zoo "panda porn" to teach them how to mate, then it was the evolution of duck genitalia, complete with graphic descriptions of the duck penis. Today, it was about poor Lonesome George, the bachelor tortoise living single since 1971 on the Galápagos Islands, possibly the last male of his species.

But what does this have to do with grad school?

First, there has to be a grad student who devotes her life to the duck phallus. A person who has watched countless duck copulations and knows duck sex inside and out. That would be behavioral ecologist and post doctoral researcher Patricia Brennan. Yes, yes, her work has made serious contributions to the field of evolutionary biology, but a career path as an expert in duck penises? Well, I guess they do say that specialization is the only path to success in academia.

Then there is Lonesome George's Girlfriend '93. The poor graduate student from Switzerland named Sveva Grigoini who masterbated Lonesome George many times in order to examine and document his virility. According to the article, she has had better luck with other male tortoises. I wonder how Lonesome George felt about that. But who cares about Lonesome George? THIS IS WHAT WE HAVE TO DO TO GET THE DAMN PHD!!! Always the silent researcher who does all the dirty work and gets no credit. Sveva I hope you at least graduated!

I"m so envious of people who read fiction, like Chayenne, lemon, navelgazer, Lorelei, MainMor. Heck, pretty much everyone in my neighborhood. The last English fiction I read was Angels and Demons, and it was only because I needed something quick and dirty to read on a direct flight from Portland, Oregon, to New York City. The two leisure books I'm reading right now are A History of God by Karen Armstrong, and The Social Construction of What by Ian Hacking. I've barely made a dent in either so far. Not much leisure time I have.

Well, I do occasionally read Chinese online stories on MyFreshNet... does that count as fiction?

Anyways, meanwhile I have 300 some references I have to read through for my dissertation. Standing on the shoulders of many many giants is totally killing me. Some of the books I am reading:

I don't know why I'm doing this. I'm still kicking myself for not getting a job in the American manga industry after college. I honestly think the only thing I really enjoy reading are graphic novels, mangas. I'm a visual person. I like pictures in my books.

Thanks to good friend Lorelei, I have come to realize that being in New York AND academia for too long has really taken a toll on my interpersonal skills. It first became apparent this summer when I hung out with the Berkeley crowd while training at UMich. But com'on, who's not uptight compared to the Berkeley people? Anyways, now that I am working part time in the Real World and dealing with human beings on a daily basis, the abrasiveness of my behavior has become even more apparent. So this is going to be a working progress. I am going to learn how to be a normal, integrated, social being.

For starters:

• I will respect rules at the office. I will not break norms just to test the responses of other people. I will abide by social boundaries and not purposely invoke discipline. (Okay, Lorelei, why can't I be disciplined? I like being disciplined...)
• I will respect authority. I promise to actively demonstrate my admiration for my wonderful boss (whom I totally adore), and to be more gentle with him.
• I will practice my shoujo giggle. I will not throw people in a loop by picking and choosing gendered behaviors. I will not be so nonchalant and will practice being more empathetic.
  
• I will choose my words carefully and not state the obvious when it might accidentally point out the incompetence of other people. I will not treat office dead weights like undergraduates. Instead of nurturing them and risk sounding patronizing, I will join them.
  

Oh no!! Is Slackenerny going to graduate BEFORE ME???? NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! This can't be happending. The only man you can count on to be nonaccountable is joining the Real World? My entire world will go upside down! I am going through a paradigm shift *intercept existential crisis.OMG where the f**k is my thesis? I am freaking out!!

If a total stranger walks into your class, hands you a difficult midterm, barks orders at you for two hours, and then makes off with 50% of your grade for the class, would you at least ask who she is?

Well, about 100 some college students DID NOT.

I cannot believe nobody came up to me after the exam and asked, "Just who the hell are you and where are you going with those exams?" Because I was so waiting to say, "Oh nobody, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night!"

What further amazes me was that some students even came up and asked me questions on the content of the exam. Well, okay, theoreticallyI should know all the answers to the questions. But let's be honest, the last time I looked at any of that information was like eons ago.

Yet, still, no one asked who I was.

There goes my one opportunity for life imitating art.

So I proctored an exam this week. It was a last minute thing, a favor for a poor frantic professor who had to deal with a student fainting in the class during an earlier midterm exam. Believe it or not, this is not a rare occurence. Exam weeks are also accident weeks on campus. Even I had two accidents during my short stint as a proctor. After the exam, one students walked right into a desk and nearly flipped over. Then another student (and I have NO IDEA how he did this) fell toward a chair and literally slid his body through the chair and rolled on to the floor.

There is a reason for that ambulence parked on the quad. During exam week, the students stop eating real food, they stop sleeping, and they are COMPLETELY DISORIENTED.

This is the absolute best time to rob them.

So I finally decided to haul my ass out of academia and get a part-time job in the Real World. Still have yet to break my record of never holding a full time job, let's hope it will never have to come to that. Anyways, so I've been working an office job for a couple of weeks now, and it really has been a fascinating study into the dynamics of the rat race. Below are the most important things I have learned thus far.

Top 10 Advice for Winning the Rat Race

1. The most powerful person in the office is not the Boss. It's the Secretary. Suck up to the Secretary.
2. Keep your lunch hour 5 minutes shorter than the Secretary's lunch hour.
3. Encourage the secretary to take long lunch hours.
4. Know your boss's schedule. Maintain visibility.
   
5. Follow Parkinson's Law. Let work expand to take up all the time that is available.
6. Turn in work on the day before the office meeting, at the end of the day.
7. Only report good news. Spin bad news so they sound like good news.
8. Complement everyone and everything.
9. Don't bookmark your surfing sites on the company web browser. Use del.icio.us.
10. Be a team player, but always appear less competant than the most competant person in the office.

Any other suggestions?

Top 10 Advice to Grade-Conscious Undergraduates
By an impoverished, exploited, and jaded ex-TA (Teaching Assistant)

1) Know the Official Statistics: If grades matter to you, don't go to a school where the average GPA is 2.1. There is a reason for that. The Law of Averages isn't a law for nothing.

2) Sharpen your Ears: Keep up with faculty gossip. I don't care if he's a recent Nobel Laureate. A nasty divorce will mean C's for EVERYONE.

3) Know Thyself: If you are a man of few words, stay away from classes that use essay questions on the exams. The excuse, "But it' is not in my nature to explain my arguments," isn't going to fly.

4) Spatial Comprehension: Know where the TAs sit in the classroom. Honestly, we don't care if you are watching a movie, IMing with friends, or surfing the web during class. But please note that if we are sitting right behind you, we can read everything on your screen. Unless you score >95% on both the midterm and final exam, it will come up in our discussion of grades.

5) Enjoy Life: If you had a long night and plans to snore through class, don't bother coming. Honestly, there are >100 students in the class and we don't really care whether you can make it or not. Don't be alarmed when the TA approaches you during the break and suggests that you sleep in the comfort in your own bed. We are really looking out for your best welfare, as we are paid to do, as well as the interests of your classmates.

6) Know what NOT To Read: Believe me, there is no way we can cover all 500 pages of the assigned readings in the 2 hour class. Talk to the TA, talk to the prof, or students who took the class last year. Don't ask: What can I get away with not reading? Instead, ask: What do you think is the most important concept I should look for in the readings? Then skim.

7) Dress for Success: Thanks for coming to Office Hours. However, a bikini top and a short skirt where the TA can't look at you without seeing your thong is a cause for alarm. Correlatively, decking yourself from head to toe in Pradas, LVs, and Manolo Blahniks is also not going to help your plea for a higher grade. Remember TA salaries qualify us for welfare support.

8) Demonstrate Soft Skills: I once had a student who did well in class, yet didn't always get the high scores. She was always very friendly and respectable in and out of class. She demonstrated attentiveness and effort, and was very professional in all her correspondences. If my little cousin was going to college in New York instead of another state, I would haves set him up on a blind date with her. This girl is going to do very well in life. Needless to say I made sure she got a good grade in the class.

9) Know who your Trump Cards are, and when to play them: This is typically saved for the more savvy students who know how to navigate the system, so I can't really disclose trade secrets. But just remember that there is always a way around the system.

10) Turn prestige into Social Capital: The professor has tenure and does not give a damn if your father is the president or CEO of XYZ, or if you attended a VIP event last night at the Met with [insert famous names here]. But your TAs do! You are our one link to the outside world and we LOVE juicy gossip!

10a) Turn success into Social Capital: I once had a student who demonstrated zero ability for analytical thinking and conceptual comprehension. Never mind her failing exam, but I was seriously worried for her intellectual development. But the prof sat me down and broke it to me gently: She has just been offered 50K starting salary plus bonus at a famous multi-national investment banking firm. Well, who am I to stand in the way of someone's success or the decay of corporate America? Passing grade it is!

Here are some awesome comics from PhD, Pile Higher and Deeper, the graduate student comic strip by Jorge Cham:

Wait, just read their graphic usage agreement.. too complicated. (I'm getting my PhD, I specialize in laziness.) So below are the links to the two awesome graphs instead of me putting them up here. (If you search for Jorge Cham or "i am screwed" in my tag pool you can see them in my photo collection. I think I can get away with that one....) I hope you are just a tad bit less lazy than me. So here are the links:

Graduate Student Weekly Output Level Analysis

Overall Motivation Level by Years of Study

I am so screwed...

When I finished doing time as a temporary paying object at the UofC, I thought I was one of the few lucky ones that was able to escape the residual effects of reinstitutionalization. I did not hold the human race in bitter contempt, I wasn't left to pick up the pieces of a shattered ego, and I didn't develop one of those arrested development style - I am an unloved genius trapped in the loony bin - complexes. No. Aside from lack of social skills and an unhealthy idealistic naiveté, I thought I was just fine.

But now as I struggle to write my dissertation, certain behaviors ritualized and internalized in those years have really come back to haunt me. I have painfully came to recognize how difficult it is to really free yourself from the imprints of your past.

What behavior am I talking about here? Chronic Binge Writing Disorder, a type of post-college bipolar traumatic stress syndrome.

Based on a series of participant-observer case studies by yours truly, Chronic Binge Writing Disorder is characterized by a cycle consisting of 5 stages, identified by the acronym DREAD:

1. Deadline - A deadline is established where a difficult task needs to be accomplished,
   
2. Readiness - Must research every single reference ever written on the subject. There is ALWAYS one more book to get before you begin,
   
3. Escape - Extensive period of procrastination & avoidance, usually accompanied by dread & self hatred,
   
4. Adrenaline - Euphoria achieved by an intense but short period of crisis management and productivity,
   
5. Depression - High wears off, sinks to a manic depressive state due to mental & physical exhaustion.
   

So basically, when suffering from Binge Writing Disorder, your life oscillates between deep depression and extreme  elation. Completely out of control. You never know what you might do to yourself when you are at your lowest, and it takes a toll not only on your self perception, but body as well.

Honestly, Binge Writing Disorder is totally manageable in certain cases. I still remember one quarter during my junior year, it was finals week and I had an important paper due for Game Theory class. Our grade was going to be based entirely on this paper. What did I do? The night before it was due, I went out partying with a bunch of my friends (couldn't miss it, it was a farewell party), came home at 3am, started writing at 4am, finished at 5pm the next day, and got an "A" in the class.

Yeah, when you are young, doing those 15-20 page papers through the process of binge writing is totally doable. But now, as I am trying to write my 300+ page dissertation, it is turning into a total, absolute, complete nightmare.

9/19: content edited