WordPress tells me I'm over 1400 words into this thing, so obviously I'm fighting pretty hard against letting the biggest lie come apart, so here goes. The truth is, I don't have a dissertation. I have written, and written, and failed to write, and written, and failed again, and on and on, but there's just not much there. There's a lot of fifteen-page starts of chapters cluttering up my hard drive, because every few months the guilt of lying and the shame of not being done impels me to one of my long dark nights. But everything I've ever said about my progress here in the casual asides in between all the monkeys and boob jokes has been a lie. If you've every run into me in person, pretty much everything I said then on the subject of my dissertation was a lie, too.
Doesn't this happen some enormous percentage of the time?
Not everybody tells boob jokes and even fewer tell them well.
I had a hard time writing my dissertation for several years. I'd start chapters and they were terrible, so I'd get discouraged. One reader kept assigning me deadlines rather arbitrarily, on the threat of writing a not-good letter for me. I had about two and a half chapters in first-draft form when I got my job, and, honestly, that was really the thing I needed.
Yes, I needed years of time because my project was so difficult and I needed that time to get smarter and talk and think about what I was doing, and yes, I needed years of time because I was teaching 10 classes a year for fucking peanuts, with a four-hour daily commute. But the real reason why it took so long is that writing a dissertation is incredibly depressing when no one alive believes in you. Even the people who do believe in you won't say so because they're afraid you might have a confident or positive feeling. I was so insanely jealous of people whose committees didn't dole out a single positive word per year so they'd begin to feel like a pigeon in a Skinner box.
Getting hired, even just for a one-year job, but one that pays well and where my colleagues say things like, "We're so excited about the research you do! We loved your writing sample!" was the carrot I needed to finally take some pleasure in writing. I loved finishing my dissertation. It felt giddy and happy and totally pleasurable to write, under the circumstances that there were people who didn't act like they hate me waiting on the other end of it.
I am so glad I didn't go to grad school, because the linked article is pretty much exactly where I would be at this point (if I'd gone straight from BA to PhD program). Despite all the good talks I've had with my alienist over the last year, and the bupropion, I get so wrapped up in my own head that I can't think right or do anything. It's horrible. I think it is a bit better than when I was at the lowest point of my depression, but it's still really bad. Sigh.
Somehow this reminds me not so much of trying to write my thesis, but instead about how much I enjoyed the game "Violet."
That reminds me far too much of the last months of my schooling (a masters program), where I had basically done as much work as was necessary but spent a long time unable to force myself to write about it, so I quit without the degree. Not totally the same, since I had done some work/research, and put it out in the world (go open source), but the formal writing hoop eluded me.
I later did put together a conference paper, but only by having someone basically email and call and nag me three or four days a week, and I hated it.
Oh, man, that was awful to read. Objectively, I'm not that badly off -- I've never actually gotten myself in a real hole by failing to write something that needs to be written. But that's the subjective experience: losing hour after hour not writing and not doing anything else either, driving myself to get words on the page out of exhaustion.
Wow, this is strange. I find that once you just get in the habit of outlining good ideas and do one of those or expand a previous one every single day, productive work just kind of happens by itself.
Also, try hard not to lose good work or go down blind alleys that take fucking weeks until you get enough analysis done to see that no, there is no exit, just a plain of writhing maggots. Now everything put off in order to try this other thing needs to be done.
10.1 was sarcasm, good advice that I don't follow. I am in fact 10.2
It's the good advice that you just didn't take?
I like the writhing maggots.
Writing really is weird. While I'm generally lazy, other kinds of work I can make myself do without running into this sort of total dysfunction -- it's largely why I never even thought about academic grad school, because it was so clear that writers block would eat me and leave me spat out on the side of the road wondering how to get a job as a manicurist.
...wondering how to get a job as a manicurist.
Polish or perish.
I have big problems with writer's block, but I avoid those problems by having coauthors. I was recently feeling proud of myself for having finished a 110-page series of papers, and Rhymeswithmaria asked how many of those pages I actually wrote and it turns out to be about 15 pages.
Obviously, I couldn't survive in the humanities. But I also think I'd have had a very hard time being a productive mathematician prior to the internet making collaboration over distance possible.
I think about this stuff a lot. One of my main conclusions is that most people can't make themselves write anything like a dissertation, but never allow themselves to do the things they need to make it possible. (Or may not be able.) Mostly, I think that as a first approximation, people can't do anything that requires sustained solo concentration and discipline, and the first step is to stop pretending they can.
My next advice is to spend money (hire a trainer, hire a dissertation coach, hire SOMEONE whose full attention is owed to your project because you pay them, because that attention is incredibly valuable). If people don't have money for that, that's a good reason not to. But if people have money, and don't spend it out because of the concept that they somehow shouldn't have to, that's unforced error.
If buying attention isn't an option, then Unfoggetarian's solution is a good one. Co-authors are instead trading off the incredibly valuable attention to the project. But no one else is interested in your dissertation or weight loss, so that's harder to find.
But people get caught up in shame about failing to do something that I'm pretty sure almost everyone can't do. That's terrible.
There really is variation in how hard people find this sort of thing. I'm distinctly screwier about writing than other lawyers whose process I know anything about -- now, I cover like anything because I'm ashamed and self-loathing about it, but I have enough sense of the norm to know I'm not close to it.
I'm not sure how it would translate to the humanities, but I think I tend to work in one of three modes, which I will call, in the usual clichéd fashion, Good, Bad, and Ugly.
The Bad Mode is seductive because it's unproductive but fun and interesting. It's where I start to think about a topic, do some reading, get an idea, play with it a little, get led to something else, which I read more about, etc. For learning something new it's a useful mode, and sometimes it's good for brainstorming and generating ideas, but for writing papers it's useless, because I spend too much time reading and playing with new things and never drill down and do serious work. I spent most of grad school in this mode, and probably learned a lot, but also spent a lot of time doing ultimately useless things.
The Ugly Mode is productive but not in a well-organized way. It's my default way of working if I'm not careful: I produce a lot of results, but they're scattering among different notebooks and computers and directories and after several months of it I'll think "wow, I've done enough with this idea that I really should write a paper," but then just finding all the pieces of it and organizing them and writing it up becomes a huge chore.
The third is the Good Mode, and the main thing I learned over the past few years is how to force myself to operate in it. Here, after initially formulating an idea that I think might be worth writing a paper about, I try to write the paper as I work. I start with an outline, which will probably change a lot but which at least gives me a clear list of things to fill in. I try to limit myself to doing tasks that actually contribute to the final result. I want a table of this, so let's write the code to generate the numbers for it. I want a plot of that, so let's figure out how to produce it. I want to demonstrate this, so let's calculate the relevant formulas. Pieces of work go into the draft as they are completed, so I don't have to go back and sort through them months later. In grad school I never really learned to work this way, except to the extent that I had to when finally finishing a paper after months of Ugly Mode.
The only drawback of the Good Mode is that it prioritizes work that can be finished relatively quickly, and it would be nice sometimes to step back and attack much more difficult problems that aren't going to succumb just to being well-organized and thorough. And it's a constant struggle for me not to fall into The Ugly Mode, because I tend to be distractible and sort of jump from one thing to another and leave bits of finished work scattered all over.
Then there's the fourth mode, which is what we are all doing at this very moment.
I've spent enough time writing in the same room as coauthors (version control is great) that I know I'm genuinely slower and more distractible than at least a few other peers.
I think you're right that it's pretty universally hard to make yourself do things that you don't want to do, but for some people writing isn't something that requires discipline. I don't need discipline to keep working on a problem I'm stuck on, but lots of people do. I need to force myself to write, but some people don't.
I'm distinctly screwier about writing
I believe you, but do you also give yourself credit for writing tens of thousands of the most lucid words on the internet? Your screwiness happens to include a facet of extremely fluid and (I'm guessing)pleasurable writing as well.
I currently have four different files open, so that when I get frustrated trying to write a sentence in one of them I try switching to another one in the hopes that I'll get out a sentence there. It often works... Though slowly.
Well, I don't need discipline to write some ranty post about water. But I'd apply my comment about getting help to anything that happens to require discipline for each person.
Conversations, even written ones, are completely different things than writing for a final edited project.
22: You may have noticed I don't put up a lot of posts. Commenting doesn't set off the 'I'm writing now' insanity, where writing posts does -- something about being responsive in the moment.
I ruled out grad school until I got my horrible self-hating neurosis about writing under control, but now I've accepted that I won't go (to an academic program, at least) and will probably never be able to write comfortably. It's fucked with my self-image a lot, though.
2 close 2 home.
OTOH, Adderall seems to be helping a little bit.
I've generally solved this problem by not being ready to write. Although, I kind of need to start writing chapters in the spring, so I should probably stop putting off going through my research files, which I have to read to get started with writing. But then, I've "successfully" set things up so that the dissertation is not the main thing I do. Hell, I'm not even enrolled in that school right now.
Megan is right about the overseer bit. The only people I know for whom that is not true are intensely driven hyper-competitive types. Even they need some external driver, though in their case it's the possibility of losing to someone else.
I understand this student has been having some trouble, but if he had put as much effort into writing his dissertation as he did into telling us his feelings, he'd be done by now.
Yeah, this is me. A big problem for me is the "perfect is the enemy of the good" problem. "Good" isn't good enough, so I obsess about perfection, and fail to start or finish anything, for fear that it's not perfect. Until there's no time left to be perfect or, often, even good. Then it's just a scramble until it's done, whether it's good or not.
At this very moment I am avoiding writing the last paper from my thesis research, a mere two and a half years after my defense. I've been opting out of fellowship applications because I'd need a good letter from my thesis advisor, and with this paper still unwritten I can't bring myself to ask for one. So that strategy is working out well.
Essear's 19 makes a lot of sense to me. I get stuck at the point of saying okay, the analysis is done now, no REALLY DONE, time to write. But if the analysis is framed as a task within the writing, rather than preparatory to it...? That could work. I wonder.
I wrote the first third of my dissertation over about a year and a half (after spending a bunch of time before that doing the underlying research). I wrote the last two-thirds over a month and a half of 18-20 hour days, seven days a week, after my advisor gave me the "this is really it, I mean it, file this term or forget it altogether" speech. I got the final version filed with three whole hours to spare on the last day. Fortunately, neither of my other two readers required any significant changes (I suspect my advisor may have had a quiet word with them about that). I'm not completely sure if I should be ashamed or proud of that record, but I got the damn thing done.
One of these days, I really ought to stop procrastinating.
I'm procrastinating (I should be writing a conference abstract) right this instant!
It's 300 words, how hard can it be.
Sifu.
300 words.
Come on.
No more commenting.
It still counts if it's the same comment and you keep appending lines. You can't fool me like that.
No.
Sifu.
I love writing, am a compulsive writer, even for ~3 years enjoyed the writing I do for work. Once I lose interest, though, I lose interest hard. The linked article stressed me the fuck out, because it's (ok a somewhat magnified version of) my working life this very moment. I can't even begin to think about knowing how to concentrate. I have to wait for the adrenal kick of something being due NOW to snap me out of the self-preserving stupor I assume I use to disconnect from something that's become anxiogenic.
(Under ideal conditions--attorney I like, client I find easy to talk to, readily available and high signal-to-noise-ratio records--it's a lot better. But those don't happen much.)
I'm doing the analysis for a conference abstract right now. I did three yesterday and the week of Thanksgiving.
When I started my first masters, I had a friend who was on the other end of the grad school sojourn who let it get down to the wire, and had to write her whole dissertation in 3 miserable months. She did fine, and got her PhD. Years later it was do or die time for me, and, keeping her example in mind, I wrote my entire dissertation in 3 miserable months. I did fine and got my PhD. We're both in the sciences, though, and I suspect that makes things easier. I think all the PhD casualties I knew were people in the humanities, falling into endless pits of faf and woe, never to be seen again.
I got the final version filed with three whole hours to spare on the last day.
I ended re-starting my undergraduate thesis from scratch about half-way through the semester which ended up producing a much better paper but seemed somewhat foolish.
Related to essar's descriptions my problems are (1) it's hard to write much about problems that I'm still in the process of mulling over combined with (2) once I have reached some final conclusions it's hard putting those on paper because I know exactly what I want to say, but it's so much effort putting that into words that I lose track of the threads and then get frustrated and sit there staring at the screen waiting for everything in my head to start making sense again.
I have learned to be able to consistently do projects at work, "that requires sustained solo concentration and discipline" but, in that case, the concentration and discipline covers weeks or occasionally a couple of months.
I start to go crazy if a project drags on longer than a couple of months because I desperately need to get to a point where I can call it *done* and not have to keep storing it all in my head.
My lab/department seems to do a good job of constructing deadlines (conference abstract! presenting in lab meeting! presenting in different lab meeting! first year project! second year project! second year talk!) such that you have to actually accomplish things. Not that that makes me any better about getting things done before the deadline imminently looms.
I think all the PhD casualties I knew were people in the humanities, falling into endless pits of faf and woe, never to be seen again.
The sciences definitely seem easier. You can't just go disappear to allegedly read three hundred books.
You can't just go disappear to allegedly read three hundred books.
Also, in the sciences your work is usually intertwined with others, and they depend on you to some degree. You're probably also doing something a bit expensive, and whoever's funding it wants accountability.
A useful diversion while procrastinating on academic writing is to read Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim. It's a fun read, although also a nasty little book on several fronts.
I wonder what the shortest dissertation ever was, and how far off mine was. I'm guessing you could have a math dissertation weigh in at 10 pages.
I have a half-baked theory that what can break the freeze for some people is dictation. Then, if you literally have someone sitting there with you and you are talking to them but they are writing it up, you suddenly have a raw file with your argument basically outlined. Which you can edit. Editing is a lot less scary than writing.
I also know, from personal experience, that literally sitting beside someone at the same computer and talking to them as you type can be extremely effective.
And some of my most fun memories have been crazed joint editing sessions in a PR-crisis or fast-breaking news type situation. Assuming you can tell the truth, that can actually be a pretty awesome bonding experience.
Although it's interesting -- I've never been surprised at the degree of editing/revision that can go into a 500-word statement, but some of my colleagues have been kind of staggered at watching/overhearing the process. It's also a really good teaching tool, if you want people to learn the nuts and bolts of what you do and why.
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/54775/what-is-the-shortest-ph-d-thesis
I should clarify that I've never done any academic writing, so all of the above may not apply. Although I am quite fond of my dictation theory.
Dictating to my mom totally worked for me in middle school and early high school. I expect it would still help a lot.
Acute enough that I had to skim all your fine comments and command myself to close the browser NOW NOW NOW oh no wait look an email, perhaps the salvational saving succoring email that will finally rescue me. (as context, the babysitter I am *paying* to give me work time is actually supposed to save me here. If only it were not me being saved, for alas, I am damned!)
I just read of an Adderall shortage.
Gabardine - If it's any comfort (it shouldn't be but sometimes it is) I am just passing the ten year mark on that same problem. I had planned to work on it this December but I have a far more interesting paper to write that's also a lot easier.
I am procrastinating horribly at the moment. I got a bunch of questions to answer earlier in the afternoon and (apparently) I really don't want to go back to the work I was doing.
I'm always already procrastinating.
Tweety,
Just write the abstract as a comment here.
I have good success with writing by starting out writing like I'm talking to myself, or a friend at a bar, or in a blog comment. All my sentences trail off and there are tons of "or whatever" and "that one thing that one dude said". Also lots of swearing and unnecessary sarcasm.
Then once I have a bunch of paragraphs that say something, I tell myself about how it's easier to go back and make it sound like a grown up, because it's already written, it just needs some clean up.
Except, I usually miss things in the cleanup phase. Having a proofreader is crucial so that the final draft doesn't refer to "Chomsky and all his little syntax-crazy friends" or "whatserface's stupid Hand Tier Model."
I did some work, the amount I told myself I absolutely had to do today, and now rather than do more, even though there is plenty of time left before I go home, and even though the stuff I have done so far was kind of cheating since it was heavily scaffolded on something scavenged from an old draft of something else, there is no way I am going to do more. Oh well!
I used to think that I would benefit from some nice ADHD medication, since I have been a horrible procrastinator and daydreamer since kindergarten at least, but (a) who would give it to someone who did in fact manage to complete a PhD? and (b) I have a feeling it would not combine well with my tendency toward middle-of-the-night high anxiety.
Then, if you literally have someone sitting there with you and you are talking to them but they are writing it up, you suddenly have a raw file with your argument basically outlined. Which you can edit. Editing is a lot less scary than writing.
I've definitely found this to be the case when helping students write short papers. It seems harder to do with big projects, like humanities dissertations, but maybe that's because I fit into the category of people who seem to not be well equipped to write one.
p.s. I actually went after ADD treatment earlier this year, and was told that my history of depression & anxiety was a huge confound, that getting a clear case history of the last 30+ years of my life in order to arrive at a diagnosis would be very difficult, and that I couldn't take amphetamines while pregnant anyway. The disorder really seems to beg for inventive, high quality CBT, but no one who takes Adderall as a productivity drug has time for that anyway. Some grad students might, however. But grad school gives you a very complicated relationship to time, IME.
Relevantly, I have now opened the documents containing my academic work! It is all utter gibberish, but now it is *visible* gibberish.
I finished the abstract and sent it to my adviser, who said "oh, yeah. That looks fine. I've seen vaguer."
This is not making me terribly confident.
I think that vague is standard for conference abstracts, since you're often describing what you hope will be finished by the time of the conference. Only if the conference is selective (keynote/plenary chosen on basis of abstract or something) do organizers get fussy about detail IME.
you're often describing what you hope will be finished by the time of the conference
Despite the fact that they specifically admonish you not to do that, yes, that seems to be what everybody does.
Right, so sometimes you procrastinate a lot on something and then you do a major draft at home in your pajamas on a Saturday night and then three months later you're being asked to present your humble little draft to federal officials. As in: Give your background details to the Secret Service, because you're going to be next door to the White House.
60, 61: We do it different and just have the abstract or, at most, a poster at the conference. Then you write the paper whenever you want.
62 should *definitely* not be presidential. Congrats, Michelle!
63: oh, well, this is an abstract for a poster. They still say they want the work done before you submit.
Hm. I wonder if the SS knows that junior WH staffers think it is OK to send an unencrypted Excel file for a visitor to fill in with b-day, Social Security Number, and other personal details.
(Thanks, everyone. I'd use my real name here but it would take about three seconds for people to connect the dots and I'd rather not.)
The Secretary of Energy is apparently giving a talk here tomorrow called "The Role of Mater/als and Manufactur/ng Research in Energy Solut/ons &Atom /nterferometry, Quantum Mechan/cs and General Relat/v/ty," which, um, what the hell? Is it, like, three different talks? Maybe he's too ADHD to talk about one thing for an hour.
I find it disturbingly useful to have a medium-bad TV show going on in
a tiny corner of my screen, as a not-too-attractive attractant for
monkeybrain. I probably `watched' all the training montages in Make it
or Break it ten times making it to candidacy. Oy.
_From Research to Manuscript_ looks like a very sensible way to
organize work so that the fun noodling around turns with minimum pain
into actual writing. I have been carrying it around for days in hopes
that the method would simply osmose into the rest of my life.
And now: back to work. (What really saved me? Leechblock.)
|| Drink 'em if you got 'em, ladies and gentlemen. |>
What helped me stop procrastinating was my advisor being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. I got through it okay, he didn't.
No.
Sifu.
I have a mix tape that might be helpful on this topic.
Obviously I've never had to write anything resembling a dissertation, or even a thesis, but my old job involved a ton of writing for proposals and master plans and suchlike, and of course every week I write a ±600 word review. I tend to think for awhile about whatever the topic is, form an outline in my mind, and then flow with a burst of writing in very short time; the reviews rarely take more than 40 minutes, sometimes closer to 15.
BUT. When I was writing really big chunks of work, I'd have a multi-paragraph burst that really was articulate and incisive, and then... it was like my brain needed hours to recover. Honestly, to some extent that's when my bad internet/Unfogged addiction began: I really couldn't continue to work on the thing for awhile, and so I'd recharge online. Now that pattern has extended to drafting, for which there's no excuse whatsoever - drawing an elevation or annotating a detail or dimensioning a floorplan isn't at all the same kind of mental burst, but I've developed a bad workflow. It's actually a problem now that I'm busy.
Meanwhile, going back to Megan's thing about self-motivation, in some, maybe even many, ways I'm very self-motivated. I ride a thousand miles a year, some of it incredibly hard, without training buddies of any sort. Obviously, I've been growing a solo practice for 6+ years now. Nobody but me expects me to spend 10 hours in the kitchen on Thanksgiving Day, but I relish it. Yet I can't fix this internet/focus problem. Blocker-type workarounds don't help, segregating computers doesn't help... it's pretty stupid, really.
Having this discussion on Unfogged feels like the guy at the crack house getting all the crack addicts together to talk about their crack addiction.
If the government ever wants to recruit a special military unit of smart, easily distracted people with procrastination issues, this would be a great resource.
I'm giving a talk tomorrow, which is more important to me than usual, and I haven't written it yet. (It's not so bad, since most of it will be cannibalized from other talks I've been giving lately. But I really should be writing it, and I can't bring myself to sit down and do it. I think I'm going to go do laundry now instead.)
I mean, yes, distraction bad. Writing one's free-associative essays about flying and that girl dissertation good?
Having this discussion on Unfogged feels like the guy at the crack house getting all the crack addicts together to talk about their crack addiction smoke crack.
74.2: Marvelous! I can truthfully say I laughed out loud.
78: But it's, like, especially meta crack.
65: There's a weird distortion effect around conferences, though. Before the conference takes place, there is almost nothing less important than preparing a conference paper; this condition obtains until the day of* the conference, when you realize too late that an ill-prepared presentation is a waste of everyone's time, particularly yours, and only preparing thoroughly would have made the whole ordeal worthwhile. Then the conference is over, and its special ranking of priorities instantly dissolves again. (What becomes the highest priority? Laughing smugly for a full hour at some inferior piece of scholarship, followed by fourteen other things -- nine of which also entail smug laughter -- followed by doing your own work. Or something.)
"Maybe it's different in the hard sciences," let me ritualistically add.
* or shortly before, anyway.
[A] special military unit of smart, easily distracted people with procrastination issues....
The Dirty Distracted Dozen, not starring Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, George Kennedy, John Cassavetes, Jim Brown, Telly Savalas and Charles Bronson.
Meta crack is what they have at the crack houses nearest the MLA each winter.
The old "Internet! Distracts me! Bad internet, bad!" excuse really doesn't explain it where a dissertation (anyway) is concerned, because I was failing to write a dissertation before the internet was invented.*
My problem was probably closest to Smearcase's Once I lose interest, though, I lose interest hard.. Once I'd done all of the reading, identified what interested me most and inspired me to do/think original things on the matter, written scads of notes, done further reading, and so on, I really didn't want to back up and write it all out. Teeth-grittingly boring. I'd moved on, and this was no longer really that interesting. It was so last year.
There were a lot of other factors involved -- losing my advisor chief among them.
* Not really, but let's just say that the blogosphere wasn't much around.
The Internet can't be that bad, relatively speaking. I bet dinosaurs were pretty distracting for Jesus.
68: Let us know if he does his Brando impressions. They're better than I'd have guessed.
84 Once I'd done all of the reading, identified what interested me most and inspired me to do/think original things on the matter, written scads of notes, done further reading, and so on, I really didn't want to back up and write it all out.
Yeah. I always find that I'm eager to move on to the next thing, and it's hard to summon the willpower to get the finished thing out. But that's why I find it much more productive to do the writing as I go. It still needs some revising at the end, but there's less of that "but this is already over and I want to move on!" feeling.
When I have writer's block, the best thing for me to do is try to think about the piece away from the computer - like take a walk or go for a drive. Get up and move while I think.
Not blogging. I agree with whoever above said that conversational writing and blogging are totally different from structured, planned, dry writing.
If the government ever wants to recruit a special military unit of smart, easily distracted people with procrastination issues, this would be a great resource.
I feel like this has been done by some science fiction writer, but I can't think of a specific book.
I suppose that it could be done humorously with a bit of the "Seven Chinese Brothers" aspect of a book like Phule's Company
87: Yeah, I realized somewhere along the line that writing discrete chapters, like individual papers, along the way would have been wise and infinitely more handleable (since I could write papers after all), but at the time it seemed to me that I couldn't see the entire project -- and therefore suss out what the chapters should even be -- until I'd gotten somewhat close to figuring it all out, "it" being what I had to contribute to the overall discussion.
It felt at the time like a problem distinct to, at least, philosophy. Maybe other fields. I did realize eventually that there were dissertations that weren't megathons, but that did routine service to relevant topics, chapter by chapter, almost like a survey, but that's not what I'd ever thought to be doing.
Probably the best advice I'd give someone at least in philosophy about this is just that: there are different kinds of dissertations. Some are more survey-ish, some are more like a magnum opus, and you have options on this.
89.1: I don't think there was a procrastination element, but Donald Hogan in Stand on Zanzibar would have fit in at Unfogged, but then they call you up and you have to go fight muckers. Or maybe the Robert Redford character in Six Three Days of the Condor.
||
Rand Paul has just done probably the only thing on earth that could earn him my respect. From the linked video:
And really, what security does this indefinite detention of Americans give us? The first, and flawed premise, both here and in the badly misnamed PATRIOT Act, is that our pre-9/11 police powers were insufficient to combat international terrorism.
This is simply not borne out by the facts. Congress long ago made it a crime to provide, or to conspire to provide, material assistance to Al Qeada, or other listed foreign terrorist organizations. "Material assistance" includes virtually anything of value, including legal or political advice, education, books, newspapers, lodging or otherwise. The Supreme Court sustained the constitutionality of these sweeping prohibitions.And this is not simply about catching terrorists after the fact, as others may insinuate. The material assistance law is in fact forward-looking....
It's a sad day when a crazy and bigoted man is talking more sense than the constitutional lawyer who is president of our United States.
||>
I'm surprised that's Rand Paul, rather than Ron Paul.
architeture video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18_iQR7mUjo
Huh, I was so surprised I read it as Ron. It's pretty rare that Rand takes a position outside Republican orthodoxy.
The linked blog post/account was almost unbearable to read. Though he writes so well! which made it all the more unbearable to read.
I have to wonder whether he should have published such an admission, such a frank confession, under his apparently real name. "I have written, and written, and failed to write, and written, and failed again"/in what I have done, and what I have failed to do...well, it does read like a classic confession to me. But is the case really so dire and irredeemable? Might he not put together 3 or 4 of those 15-page fragments into a couple of solid chapters; or is all really lost, as he now seems to believe?
I wish him well, in any case.
Haven't read this comment thread yet, but boy, does his story sound familiar. If I'd written that, there'd have been a few altered details--no co-authored journal article, less emphasis on focus, and more on shame and depression--but, really, it could pretty much stand as-is.
84 also describes me to a T.
Once I've figured it out, I immediately lose interest in the tedium of filling in the gaps and writing the manuscript. I know the answer, so it's done, right?
I'm actually mostly ok when I finally start to write. The problem then can become that I get too involved and it completely screws up my hours since I don't like to leave something for too long when it still feels too undone. I guess if you can keep student hours it's less of an issue.
Again, I solve this problem by not being ready to write.
When I started grad school, I was healthy and not yet a parent. I had my share of procrastination issues, but looming deadlines and the ensuing panic were always enough to get me through.
But when I was finishing my degree, I was the primary caretaker of two kids and I had managed to acquire two chronic pain conditions, which necessitated round-the-clock narcotics. I'm not sure at all how I managed to graduate.
However, the goal was a PhD, which required a second masters degree and then a doctorate. So I started in on my second masters degree while both of my chronic conditions were rapidly deteriorating. The fog from the narcotics made it impossible to concentrate while simultaneously damping the panic of looming deadlines, which removed all motivation for writing.
I managed to finish a single class. And that only by not taking my pain meds, and then when the fog cleared writing through the pain until it became intolerable and/or until withdrawal symptoms set in, retreating into the narcotics haze to rest up for a while, and repeat as needed.
That was unsustainable.
I took a semester off, switched around my meds (including adding in some ADD meds to combat the narcotics fog), tried to take another class, and realized that I was now so bad off that I couldn't even *read* my course materials, much less write anything.
Dropped my class. Put my academic career on hold for the foreseeable future. If/when any miracle cures materialize, I'll consider starting up again.
But is the case really so dire and irredeemable? Might he not .... or is all really lost, as he now seems to believe?
I've always kind of hated Thanksgiving. But the only part of this year's extravaganza (5 days, 16 relatives) that really got to me was when, as she bid us goodbye, and after an evening when I'd done my usual schtick of talking as if my comparative constitutionalism anecdotes represented only the tip of my Iceberg of Knowledge, my grandfather's wife remarked to my mother and I that, gosh, with the way I talked, well, I could be such a wonderful college professor.
Yeah, I'd thought so once, too. But thanks for reminding me!
Sometimes, it's kinder to just let the dream die.
The linked post is more or less what would have likely happened to me if I'd gone into a PhD program too, and it's more or less what happened to my dad when he did go into one, with the result that he dropped out at the ABD stage (although there was other stuff going on too that contributed to that result). Not doing a PhD is a decision I've never regretted.
Relatedly, my current job is awesome. It's by far the easiest job I've ever had, and it's fun too. Bureaucracy for the win!
You know what's awful? Writing up notes of sessions at a tedious conference for a report nobody reads, two weeks afterwards.
Also, why will nobody who isn't a programmer ever use version control? I am seriously considering filtering all e-mail attachments from colleagues in an effort to operant condition them out of sending around 3 MB MSWord files with inconsistent edits.
re: 103.last
I ended up installing subversion and using version control on the final drafts of my thesis resubmission, as I'd cocked up repeatedly towards the end of my first submission [with sending my supervisor the wrong draft, or with updating the wrong version, etc. and the examiners complained about minor grammatical errors in the submitted version that I know I'd fixed].
At work people are increasingly writing documentation in LaTeX or just plain txt files, then using version control (and diff) so we can track changes. Still a bit unsystematic at the moment, though.
Also, why will nobody who isn't a programmer ever use version control?
If you say things like that, the gods will punish you by making your company deploy MS Sharepoint, and then you'll be sorry!
But you're right. Tell the silly buggers they're making Paul McMullen's job easier by exposing their early drafts to him.
This is hilariously insane. And it's a developed world thing, not an academia thing or even an American thing, although some details about it are. Everyone should read the link in 50 if they haven't already. Short version: for most of the past year there has been a nationwide epidemic of people going without their usual medications or paying exorbitant prices for them, probably due to drug companies manipulating the market to screw over their competitors and/or get people to switch to a new, even more profitable drug. We have people commuting two hours a day and working on high voltage equipment while going cold turkey on Adderall.
(To preempt the obvious glibertarian response: while, yes, this is partly due to restrictive government regulation and a laissez-faire drug policy might help in some ways, if it weren't for the FDA companies could and gleefully would sell stuff, without a prescription, that was seriously addictive rather than just "sticky". That would be bad.)
I'm glad I don't have that problem. I know that because the only drugs I use are alcohol and caffeine, and last night I got a good night's sleep all on my own... after fighting a time-traveling dragon (with the help of his past self, no less) in the recently-released new content of a MMORPG. Yup, I'm the normal one here.
Sorry about that, hope the sarcasm is obvious enough. Seriously though, it's fiction I've been meaning to write and putting off interminably rather than a dissertation, and there's almost no pressure or guilt involved, but this thread has inspired me to give it a try again. We'll see how it goes. And as for the rest, I find just it funny how the future is now but no one noticed.
103
Also, why will nobody who isn't a programmer ever use version control?
This makes me realize that, wow, my job could easily be worse. I have people working off the server document probably at least a third of the time by now, when they do e-mail file attachments around it's usually consistent by the time it gets to me, and the biggest file I have to work with is less than 1 MB. I definitely share your pain... but not as much as I thought I did.
Might he not put together 3 or 4 of those 15-page fragments into a couple of solid chapters
I have a friend who has been not finishing her dissertation for a good five years now, including a year abroad and a year on dissertation completion fellowhship (that is, two years funded with no teaching responsibilities). This is the thing that everyone has been trying to tell her. I long ago stopped believing that it was ever going to happen, and only wish she could get to that point as well.
Another book to (not) read while procrastinating on writing is The Thought Gang, particularly the sequence where his exasperated editor kidnaps him, takes him to the Outer Hebrides and cuffs him to a radiator (but ultimately writes the book herself).
"Dr Coffin, you are lazy ...thoughtless ... crapulent ... contemptible." I was biding my time until something came up to which I could object, but nothing surfaced in her disdain that I could really contest. "You're on Barra. You're miles from the nearest off-licence, even if you could decuff yourself. "...
"No, we can sit down and write. Ten pages a meal. When you've done two hundred you can say goodbye to the radiator."Also maybe Sartre's Nausea.
People there are things *so much worse* than sharepoint. I "use" one at work. They're just stealing our money with that tripe.
101: fwiw, you have my full sympathy. My parents still say this to me on a regular basis, particularly my mother. And it's fundamentally as silly as having your parents tell you you're so charismatic that you should have been a movie star, but it doesn't feel that way at all -- presumably because I don't know any movie stars?
108: yeah, the thing is that those fragments can get to a permanently dormant, depleted state from which no amount of effort on the author's part can recover them. I'm a bit afraid of this happening to me. The loss-of-interest issue is indeed a huge one, and it can be really, really insidious -- you can easily be unwilling to acknowledge for 5 years that trying to warm over old work is mental torture and you'd do almost anything, even forgoing a PhD, to avoid it. I don't think this attitude is so unhealthy -- but I still hope I can avoid it.
I idly wonder if I know the person you mean -- hope not. Odds must be low.
I spent a while thinking about whether there was some sort of "version control for humanists" package that I could put together for rfts when she was working on her dissertation; in the end, the answer was no because she wasn't working in TeX (or Markdown, pandoc, etc.), and I sort of figure that anyone working in TeX is technically sophisticated enough to use subversion themselves. (Now she uses Scrivener, which has its own VCS system baked in.)
Ah: no indeed, the person I was thinking of filed last year (yay). I did not know Google Books listed dissertations.
I tried to teach git to non-programmers this summer. That was hilarious.
You callin' me unsophisticated, buster?
Sharepoint has version control, and MS's cloud is super-easy to sign up for.
I tried to teach git to non-programmers this summer. That was hilarious.
My only knowledge of git comes from these posts (and comments) but they make that sound like a bad idea.
At my last job we had some mild success getting people writing in Word to use TortoiseSVN, which has some black magic for doing diffs of Word documents. Plain text or something would have sufficed for 90% of the work, but such is the corporate world.
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I just found out that my colleague got their PhD at a for-profit university!!!
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My paid planning internship comes to an end at the end of the year. It's clear that I'm not going to be offered a real position, though if I beg beg beg I might be able to extend the internship. I've been at this place for a year now, and has 8 months of paid internship before that.
I've been applying to planning jobs, and none have led to even an interview. One, a internship in MS, got over 150 applications. If an internship in Biloxi gets that, how many applications do real jobs get?
At least in this economy, it is becoming clear that because job market is so tilted in the favor of employers, they basically want the next superstar. If you want a job, to competently do the work each day, and then go home to the rest of your life, you basically aren't getting a job in planning. I just got an email from a boss about a webinar that will make us more saleable, that ends "As always, you are on your own time unless you have team leader approval". Go fuck yourself.
And, frankly, I don't want to be the next superstar. I would like my work if I were reasonably remunerated, but I don't think I care about contemporary planning enough to do all the things I would need to, like webinars and groups and conferences and books, etc.
So, unless one of these last opportunities comes through, I'm getting close to deciding that I'm not going to be a planner, and have started applying to secretarial jobs and the like. This failure is heart wrenching and sad, if only because of the time I've put into it, but also the first real professional feeling of failure I've gotten since undergrad. That sounds horrible, but in grad school, and before when applying, I was always encouraged.
So this is a long round about way to get to the topic at hand: I'm talking with profs about applying to a PhD. And even more topically, possibly in medieval history/geography/architectural history. I've been advised, rightly I think, that I shouldn't apply solely because the job market sucks, and I couldn't agree more. But I do have a passion for the stuff I'd be applying for, and I've been getting lots of encouragement. With the complete lack of professional encouragement I've been getting, professors' excitement at working with me is kinda overwhelming.
But I ask you, is this a real indicator? The profs, of course, don't have to offer me employment. They get me to work for/with them for a number of years, and then put me on the market to fend for myself. Should I trust this excitement? I really want to be around people who are excited to work with me. I don't really have other questions, but just am going a little crazy about all of this, and would love advice/chat/etc.
I might be willing to pay someone for the treatment in 109, sometimes.
I just found out that my colleague got their PhD at a for-profit university!!!
So you know where they got their PhD, but you haven't yet been able to figure out this colleague's gender. Interesting.
My advice, Alfrek, is don't go. The job market for academia is (probably) worse than the one for planning. You'll take yourself out of the work force for at least 5 years, making it unlikely that you'll accrue any savings, and it will be an emotional grinder as hard as the one that you're facing now at the end of it, especially if you don't want to be a superstar. That being said, it is fun, and the excitement certainly is worth something. But you will not be reasonably remunerated, and the way you will get ahead is by devoting hours and hours of 'off' time to other things. If you're already having a hard time doing this, I wouldn't think grad school would be the place.
Alfrek: how would you feel if instead of a 20-month paid internship, with no real job to follow, it had been a 72-month internship, with no real job to follow? Because that's a very, very real possibility.
(I say that last bit because the initial love and excitement wears off, sometimes, or at least vacates you for a few months at a time, and you've already discovered how crappy that feeling is.)
121: If I had a supervisor looking over my shoulder literally all the time, I'd probably be more productive. (Seriously, if I ever had the sort of boss where I felt I didn't need to hide the fact that I'm insane and unproductive, I'd be asking them to set and enforce very short, frequent, modular deadlines for me on large tasks: I'll have section I of the brief for you on Monday, give me a hard time about it if I don't, and so on.)
126: I think I need the part with handcuffs and an empty room, too.
With the complete lack of professional encouragement I've been getting, professors' excitement at working with me is kinda overwhelming.
I think this part is key. I'm sure you've looked, but is there a way you could be getting this sort of encouragement within your current field?
Don't go, Alfrek. Imagine being in exactly your situation, only you are far more qualified (which won't matter) and in considerable debt.
Teo: high five between bureaucrats!
re: 123
Thanks for the response. The thing is, having been through a "terminal" master's program that I made more academic and less practical, I know that I can do a long project, and that if I'm working on the obscure stuff that I'm really interested in, I will and can and do geek out for hours and weeks. It's just that I can't find the energy to geek out on the stuff that'd make me a superstar in the professional world, but can do so on my obscure obsessions. And at this rate, I'm not going to be putting away much savings anyway.
That being said, the other hesitancy is my more or less complete lack of language skills. I took Czech for a year in grad school, but in order to study medieval Prague I'm going to need Czech, German and Latin (!). That's why I'm settling into studying colonial Boston and medieval UK. For a PhD, I'd focus more, but this is what I'm doing in my spare time now.
124: That's a major question. The Arch Hist program at the Technical University of MA has a really good placement record, and one of the profs there is one who is interested in me. I'm trying to be cautious, and, if I apply, will do so only to the schools that would give me good prospects after.
A related question: I don't have to go for a PhD to do the research I'm talking about. I could just do it in my spare time. Does anyone know anything about what it's like to try to be a pseudo-academic with another full time job and no PhD?
128: I can't seem to find any!
I'd be asking them to set and enforce very short, frequent, modular deadlines for me on large tasks
I am no doubt imposing, but I've started doing this with the admin staff for our facilitation consultants. It doesn't have to be supervisory eyes; anyone can babysit me so long as it happens. It is outsourcing my discipline to someone with less privilege, so I feel a little bad, but I'm super nice to her and I assume she bills us for the hours she "collaborates" with me and more work gets done. (Also, I pick her first for doing more prestigious stuff than she otherwise might have access to.)
123 and 124 get it right. What you are saying makes it sound like grad school is a particularly bad option for you. (And everyone should be discouraged from grad school, not because it's bad for everyone but because on average it's not a good idea.)
And remember: friends don't let friends do unpaid PhDs.
129:
in considerable debt
I also wouldn't go without full funding.
What you are saying
Which part? All of it? Please say more.
Does anyone know anything about what it's like to try to be a pseudo-academic with another full time job and no PhD?
John Emerson.
130: I'm not trying to place doubt on your abilities whatsoever, more saying that it sounds to me like you'd be just delaying the position you're already in by 5 years. Everyone I know (granted, smallish sample size) that's finishing a PhD right now feels exactly the way you do at this moment re: jobs, and I don't think it's going to get any better in the next 5 years. (But goodness, that would be nice.)
130: You'll need Latin for medieval UK too. And most graduate programs will require you to be able to pass a language exam in a relevant language even if you're studying the US. But you could start working on languages now, in community college or the like!
134: You say that you don't want to be the next superstar, but in academics only the superstars get good jobs. You sound like you want a job with defined requirements, which is the opposite of academics. You're frustrated about a job getting 150 applicants, when jobs in my field get upwards of a 1000. (History has more specific searches, so the number of applicants will be smaller, but so will the number of jobs that you apply to.) As mentioned above your post about your frustrations reads like a stereotypical person getting a Ph.D. this year.
If you want a job, to competently do the work each day, and then go home to the rest of your life, you basically aren't getting a job in planning.
We're talking city/regional kind of planning? I am so, so glad that my wife got her foothold in that job market before the crash started eviscerating municipal budgets (Though now she's in transportation planning, which seems to be slightly better paid but an even narrower sub-field, so she's kind of stuck).
What are sources or authors for the urban state of medieval Prague, I'd be very interested in reading them? I read Czech.
Full funding for grad school leaves you in a badly underpaid position. You are effectively warehousing yourself until the economy gets better. I basically did this during my PhD years (physics, I chose a topic that let me leave with marketable computer skills). The alternative would probably be a low-level job in a field where there will be growth later, useful knowledge and maybe contacts but not experience.
Seeking praise or even attention is IME dangerous, expect indifference to everything but good finished work which it is completely your problem to produce.
How closely are the professors really going to be working with you? You take a year or two of classes (maybe once a week) and then after that you're basically fending for yourself anyway.
Seriously, if you have issues with no one caring about your work, people expecting you to put in effort outside of 9-to-5, and a job market that features ridiculous competition for positions in the middle of nowhere, a history PhD is like the opposite of a solution to your problems.
133: If you've got funding, then by all means consider it. Just don't consider it a plan B. If you wouldn't go if you thought you could find a better job in a better economy, you're probably better off trying to look for a job regardless of the economy.
137: Yeah, for sure. I'm considering taking a course this spring.
One option is at the English-speaking university in Budapest that was founded that really rich Hungarian guy. The head of the medieval studies dept concentrates on medieval urbanism, and is excited to work with me. She encourages me to apply for the MA and then the PhD, mostly to get the year of latin, but also to learn the basics of historical research of this type. Folks I've talked to who have gone through ND's medieval studies program have said that the Budapest MA would be good before applying to the PhD at a place like ND.
In any case, the Budapest program "fully funded" MA only offers the equivalent of 240USD/mo, which is absurd, and AFAICT, won't get the Artful Chicken a work visa, which makes it a bust. That being said, the prospect of being able to live in Budapest for a year or two is awesome and if I can make it work financially, might be worth it even if it doesn't lead to a PhD.
When you ask professors about getting a Ph.D., it's like the joke about the devil with the punchline "Before you were a prospective customer. Now you're a client."
126: I'm currently struggling (as in this week and literally this moment) with the tension between my usual style and a requirement that everything for a thing next Monday go through the presentation police* with a daily checkpoint with my boss. We're both pretty fucking frustrated at the moment--it is one of those "bring together 20 different threads/ideas after consulting/double-checking with 10 different people and then chew on it for a bit and then on Sunday afternoon deadline panic helps you finally sort out how to talk about it/show it" dealios.
*For not very great reasons (it's only for his boss for God's sake). Long, stupid story on why this the new standard he is "applying".
140: In English, Prague is Black and Gold is a good intro, and easy to find. There are a few chapters at the beginning that are urban-form focused.
Also,
this is a dissertation with lots and lots of medieval Prague urbanism citations, though authored by someone who's last name ought to prevent him from getting a doctorate.
In Czech,
Nové Město pražské (also translated into German) is awesome. I've spent some time translating it paragraph by paragraph, working on my Czech czops.
This is supposed to be good as well, but I haven't gotten my hands on it as of yet.
144: This is exactly my worry.
I can only second what others have said. If you aren't planning on being a superstar, fuck it, if you aren't one already, don't bother. I can't think of more than a tiny handful of my grad school peers who haven't had a total nightmare getting jobs. Many/most of them are still on short-term/fixed-term shitty low-paid contracts.
Graduate school means working more than normal 9-5 hours, doing a lot of ass-kissing and stupid soul-destroying shit just to try and keep up with everyone else, who are all also running just to stay still. As others have said, it's the exact opposite of what you've described yourself as looking for. It's like being in some ruthless cut-throat sales job, except no-one's paying you.
Graduate school means working more than normal 9-5 hours...
That may have been my problem.
144, 146. last: I'd also say that good professors are generally quite inspiring - that's what makes them good at their jobs. It also makes graduate school and becoming 'like them' appealing; while I don't think anyone is trying to mislead you deliberately, I don't think their excitement at the prospect of working with you is something to trust when making up your mind about graduate school.
You know, I pretty much do research and writing for a living, and I can point to things that I've (primarily) written that are objectively good, though not dissertation-length -- but the post linked in the OP still resonates with me to a scary, almost painful extent. It's like an old, intimate nightmare. Someday there really will be a project that will make it clear that I've just been faking it all along.
I guess the other side is opportunity cost. The planning (and yes, I'm in transportation planning at the moment) economy is terrible now. And do you think that US local and state governments are going to be giving out more or fewer big contracts in the next few years? Yes, I'm frustrated about a job getting 150 applicants for a 3/4 time internship in a 50th rate state. The real jobs are getting 1000, I'm sure. I just don't even get an email back from those ones telling me how many people applied.
But I also see this coming across that the only reason I want to do it is because the planning job market is shit. And I don't intend that. I am excited at the prospect of studying medieval/premodern urbanism, and do think I would work really hard and long hours at it. The fact that I did so my master's tells me this isn't a pipe dream. I'm just super frustrated at the moment, and it's hard to talk about the good side of it.
Perhaps later I'll write about how awesome urban morphology, space syntax and 3D visualization are, and how spatial tedium is soooo much fun, but not now, I guess.
But probably, I should just go be a secretary.
lucky jim was mentioned upthread.it is funny in places but overall revoltingly misogynistic. rarely have I seen such scorn heaped on a woman who wanted to initiate sex. never have I seen a protagonist who less deserves the girl, get the girl. dude, if you hate women that much, just fuck guys. there are plenty around. do men genuinely not realize that a huge percentage of books are mary-sue "she had copper red hair and purple eyes"-- level wish-fulfillment in these matters? this is stipulatively genre idiocy in a romance novel, but magically ok in Serious Literature By Someone With a Penis? fuck a bunch of 20th century novels. granted that it's funny.
Thanks very much for the cites.
It does sound like a cool experience, but the money's not right and neither Latin nor European archive skills will transfer to the real world.
Secretary is extreme. Many people are in fact really slow on the update; even minimal spreadsheet skills coupled with good reading and complete sentence writing and some intelligence will open doors, eventually, even in this shit market. 80% of applications are from people not suited to the job who send out very many resumes. How are your computer skills?
Are there companies that do document prep for these contracts? Emerging xml specs for blueprints or something? It would be scut work, but not used car sales.
Clearly some people around here have thought about version control more than me, and probably work in environments with more modern and less restrictive IT departments, so here's a question: is there any way to avoid the "only one person in a server document at a time" problem?
Like I said, people at my office work in documents on a shared server most of the time, but when one person is in a MS Word document, other people can only open it in read-only mode. If one person wants to work in it when someone else already has it open, they have to wait (which in my opinion is fine), find the person who's in it and ask them to leave (also fine), e-mail someone else to have a record of the work (which is usually me, and I'm okay with that), or save a copy of the document on their own computer and work in that copy (bad, bad, bad).
It seems to me that there must be a better way, though, and the problem is just a technical one. I mean, an instant messaging chat window is a document two people are editing at once, right? You'd just need to find some way to make text formatting as easy as in Word and put it in a .doc file type. So is this just wishful thinking or does this system already exist?
Not that my office would ever use it either way, of course. Like I said, even our current system is too complicated for some people. So I'm mostly just asking out of curiosity.
94 is amazing, and I can't believe I spent 5 minutes watching someone else draft while I, myself, have drafting to do.
I've never been there, but it doesn't sound that bad.
Branching and merging are the functions to make this happen. Merges can be automatic if different parts of the document are being modified (note that deletions and replacements make editing different from chat), but not always, so the merge needs human supervision, which means some user owns the final edit.
152 sure, but she just seemed so beady-eyed and clingy, Amis was only being honest in showing that, right?
It seems to me that Transportation Planner for Medieval Prague is a position with even fewer openings, although I suppose that there would be fewer applicants, as well.
Lots of people with muni planning experience go on to work for large engineering firms and developers. Can that directionality go the other way?
save a copy of the document on their own computer and work in that copy (bad, bad, bad)
Why is this bad, bad, bad?
154: version control is certainly one option. Google docs is another option (one that lets you see the edits real-time, which for collaborative things that aren't, like, code, is pretty cool).
152: Yes, that was most of the "nasty little book" part.
94 is about a building in Prague exactly like the one my grandfather lived in, I recognize the balcony rails and hallway:apartment width ratio.
The barely-ventilated bathroom is immediately next to the kitchenette, has two opposite wall doors to become a hallway to get from the kitchen to one bedroom.
Google docs comes without support in case of technical problems, though, right?
My son draws subways and tram lines for cities that don't have them yet for fun, and has actually done one for Biloxi. I can round it up and see if he'd be into consulting.
with muni planning experience go on to work for large engineering firms and developers. Can that directionality go the other way?
We've picked up engineers from the private sector and from developers in the past few years. It is demonstrably possible.
162.4: That's great. It's so much fun to draw maps like that. Drawn by hand or on computer? If you have access to Illustrator, it's fun to grab a pdf of an existing system and add new lines, etc.
My son draws subways and tram lines for cities that don't have them yet for fun, and has actually done one for Biloxi.
Somebody drew an urban gondola (the cable car kind, not the canal kind) system for Pittsburgh. It's pretty neat.
re: 162
My wife's sister used to have a place [I presume 19th century] which had what I think of as a very Czech layout. Huge hallway disproportionately large hallway, which the neighbours had partial access to [there was a bathroom or something at one end, they could use], but tiny kitchen and bathroom.
163: And those people had never worked for gov't before? That was mostly my question, whether firms were hiring ex-bureaucrats largely for their connections/knowledge of the process rather than specifically on the merits (not that bureaucrats don't have merits, of course; mostly that, to an engineer, "planner" can sound like a soft skill, and so you'd want to hire one with an edge, like being friends with the Zoning Administrator). Lord knows I often sell myself to clients based on my knowledge/experience with City Planning, although I no longer know many people down there (at one point, half the staff had been my wedding guests).
I suspect that there are many more options out there than (a) civic planner; (b) secretary; (c) history grad student studying medieval urbanism. Like JRoth says, even if planning jobs strictu sensu are ultracompetitive, can't you use the degree to work for a developer or construction company that does transportation projects or something similar? Or work in some other related state or municipal agency? I know the economy is terrible but these things still exist.
I mean, if living the dream for you means studying medieval urbanism, and you're conscious of the risks involved and not taking on debt to do so, definitely go for it, but if your goal is steady work in a field related to urban planning you seem to be despairing a bit needlessly.
92: Rand Paul (and Ron Paul) are consistently fantastic on civil liberties, foreign policy, and military/defense issues. Far better than Obama and the Democratic party. And they are for real about it (e.g. see Ron Paul's full-throated defense of the "ground zero mosque" at a time when this was politically risky and Democrats ran from the issue). These are not peripheral issues. We spend more than half our discretionary funding on the military and our foreign policy has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians over the past decade. I think they deserve respect and an elevation out of the "crazy" category.
However, if you simply must disparage Senator Paul as 'crazy', then here is an intriguing debate between Senator Paul and Senator Sanders on the right to health care.
The cited thesis has a chapter Another takes as its subject the controversial attempt of a popular preacher to convert a brothel into an experimental religious community of priests and reformed prostitutes.
Looks like good reading, my dad will like this too.
By hand, and he does imaginary cities from scratch for real places too. One of the Kerguelen islands got the treatment this week. Uninterested in the Google maps API so far.
You could design money-laundering kickback schemes for tram-line makers to use in getting muni contracts, I bet historical research would come in handy there.
Yeah, the ones I chatted with weren't former gov't employees before. But I'm talking about formerly private sector people joining the civil service rolls. I have no idea what the private sector wants out of people, although I hear it involves more than 40 hours of work per week .
163: I'm not an engineer, though. And are the ones you've picked up in the latter part of their career, with lots of experience, or just getting started? (on preview, I see pwned by JRoth)
I'm not saying it's impossible. I know people who got jobs, it's just that I'm having a hell of a time with it, and I'm incredibly demoralized.
And at this point, I'm not sure I want to do planning. I really like some forms of spatial tedium that I get to do, but urban designers (read: architects) get most of that work, and that is also another 3 years, and is another terrible job market. And there isn't that much of that type of work out there. But planning is ultimately a job for optimists, who think that their work is going to make things better. I just see a losing battle.
168: I'm looking, but not finding. The other part is that to get into the related professions, I need to get out and network, and present an optimistic face, and say how excited I am. I hate networking, and I'm not cheery about the prospects. Yes, I need to do these things.
I suspect that there are many more options out there than (a) civic planner; (b) secretary; (c) history grad student studying medieval urbanism.
Right, but some of the other options involve growing or processing grain.
I myself consider "planning" a soft skill and tell anyone who wanted a comfortable life to go back for her engineering masters.
144: I'd add to this that I'd expect a random professor to have no idea what the job market is like now. This is especially true of older professors, who got their jobs when academics was way less competitive.
I hate networking,
Graduate school includes a lot of this. It is different if you're excited about the material, but it still sucks.
That said, 'don't go to graduate school' is just my blanket response to anyone who asks. As Halford says, if this is your dream, there will be no dissuading you, and you can certainly pursue it and hopefully it'll all work out well!
The other part is that to get into the related professions, I need to get out and network, and present an optimistic face, and say how excited I am. I hate networking
Me too, but just to play asshole/realistic guy for a minute, you are going to need to do this at some point anyway in whatever career you choose. Going back into grad school will delay this problem, but not solve it. A need to network and opportunistically seize on connections is what being out of school is all about, in basically any career (including, I believe, academia, although perhaps less so there than elsewhere). Best not to let fear of networking alone-- which, tbh, isn't THAT bad once you start -- doom you to a graduate school existence.
Further to 177, I'm sure I've mentioned before that I used to tell junior associates to network/market the hell out of their senior colleagues, colleagues in other practice groups, and all the partners. It's (1) essential to moving up and (2) great practice with a generally sympathetic audience. I can imagine that this is exactly the situation with academics. I didn't do shit in this direction as an undergrad -- more out of cluelessness than fear -- but by the end of law school, at least 1/3 of the faculty was on a first name basis, and would have given me whatever help/rec I wanted, and not just because it's part of their job.
159
save a copy of the document on their own computer and work in that copy (bad, bad, bad)
Why is this bad, bad, bad?
Because then someone, generally me, has to merge them. At the very least, it makes more work for me, which is unnecessary in 90 percent of cases if they had just waited or tracked down whoever had it open. (Admittedly, there's a glitch around here that makes it hard to tell who has it open. However, I'm pretty sure some people don't even try to find out.)
Beyond the "usually unnecessary work" part, there's the fact that merging them is usually more work than it looks like. I know how to use Word's Combine Documents tool, but that screws with tracked changes, so that's not always the best way to go.
And finally, there's at least one guy who keeps on working off documents saved on his own desktop, long after other people have made edits to the text, so he frequently sends me something with a dozen changes to the current version, but there's only one or two he actually cares about and the rest are holdovers from a month ago or more. That's one reason why version control is important, kids!
Have you considered not caring about what changes other people want to make? Just email them the doc and say get your comments back by Friday and if they don't have them it wasn't important.
Obviously 179 is a minor problem even by the standards of this thread. But it's disproportionately annoying partly because it's such a persistent problem despite frequent attempts to get people to stop, and partly because it usually seems like someone else could and should have prevented it and there's no reason they didn't but stupidity.
And another reason it's annoying is that it's what I'm dealing with right this minute. Since noon I've had three or more people bring in the kind of thing I'm complaining about right now, and I'm expecting more before the end of the day. Definitely more of this problem than I've had in a month.
160: Interesting. I've heard of Google Docs but I've never actually tried it. I'll check it out. Like I said, I'm not optimistic about getting people here on a new system, so this is just out of curiosity.
When you say "version control" though, are you thinking of some specific program or method or something, or just the general problem I'm talking about? It looks ambiguous.
Imaginary people, this is making me really stressed out. I know that isn't your intent, and I thank you for your honesty. I had to just go for a walk. Later I'll pick your brains about what other than options a b and c might be out there, but I have to stop unfogging for a bit.
181.last: well, I'm thinking of version control software, which generally implements (at least) diff and merge and branching. I suspect subversion is the most user friendly choice (and per above, apparently has a client that can deal with word docs), but I don't know for sure.
179: Ah, there's the problem. The person who wants to save a copy of the document on their own computer and work locally should be responsible for making sure their edits end up being reflected correctly in the document on the system (just as they would have been had they been working on the document on the system all along), without fucking up anyone else's changes that were made in the interim. Problem solved.
Rand Paul (and Ron Paul) are consistently fantastic on civil liberties, foreign policy, and military/defense issues. Far better than Obama and the Democratic party.
Far better than Obama, yes. There are plenty of Democrats who are every bit as good as the Pauls on those issues. They just have no sway whatsoever over their party's foreign policy apparatus. Which is also true of Ron and Rand Paul.
they deserve respect and an elevation out of the "crazy" category
It would help if they didn't have such gargantuan baby-with-the-bathwater problems.
I myself
Funnily enough, I wasn't thinking of Megan, but there you go. QED.
As an architect, I can tell you that a lot of planning-related jobs go to large engineering firms with planning departments. Part of this is because large engineering firms get big muni contracts doing infrastructure, which makes them big political players (that is, campaign contributors), whereas munis do vanishingly little architectural work, and little of that in big contracts, so it's a rare architect who is as well connected as any of the half dozen largest engineering firms in a given metro.
"Consistently fantastic" seems like a pretty serious overstatement. I suppose I'll grant "better than Obama", but that's not an especially high bar.
There are plenty of Democrats who are every bit as good as the Pauls on those issues.
A fair number in the House but they are still a small minority of the party and none except Kucinich have national prominence. I have a hard thinking of any Democrat in the entire Senate who is as consistently good on civil liberties/military/empire issues as the Pauls are.
As another example, in the R presidential candidate debtes Paul has been better on foreign policy issues than any Democratic candidate I can remember (except again Kucinich).
188 -- wow, I'm shocked by that, maybe I'm wrong then. I had only seen his Senate floor activity on the Patriot Act and so forth and that was all great. Maybe I assimilated him to his father too quickly.
Rand is evil, Ron is crazy but right about a few big things.
179: Word's Combine Documents tool
I remember looking at that thing for the first time and thinking: "No, I can't really foresee myself ever trusting Microsoft Word that much, ever."
(Maybe it works fine, for all I know, and I've been missing out.)
191: I think this is both a charitable and also quite possibly correct explanation:
Paul is mostly good on civil liberties -- he was one of the few senators to oppose the extension of the Patriot Act -- but he is also kind of dumb, and he often makes dumb arguments, especially when speaking extemporaneously.
185 reminds me of 10.1, with the added catch that I'm way, way down the chain of command from being able to tell anyone to do anything like that.
And despite that, I guess I might try something kind of like that on a future project, when the team is still new to each other and a system is still being set up and stuff. I can't even imagine how to do it here, though. That ship has sailed sunk.
Well, back for a moment.
183: Thanks
187: Also, big firms tend to use planning as a loss leader to get the giant engineering projects. I do have to network over to these folks.
Ok, back to GIS.
Speaking of the other parallel conversation, GIS is brutal on version control. There's no Google docs equivalent (unless you are doing something simple that can be done in Google maps), and everything file is essentially a database of other files, so every time you move something from or to the server, all the files the map links to have to be uploaded too, and everything has to be relinked. We have GIS on Citrix, which is essentially in the cloud, and gets around a lot of these problems, but it is so slow.
Ok, back to work.
he is also kind of dumb, and he often makes dumb arguments
I think this is probably correct. On a related note, I recently read someone (don't recall where now) opine that the reason Gingrich is doing as well as he is in the polls is that he sounds exactly like what dumb people think smart people sound like.
I have Citrix somewhere. I don't know what it does. If I'm in charge, I keep the main copy on my hard drive, a backup on a portable drive, and then let everybody else do things by email.
Ah: no indeed, the person I was thinking of filed last year (yay).
I have another friend from my institution who could almost have been said to be in the same boat, and she did file last year. There are almost certainly lots of people in that situation, but stranger unfogged common connections have happened. Do you know where I went to grad school, lurkey?
I did not know Google Books listed dissertations.
Huh, indeed. It says that my dissertation is 444 pages, which is about 200 pages too many.
Those who point out the necessity of networking skills in academia are correct. It's true that not all successful academics are good at networking, but the in my experience the vast majority of them are. and it's one of the skills that I emphasize the most with the grad students I mentor.
Gingrich is doing as well as he is in the polls is that he sounds exactly like what dumb people think smart people sound like.
That's perfect, and perfectly true.
200: Hopefully you emphasize it in the form of "If you don't have networking skills, don't go into academia", instead of "Make sure to develop some networking skills somehow!"
194 strikes me as the most likely explanation, in part because he delivered that video linked above extremely smoothly (as in, the right pauses and timing for some complex sentence structure), in a way that sounds thoughtful but could just be good speechreading.
I don't doubt that he honestly believes good stuff on civil liberties, and I really do appreciate that he's saying it publicly. But as a woman who isn't any variety of Christian that he would recognize, I certainly wouldn't feel appreciably more safe in Rand Paul's America than I do in Barack Obama's.
I will also say that I can't stand networking in the abstract. Nevertheless, when in service to an important goal, it's a heck of a lot easier.
I imagine "important goal" varies by person -- mine are essentially all in the advocacy domain. If I had to network for my own sake I can't imagine how I would do it.
what dumb people think smart people sound like
I think this description of Newt is from Krugman, although the phrase may not be original to him.
197 is reminiscent of AWB's fantastic description of David Brooks as "a dumb man pretending to be a smart man pretending to be a dumb man".
Yes, I've often stolen AWB's line about Brooks, to great acclaim.
In addition to the smart/dumb David Brooks dialectic, there is the cynic/moralist dialectic -- but I can't fucking decide if he's a moralist or a cynic; I just know there are layers of pretense built in. I was for "moralist" for a while, but now I'm honestly not sure. (So, ok, a dumb man pretending to be a moralist pretending to be a cynic pretending to be...)
199: I know nothing beyond inference from comments here, but either some of them were fairly explicit or I just jumped to conclusions (or both). But it was suggestive enough that I wondered if you were talking about this acquaintance -- it would have made me feel sad for her. It seems not, so now I just feel sad for your colleague, and for the guy in the OP, and for a hell of a lot of academics, I suppose. I might just be in a mood.
I endorse all the prior comments stressing the importance of networking in academia, and might add: if you can't do it, you run a pretty high risk of stagnating and feeling alienated from your work. Even if you love to read and think and write, very few viable dissertations are anywhere near as fun as the independent research you could do if you could pick your topic outside an academic discipline or departmental structure. It's rare for people to get by on their love of research alone -- unless you happen to be the world expert on some little thing, have a topic of great personal significance, etc.
I don't think Rand Paul is dumb exactly, he's maybe of average intelligence, but he's confused by his upbringing. He's not as smart as his father -- Ron is very sharp but radical in the extreme. Ron actually wants to return to a mid-late 19th century social order and has a decent understanding of the institutional change that would be necessary. He's also anti-imperialist and anti-militarist. That's the ideology Rand Paul grew up with, but it is so insanely astronomically far from "conservatism" today that it must be pretty confusing to hold on to it. He must constantly be getting tripped up between stuff his Dad taught him and what he heard on Fox the other day. Ron Paul completely understands that his conservatism has little to do with today's conservatism but I'm not sure Rand has figured out all the angles on that yet.
Personally, I don't regret going into a Ph.D. program, but there have been a bunch of costs - mostly of the opportunity variety, fortunately* rather than of the loss variety. I'd do it again from the same starting point, but differently. I am less sure of my decision to do the other MAs I'm doing, but the prospects are better and I actually like the work work, just not the school work.
Anyway, I have a lot to say on the "should I go to graduate school" but don't really have time for it tonight. I don't really have much to say on the answer that starts with "no", as that's been covered well enough - it's more an answer that starts with "if you do go...". I'll try to check in tomorrow.
*To the extent that can be considered fortunate.
wants to return to a mid-late 19th century social order
But definitely not crazy. Nope, no way.
I don't think Rand Paul is dumb exactly, he's maybe of average intelligence,
Average intelligence is astonishingly dumb. We've covered this before.
Speaking of Ron Paul, you can now buy the 2012 Edition of the Ron Paul Family Cookbook. "28 pages of tasty recipes" for only $8 (plus shipping). Quite a bargain.
Wait, I can't tell if this is supposed to be a joke, or is a real excerpt from the cookbook. It reads like a joke. It better be a joke. I want recipes!
Another possibility for version control is using some kind of wiki set up. They usually have a way of controlling who can edit. Final transfer into a Word style document might be tricky, though, but as long as you have a WYSIWYG editor, people wouldn't have to learn the markup language it uses. On the other hand, it might not do some formatting you need.
A need to network and opportunistically seize on connections is what being out of school is all about, in basically any career (including, I believe, academia, although perhaps less so there than elsewhere).
More so, not less, in my experience.
I would guess that would depend on field. Certainly in math networking is quite helpful, but there are a lot of very socially awkward but very successful mathematicians who aren't very good at networking. Obviously I haven't been in a normal career, but my feeling is that many of them would require more networking than math academia.
there are a lot of very socially awkward but very successful mathematicians who aren't very good at networking
I still love that Berkeley mathematician who made a short film in which he stripped naked and did math problems all over a naked Japanese woman's body in the hopes of demonstrating that mathematicians are not complete weirdos.
Do mathematicians depend on research grants?
No. Getting grants is necessary for achieving a certain level of success in the field, but at say a 25-75 ranked school a grant will basically guarantee you tenure rather than being a requirement for tenure. Mathematics is largely funded by teaching calculus more than by grants.
At a guess, academic networking at least in the humanities at a graduate school level involves a lot of self-promotion -- not of the "let's be friendly and know each other on a first name basis" type, but of the "here's the latest piece of work I've produced, I'd very much love to hear your thoughts, given how interesting what you had to say about blah was that one time, and you might notice that I've incorporated a bit of your conception of blah-blah in section two [with due acknowledgment]. Anyway I am expecting this to form a central part of the 4th chapter of my thesis, so you should totally notice that I am citing you in my dissertation and if you wind up knowing anyone who knows anyone at a school to which I later apply for a job, you should remember my name."
At least I was told that one should do that kind of thing. Couldn't really bring myself to do it, cold, myself.
202: i tell my undergrads not to go into academia. For the grad students I mentor, I teach them how to network by example (I let them crash with me at smaller conferences, strongly suggest that they stay close, watch, and learn, and then introduce them to all of my friends and aquaintances).
I'm not sure what to say to this discussion, since going to grad school for me was pretty unambiguously the right choice and I think I'll always say that even if I someday end up in a different career. If you really enjoy doing something, and don't have a stable job doing something else, why not do it? On the other hand, my experience is in a field where grad school and postdocs pay a reasonable wage, so it's probably a little flippant to apply the same attitude to the humanities. So perhaps I had better shut up.
Plus your PhD is weirdly useful in applying for non-academic jobs, while my impression is that humanities PhDs are much less useful.
I also think in fields like yours and mine it's a little easier to self-assess. I was pretty sure I was in the top 50 but not the top 5 in the country in my year, and that estimate hasn't really changed over the past 15 years. I feel like it's really really hard to know whether you're a top 50 potential historian before graduate school.
Speaking of grad school, Blume is out of town so I finally understand why so many of my labmates stay at the lab so late; they're either single or have SOs who live far away, there's always more work to do, and the lab is reasonably cheerful when it's full of people so, you know, why leave?
225: This line of thought leads eventually to sleeping under your desk.
226: oh, no, we have a special room set aside for naps.
A guy did live in the lab for a while (postdoc; ran out of funding) but he had a couch in his office.
223.last and .last: Kind of, yeah, the difference between humanities and sciences is vast, and I'm always a little surprised when these discussions don't make a strong distinction.
It's funny, in reflecting on my lengthy blather in 221, I realized also that (a) the advent of the internet as we know know it makes a *huge* difference to these things; I entered grad school in 1989 and by the time I was working on my dissertation, people were just beginning to have email as a matter of course; (b) you mostly get an inroad to future communication with people in your field but outside your school via conferences. There weren't an awful lot of conferences in philosophy. Fellow grad students would every once in a while go out of town to another university if someone of interest was giving a talk; not so that they could hear the talk, exactly, but to give them a chance to elbow into post-talk elbow rubbing ... as an entrance to future networky self-promotion.
It reminded me of nothing so much as the art world, actually.
224: Yeah, I had a pretty clear self-assessment, and also an assessment of how interesting various faculty were that's held up fairly well over the years. Where I ordered them correctly, though, I didn't really appreciate how large the hierarchies were between them. I decided not to work with the best person in my field for what are, in retrospect, slightly dubious reasons, and if I had been his student I would almost certainly have a faculty job already. My advisor was awesome and I don't really regret my grad school choice, but I didn't appreciate how it would play out down the road a few years.
225: I occasionally stay at the library until it closes at 10. On my way home, I walk by one of the engineering buildings and there's a always a few people in one of the labs. Occasionally, they're in the room next door playing foosball. It doesn't seem like such a bad deal, assuming they like the work.
I know I said I have too much work tonight to contribute to this, but
my impression is that humanities PhDs are much less useful
I think this is true, but that the kind of stuff Alfrek is talking about is actually a bit of a hot thing* right now and there are ways to make sure you get transferable skills as you go through a PhD program. I just didn't know them when I was earlier on in school and I didn't come in with the baseline you need to really build on those skills while in school.
*Job market probably still isn't good, but unless it's a bubble - and it could be! - there's grant money floating around in areas that the humanities haven't spent a lot of time around before, what with the humanities not doing a lot of collaborative grant funded work, like, ever.
I have never heard of a biomedical science grad student who was physically unable to complete their dissertation because of writer's block. This is because by the time you're allowed to "start writing" your dissertation, you've already written a paper of some sort or at least presented your data in all kinds of ways, so you don't start with a blank page.
It does not have to be a coherent whole and it ideally consists of two or three already-submitted journal articles melded together, with more detailed analyses of the data and a much much longer introductory section. Doing all the background reading and synthesizing the information for the introduction is the hard part, but the truly uncreative type can just paraphrase other introductory reviews written by other people.
I let them crash with me at smaller conferences
Sexual favors are the acme of networking, as Julius Caesar knew.
playing foosball
We have a foosball table in our lab.
it ideally consists of two or three already-submitted journal articles melded together
This is what our dissertation is required to be. Three theoretically connected first author journal papers plus an introduction and conclusion.
My impression, too, and I could be wildly wrong, is that upper-level undergrad work in the sciences is much closer to grad level work than is true in the humanities. So you know much more precisely what you're getting into.
I should get ambitious and try to first author a paper again.
All of the first year grad students in my department either had significant undergrad research experience (one just had a first-author article published, insanely) or had worked as a research assistant in a lab in the same (or a very closely related) field. It's almost impossible to get admitted without that, I think.
What kind of department are you in again? Neuro-bio-physics software?
Neuro-bio-physics software?
Yeah, you know. Ish.
231: there's grant money floating around in areas that the humanities haven't spent a lot of time around before, what with the humanities not doing a lot of collaborative grant funded work, like, ever.
I am so glad I got out, to tell you the truth. I can't imagine what it would be like to tailor my (humanities, philosophy) work to something collaboratively grant funded.
My impression, too, and I could be wildly wrong, is that upper-level undergrad work in the sciences is much closer to grad level work than is true in the humanities. So you know much more precisely what you're getting into.
I don't know if I agree with this ---- a 300 level art historian is doing something very similar to an honours student is doing something very similar to a masters student is doing something very similar to a PhD student. (And this goes all the way back to first year, as well.)
I don't know how true that is in the sciences, which seem way more discontinuous. After all, if I was marking 200 level art history essays, I would be applying the same kind of protocols as I would if I was reading a professional art historian. But that doesn't seem like it would be the case in the sciences.
In undergraduate physics, the Earth's gravitational acceleration is given as 9.7 meters per second squared.
242 -- I see humanities dissertations as so distinct from undergrad research, or even early grad school long papers, as to be basically discontinuous.
Another problem in the humanities is that, at each level, you are basically rewarded for bullshitting better than your peers.* As your peers improve at each level, your relative standing decreases, but it's hard to gauge exactly where you'll stand in the next level up. So you can feel very very smart indeed as an undergrad but it really doesn't tell you much about how you'll do as a grad student. In the sciences the markers of success seem more objectively determinable. Maybe that's what UPETGI is saying.
*Come on, admit it, we all know that this is true.
243: not in any of my books. 9.8.
243: You joke, but as I recall, my lab reports for the undergrad class I took in mechanics (the first part of the sequence for physics majors) all had lengthy sections explaining why the results were so far off of what you'd expect in an ideal situation according to what's actually known about physics. Alternatively, we were consistently invalidating the laws of physics. My grade was fine, btw, so it's not like we just did stuff wrong.
I think part of the problem is that tasks in the humanities are often easy to do, but hard to do well. This means that you need to be evaluating shades of how well you're doing. In many of the sciences the tasks themselves are inherently difficult, even if you only want to do a half-assed job of it. Thus it's easier to get an accurate self-assessment because you're just asking what you can do, not how well you can do it.
*Come on, admit it, we all know that this is true.
I thought this was something we only know about other fields. Anyway, I was impressed by the lack of in-class bullshit in my program (not just in discussions but in the research paper classes as well). We might not have always done the reading for that day in seminar, but winging it on low-background is not the same as bullshit. But I'm probably a naive empiricist.
My undergrad physics lab had a special chamber where you could safely fire a bullet into a block of wood to measure the force. The TA couldn't get it to work and a crowd of red necks fixed it for him even though they were angry that he made them remove their ball caps.
242 -- I see humanities dissertations as so distinct from undergrad research, or even early grad school long papers, as to be basically discontinuous.
Really?
I would have thought that ideally by the time you'd got to the PhD, you'd have written a dissertation for your honours year, and your masters, so you were pretty much used to that process.
(Mind you, the US style might be quite different.)
Not every U.S. school has an undergrad thesis requirement and you can go into straight to phd programs that do not require a thesis on the way. I've never written a paper longer than 50 pages, but had it been on my dissertation topic, it would have been perfectly fine as a chapter.
(Actually, that's a path I probably would have taken had I done it over knowing that I'd end up not wanting to be a professor: local sources, topic interested me, already part of the way there, general public interest, policy implications. I should stop remembering this now.)
re: Networking comments:
I totally feel what you are saying. I think I might mean something slightly different when I say I am adverse to networking: I mean it specifically concerning looking for professional jobs that I'm not super excited about. I certainly don't love academic networking, but I'm ok with it, and have come out of every academic conference I've gone to with good connections. The same can't be said of professional networking.
The professional planners meetup I went to recently can illustrate. I talked to a few people I know, and a few I don't. I'm trying to get a job at their place, though subtly, so I have to express excitement about what they are doing. This is exhausting. Towards the end of the meetup, after I loosened up (only one beer!) and got comfortable, I was able to talk about pre-automotive urban 3d visualization, etc. I could feel my excitement grow, and got into a really interesting conversation, for all involved, I think.
What I hate, and don't know how much I would meet in academia, is going to informational interviews and pretending that I am the next planning Einstein, when really I would do a perfectly adequate job, but this isn't being an ice cream taster, after all.
221 sounds reasonable.
Part of the skepticism I have of those proposing I look for non-planning, professional jobs is that I can't compete for planning jobs, for which I explicitly have experience and qualifications. I should apply for another field, where there are hundreds of people with experience and quals?
But in any case, unless I get a great deal in Budapest (which would as much for getting to live in Budapest as anything else), I'm a year away from aplaying. I intend to research schools, whether I want to do this, and my topics in the mean time. The next month, however, is dedicated to researching jobs.
251: I wrote an honors thesis as an undergrad in the social sciences. It was nothing at all like not writing a doctoral dissertation.
251 -- I think this from the linked post gets to the difference between undergrad research paper and dissertation in the humanities:
And a dissertation requires more than the six or so hours of exhausted terror that has sufficed elsewhere. Six or so hours of exhausted terror bottoms out, for me, at about fifteen to twenty pages.******** For the really big projects like my my masters dissertations, I hit about twenty pages, collapse, remain immobile for three days, then reprise the night of terror to get the rest of the way. And afterwards, I would tell everyone, my advisors, my colleagues, my family and friends, that I had been working tirelessly over a long time, the way that I imagined that most people did.
255: Yep. That burst of terror thing is how I did my undergrad thesis.
I think 247 has something. Though it's hard to figure out what "tasks" means when you're reading Hegel as an undergraduate.
me: I am not doing this well! I can tell that I am not! I'm having an especially hard time with this! I'm only 19! I'm doing my best on this paper, but fine, I know I don't get it. I cannot stand this. Shit.
How are you guys doing over there with your bunsen burners?
On preview, 251: (Mind you, the US style might be quite different.)
I think it is.
Also, just got around to watching 94. Amazing. Kinda ties the whole thread together.
The bar is now half full of people not born when I first voted. Time to go home.
Right. But that's fucked up working habits.
I was more thinking that the product of arts papers is way more homogeneous than the product of science papers. After all, in the arts, all you ever do is write. And write. And write. Lots of essays. But in the sciences you don't always do the same kind of thing.
I mean, you can do the work-in-bursts thing in a lot of sciences. Engineering students are atrociously bad for working in chunks then not working then in chunks then not.
Do people still use bunsen burners? I mean, I guess chemists probably do.
My (chemist) flatmate is forever whinging about the research labs not having any bunsens. (Or rather, all the bunsens going missing.)
236 My impression, too, and I could be wildly wrong, is that upper-level undergrad work in the sciences is much closer to grad level work than is true in the humanities.
At least for me this was not true at all. Though my work is surprisingly similar to how I spent my spare time in high school.
You know what seems just bafflingly, insanely difficult? Optogenetics, that's what.
Apparently it was the most depressing discovery he made when he finished his undergraduate degree. Suddenly, you have to hunt out your own bunsens, amongst the detritus of the labs.
I've never even heard of optogenetics.
264: But in the sciences you don't always do the same kind of thing.
In the humanities, you may still be reading and writing, but you're not reading and writing about the same things, and not in the same ways, so it's pretty much like shifting gears time and again. It seems to me.
This means that this: the product of arts papers is way more homogeneous than the product of science papers
reads ... strangely. The product of arts humanities papers differs vastly. Have you read a psychology paper? WTF with all the parenthetical citations and crap? But then it just occurred to me that nobody's clear on whether psychology is an art or a science.
268: you use transgenic viruses to implant genes from green algae that make neurons light sensitive, then you can shine a light at a mouse's brain and make it do things, roughly.
While this thread is on educational topics, does anyone here have experience with this sort of thing? I'm wondering how tough it would be to learn the prerequisites (under "what background do I need") in the next month of so. Let's just say that I can't do any of it right now, but probably knew the vector and calculus stuff at some point in my life.
But then it just occurred to me that nobody's clear on whether psychology is an art or a science.
They aren't? I mean, psychodynamic therapy, okay. But I'm pretty sure nobody thought of B.F. Skinner (say) as an artist.
Parsimon is clearly thinking of the psychology departments in contemporary major US universities run by Lacanians and Kleinians.
271: the math will probably be relatively intense if you haven't done it in a while, and a good grounding probability would help a lot. But that said, the set of math you need to know is pretty bounded, so sure, you could figure that part out. If you're planning on actually doing the assignments and you aren't currently pretty comfortable with programming, that seems tougher.
I wonder how much the differences between the various humanities disciplines affects how different doctoral work is from undergrad work. In history, at least in the past, not everyone had the opportunity to do extensive archivally-based papers in college since that could require travel. Working from already gathered published sources is similar, but still not quite the same thing. There's microfilm, but lots of people do everything can to avoid microfilm - even professionals.
271: You mean other than a willingness to be filmed with a befuddled expression?
274: it gets a lot crazier. First of all, you can make different kinds of neurons sensitive to different colors of light. Then you can do things like make transgenic rabies viruses, which will travel across synapses, so you can make a whole network of neurons (across the breadth of the nervous system, if you want) light-sensitive without touching anything else.
Whenever I see a talk on animal work I think to myself "oh. That's real science."
Yeah, I was intrigued by the Crooked Timber post on free graded online classes. I'm not sure if they would be a better way to learn something new than getting a book and figuring it out for myself, but maybe it would keep me from trailing off midway through. On the other hand, it's not like there would be any consequences to just quitting the thing after a few weeks, so maybe it wouldn't be useful. But I'm mulling over whether to sign up for one of them, maybe machine learning or information theory? Being able to see a syllabus in advance would be nice.
That natural language processing class looks pretty interesting too. Maybe the Unfogged reading group could be resurrected as the Unfogged study group.
Those courses do look pretty sweet and the price is right. Maybe I'll sign up for Computer Science 101 so I can learn something about what all you nerds are talking about. But I really want to just go straight to making mice do my bidding with laser beams.
271, 275: I'm not in a position to do the programming, but the theory part could be very useful for what I do. I may try to do follow the lectures and skip the actual work, because I won't have the time to devote to it if I still have three kids and being able to program any of this wouldn't actually help at my job.
275: Hmm, I actually have a pretty good incentive to do the work*, and since it's not for credit it's probably ok if I discover I can't do it after the class starts.
The probability is the only thing I wonder about just because the stats class I took was garbage - stats for people who don't do other math - so that would be truly from scratch. I've never used python, but I did a programming class that used C++ and it didn't make me not want to do programming, so there's that.
*I've got a bunch of historical text that I'd like to analyze. I haven't been impressed with some of the advice I've gotten on how to do that without learning how to do it - i.e. "why don't you just plug it into this tool [the inner workings of which you can't explain]." The tool's probably fine, but I want I want to be able to account for my research.
281: How about making rats live in somebody else's appliances?
282: if you just want to watch lectures on NLP you could start here.
283: python is a lot friendlier than C++ but you'd want to try to get your head around the data structures stuff, at least, or else you would risk being lost somewhat quickly.
Actually, Cosma's lecture notes from his last couple of classes are probably a good place to start.
maybe machine learning or information theory?
Mmrf. The world has changed. This used to be a philosophers blog.
(/grumpy)
286: Oh, yeah, right. It's not just the coding.
Still, I'm almost convinced to go for it. I guess I need to find the resources that potentially could teach me the background and spend some time with that. I suppose it's possible the class could fill, but I probably can wait a bit before signing up.
270: er, how do you work the stimulation-with-light part? Is that the fiendishly hard bit?
hmm. Do I need a real pseudonym *now*, or do I swear this is the last comment?
290.1: you shine a light at their brain. That's the easy part. The hard part is getting it so that their brain does thing when you shine a light at it.
290.2: yes on one, no on two.
Oh, and if other people take the class we really should cheat off of essear make a study group, or something.
I know some people who haven't finished their science (biology/ecology) PhD's. Often through getting a job and postponing their dissertation until they time out. Or my favourite, people who drop out of PhD programs and get gifted a MSc as a going away present.
Anyway, Alfrek, I'm also in the 'don't do it!' camp. I'm coming up to finishing my PhD in one of the few fields in non-medical biology that's hiring and have had a couple of interviews (didn't get them), a almost certain back-up (temporary) plan and I'm freaking out. Grad school has really just been a holding pattern for my life and I'm watching my non-academic friends live lives that I think, fingers-crossed-knock-on-wood, I could possibly get to in like 8 years? If things go well?
I always intend to read more of Cosma's lecture notes, but so far I haven't gotten through many of them.
I feel like there are probably interesting things that can be done by applying more powerful learning algorithms to collider data, but since I don't have access to any such data anyway, it would be an uphill battle even if I did learn something useful about statistics.
285: Thanks, but the appeal of the class or pseudoclass is that I think I could trick myself into paying attentin rather than giving in to my kneejerk hatred of video lectures. Instead of watching any, I'm going to read a little Joan Didion until I go to sleep. That's probably more or less what happened when I decided to teach myself Python and just couldn't get sufficiently interested to keep going past the basic basics.
288: Isn't neb a philosopher of some sort.
What I hate, and don't know how much I would meet in academia, is going to informational interviews and pretending that I am the next planning Einstein, when really I would do a perfectly adequate job, but this isn't being an ice cream taster, after all.
Don't go. 150 for an internship is nothing compared to 600 qualified candidates for a non-typically-desired job in a non-typically desired location, and they still want someone who can act like an Einstein in an interview.
I suspect you're not as bad off as you think, and while it may not make a lot of sense, you may well find that you have more luck in a field tangential to planning, where you have experience that they might value even if they don't need a planner. (I'm thinking of all the biomed types who end up in consulting because even if they're not interested in doing cutting edge research, they can understand the research and so are useful to consulting firms, even if they don't have a consulting background.)
When I go to the page linked in 285, a little thingamajiggy pops up in the lower right corner of the browser window and tells me that some number of people are nearby.
It seems to be a good strategy that if you're knowledgeable about X then you should not work in X itself, but instead work in a field where they find X intimidating. Cala's example fits this pattern, but it's true pretty universally.
I signed up for machine learning and natural language processing. I'll see in January if I actually have time for them or not.
instead work in a field where they find X intimidating
No humanities, then. Whether or not they're right to not be intimidated, no one is intimidated.
300: I suppose I could just sign up and drop later if that seems like the best thing to do. The fact that I didn't consider that is probably a result of our different disciplinary backgrounds.
294.last: I feel like in practical terms these days everybody just does some filtering and then SVM, unless the data is really weirdly shaped. And some of the other cool approaches (like self-organizing maps) don't necessarily get taught that thoroughly in this country.
I feel like if I'm going to take a class in the spring I should, like, actually take a class, since I need to do that anyways.
Hmm. The buzzword I hear in the fancier experimental analyses is always "boosted decision trees," which seem to have taken over from neural nets as the favorite black box to use in the last several years. Google does turn up some SVM results on fnal.gov and cern.ch, though, so I guess it's not completely unknown in HEP.
Whether or not they're right to not be intimidated, no one is intimidated.
Not true, ime.
I'm taking two more classes in the spring, down from 5 the last three terms (excluding summer), as well as working (for credit) at one or two places on potentially interesting projects that will potentially make me much more employable. And then someone should hand me a couple more masters degrees.
304: oh huh. Well, boosting is pretty neat, and not terribly complicated.
307: The phone book works for a boost.
305: Probably another case where the differences between the humanities show up. I've met people who are genuinely impressed with historical work, amazed at the knowledge that the best historians have and so on, but not intimidated in the way that I've seen with science/math. It's more "wow, they know a lot" and less "wow, they know how to do tough things."
I've never been in English/Literature, so I don't have the experience of saying I'm in the field and hearing what people think of it, but it really seems to take the biggest beating. "Oh, isn't that all opinion anyway?"
Finding the field intimidating is not necessarily the key point, it could be a skill or particular aspect of the field. For example, lots of people who are good at English/Literature are rapid and cogent writers. I find that intimidating, and I'm sure there are plenty of fields which are not writing fields as such but where that ability would make you stand out.
What intimidates me about statistics is that every poster I see advertising a biostatistics seminar fits two intimidating patterns. Either the researcher is coming up with "A new multiparametric method" or "A new pseudolikelihood method" or "A new hierarchical method" for this or that [And you must think your new method is a clear improvement on what came before, right? Or else why would you bother?], or the title is a concept like "Robust Inference for Sparse Cluster-Correlated Count Data" that makes me think "I don't know much about how that gets used in practice, but if you're just talking about the concepts, how is there not already a consensus on that?"
Also, everyone under 40 in biostatistics who isn't an epidemiologist in disguise seems to be Chinese.
(Do I need to say that 301.1 was mostly a joke? I guess after 309/310, probably I do.)
[And you must think your new method is a clear improvement on what came before, right? Or else why would you bother?]
I mean, it could be a clear improvement for certain special cases.
To put it a different way, when surrounded by people INTERESTED by statistical METHODS, I get the overwhelming feeling that I'm missing something and there's a level of information that I will never be able to access. Aren't the statistical methods we already have good enough? What does a statistician do all day when he isn't being hired to analyze someone else's data? Writing articles with titles like "Modified Likelihood Ratio Test in Finite Mixture Models with a Structural Parameter" seems like the ultimate example of the boring boring of very hard boring boards.
316: but statistics is rad! Statistical inference is learning. You don't like learning?!?
I mean, the joke about machine learning/AI is that it's just applied probability, but actually that isn't a joke.
The people who are interested in stats qua stats are very useful but you don't need too many of them.
Alfrek: I have many things to say to you. A PhD is probably not your best bet, but given your interests you have other options that you should probably look into. Let me think this over a little and I'll post some ideas shortly.
I myself ... tell anyone who wanted a comfortable life to go back for her engineering masters.
My mother seems to think the solution to my problems is to go to get an engineering masters. Of course, I have no background in anything engineering-related, and have no sense of what I would want to engineer, were I to engineer stuff. But there is something appealing about the idea of making stuff, I suppose.
So, back on topic, this seems to be a common experience, and while one can attempt to explain it in terms of commonly accepted psychological maladies (ADD and depression), at what point does it become its own psychological thing?
I used to be a reasonably good and prolific writer (age adjusted), and I would operate mostly by direct transcription of my internal monologue. Late in high school this stopped working as my internal monologue seemed to contain as many backspaces as normal characters.
Sorry for the incoherence, by the way. Wine and mathematics night was a bit more successful in the wine category.
Some news you can feel good about. Here's another: my son's classmate.
Okay, Alfrek, here's what I think you should do:
First, if you haven't already, it would probably be a good idea to read What Color Is Your Parachute? (or another similar book, but this one gained its cultural salience for a reason). I've been reading it lately, and it's quite good in setting out a logical, systematic way of both figuring out what you want to do and getting a job doing that. I had sort of already inadvertently backed into more or less exactly what I want to do before reading the book, in small part by independently discovering some of its techniques but mostly by pure luck, but it sounds like you're not really very sure what you actually want to do and figuring that out is important before you make any further drastic choices like going back to school. It could also help you in getting something more immediate when your internship ends, although honestly in this economy you might just have to take whatever short-term work you can get.
If you decide that what you want to do long-term isn't something you can realistically do with your background (both your degree and the skills you've acquired), you probably will need to go back to school. Again, though, given what you've described here it doesn't sound like a PhD is likely to be the right choice. Instead I think you'll more likely want to do another Masters. This will, it's true, almost certainly mean taking on more debt, but if you choose it right and know exactly why you're doing it and what you intend to do with it you're in a better position to end up in a place afterward where you'll have a job that will allow you to pay off the debt as well as being more fulfilling than what you're already doing.
Specifically, I think it sounds like a Masters in architectural history or historic preservation might be a better match for your interests than your planning degree. Those are more specialized fields than planning, and the job markets might not be great right now (although they could hardly be worse than the planning job market), but they do have the advantage over planning (and, for that matter, academia) that a lot of the work is related to mandatory compliance with federal laws, which creates a kind of built-in demand for work even though the actual number of jobs may be very small. Preservation is kind of a diffuse field, or perhaps more of a hodgepodge of vaguely related fields, but architectural history is very tightly focused and could maybe be considered a subfield of preservation in some ways. There are only two terminal Masters programs specifically in architectural history that I know of (at UVA and SCAD), and I don't know how easy they are to get into, but there are many more programs in preservation that could likely be tailored to a similar kind of focus. (I know all this because this is one direction I've considered taking myself at various points, and while my own life has turned out in such a way that it's unlikely I'll do it, it seems like a good match for your interests as you've described them here.)
Of course, you know your own interests and personality much better than I do, so you may decide this is not the answer, and that you'd rather go into academia or stick with planning or become a baker or something. This is where Parachute or a similar process of self-evaluation would be helpful. It does sound like your interests are pretty similar to mine however, at least in that the stuff you've been mentioning in this thread sounds fascinating to me, so I figure my perspective might be helpful. (Indeed, if you do end up going the research direction, with or without PhD, I might potentially be interested in collaborating with you on some projects.) I definitely sympathize with your frustration over the state of planning, both the job market and the field as a whole.
Anyway, I wish you luck, and feel free to e-mail me any time. I think you have my address already, but if not you can use the contact page on my blog.
301: Whether or not they're right to not be intimidated, no one is intimidated.
Neal Stephenson to the white courtesy phone. Neal Stephenson, white courtesy phone. You have a call.
re: 232
I have never heard of a biomedical science grad student who was physically unable to complete their dissertation because of writer's block. This is because by the time you're allowed to "start writing" your dissertation, you've already written a paper of some sort or at least presented your data in all kinds of ways, so you don't start with a blank page.
That seems a bit strange. By the time I started writing my doctoral thesis I'd already written, what, half a million words? Probably an exaggeration, but I'd written over quarter million in the 2 years preceding it [when I'd done my masters]. It's not like I'd no experience of writing. And a small but substantial chunk of that quarter million was work that either went into the doctoral work largely unchanged, or formed part of the prep for it. I'd guess that would, in terms of how I understand people's normal progress through humanities education, be fairly typical.
[Or what 251 said, basically]
For me the practical things were the problem. I was working a lot of paid hours (in a non-academic job), and teaching a lot, and while I was working hard on the doctoral research/writing it wasn't quite enough to break the back of the hardest bits of my thesis early enough in the process. So while I submitted on time, without extensions, I did so with a really hastily written final chapter and one earlier chapter that hadn't covered a recent piece of work in the field.
Examiners: 'you need to rewrite these two chapters'
Me: 'Fuck'
re: 301
You've maybe not seen someone from the right sort of humanities discipline completely monster someone, then?*
* Yes, it's often an arsehole thing to do, but watching a philosopher take someone apart who mistakenly thinks they have an argument can be a joyous thing.**
** not just philosophy, I've seen other humanities types with different-but-similar skills do the same.
As I say, I was mostly joking, but the example was "a field where they find X intimidating" and I took X to refer to the field, not to particularly intimidating people in that field.
152: J.G. Ballard's autobiography is rather good on the horrible experience of being one of Kingsley Amis's friends and watching him morph into a bigger and bigger reactionary alcoholic arsehole, and then bigger and bigger again. Fractal arseholisation.
327: I will fuck people up in ordinary discussion if they piss me off somehow. arguments in logic class are way harder that real-life arguments with people who don't even have any fully-formed premises. shit will get ugly. not that it happens frequently or anything, because I'm not an asshole like kingsley amis.
329: I can well imagine but ballard himself...um. I do love his work, but it's impossible for me to come away from the books without a rather negative judgment on his actual character when it comes to what I like to call "the lady problem"--to wit: they exist. otoh he's a well-formed misanthropist so perhaps he was just exercising his discipline on half the population for practice.
327. Very few people are arseholes like KA, which is entirely to the benefit of the species. I had an uncle who was a friend of his - he was a bit of an arsehole himself, although moderately anti-racist by the lights of his generation, which is more than you can say of Amis. As far as I can work out he was a boor and a bully - my uncle had no discrimination in choosing his friends and evidently liked him mainly because he was funny. But I'm surprised that Ballard had time for him.
re: 330
Yeah. Although the irritating thing is dealing with people who don't know they are beaten. Unleash the nuclear pwn and they are too thick to know that they are sitting in a smoking pile of rubble. To be honest I tend to just let it drop, in real life, on pain of looking like a bullying arsehole; but sometimes fuckwits need to get both barrels.
re: 331
Yeah, although Ballard's home-life was interesting, as a single father raising three kids. His kids all, from interviews I've read, seemed to have a very happy childhood. He doesn't seem at all Amis-like.
'50s Amis was a big SF fan. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, when the New Wavers came along he discovered it was just the rockets-and-steely-jawed-engineer-heroes side he liked and started printing factually incorrect stinker reviews.
(Come to think of it, today he'd be getting the OH NO JOHN RINGO treatment.)
334. Indeed I'd have thought Ballard was exactly the kind of writer he'd hate for that reason as well as others.
333: that is, indeed, annoying. "I just incontrovertibly refuted you, motherfucker!" "[maintains false conclusion unconcernedly]. arrgh.
One wonders whether the he-became-a-bigger-and-bigger-asshole trajectory of Kingsley Amis resembles his drunker-and-drunker curve. Mumble yes, I know Martin Amis said something mean about [book/person/group/category/continent/phylum] recently and he seemed sober mumble.
One wonders whether the he-became-a-bigger-and-bigger-asshole trajectory of Kingsley Amis resembles his drunker-and-drunker curve.
Probably. He generally started drinking at 2:00 in the afternoon, when the lunchtime rush at the Garrick Club had died down, and carried on till bed time. This was not a healthy lifestyle.
I think the notion of "Mary Sue" is intrinsically gendered, in that no one particularly objects when a man in a book is too perfect or too successful in some way.
I saw an article somewhere about how Twilight was good because the main character is completely passive, and that was better than the Millenium books because Santander was a super-hacker who could kick people's asses, which meant she was really a man in drag. I've never been to the kung fu hacker planet, but here on Earth Santander makes an equally implausible man.
To be clear, I love it when someone calls a male character a "Mary Sue", but I think it's no coincidence that the stereotypical example is female. The mythical Lieutenant Mary Sue that sleeps with the leads and saves the day is not actually distinguishable from Captain James T. Kirk as a character.
I've never been to the kung fu hacker planet
Hell of a place.
but here on Earth Santander makes an equally implausible man.
And a pretty crap bank, too.
I only have room in my head for the first two and last three letters of any word. I just make up the rest. When I was a teenager it would have been SaMotörheadrökksder.
Going to international martial arts competitions, I know a few polymath lingerie-model-kickboxer-mathematician-musical-virtuoso types. Fuckers spoiling it for the rest of us.
339: [N]o one particularly objects when a man in a book is too perfect or too successful in some way.
They do, but the characters to whom they are objecting tend to be female protagonists' love interests* rather than protagonists themselves and the people objecting tend to be boys/men having their first meeting with unrealistic standards of beauty or something like that.
340: Captain Kirk doesn't have green eyes.
* He's a trained pâtissier and an animal rescue worker; he doesn't object to her spending August in Provence with her werewolf high school boyfriend; something about his hair something.
And a pretty crap bank, too.
Plenty of pretty Spanish girls in their NY and Latin American offices, though.
Also, now that I think of it, James Tiberius K. has, at least notionally, a code of conduct and superior authorities, political and moral, to which he, again notionally, defers, while the essence of the Mary Sue is self-actualization; hence all the opportunities for speechifying about "the right choice for me" in YA novels about strong female characters.
I blame this insight on recent reading about Ernst Jünger's time in Paris during WWII.
I certainly knew super-hackers who took martial arts so they could learn to kick people's asses. Never seemed terribly plausible to me that they would actually be able to do so. But who knows; the worlds of super-hacking and ass-kicking don't actually overlap that often.
I knew a girl who dressed like whatserface from those dumb books and claimed to be a superhacker who could kick people's asses, but she was a liar on both counts and also a narcissist.
I just remembered a guy who plausibly could (and would) kick (some) people's asses, who was also reasonably competent at computers. He was also a liar and a narcissist, and then later he got fat.
And of course I myself have a hacker ninja army at my command, but I don't like to brag.
The essence of Mary Sue is wish-fulfillment, not self-actualization.
I actually knew a guy who was a hacker as a teenager, went into the computer industry, but then quit to try to become world champion in some martial art. He really liked Nietzsche, who he took to be about self-actualization.
350: a lot of that kind of thing in the hacker scene, yeah.
My one friend sorta fits the bill, really. Undeniably a superhacker, played guitar with Santana, drives ridiculous sports cars, testified before the senate, does tons of jiu-jitsu, now works for DARPA. But it doesn't really fit in real life, because he did all those things because he wants to be that guy, which is endearing and sort of goofy, but breaks the spell.
I'm not exactly sure what "self-actualization" means except that I have trouble staying in the same room as people who use the word very often.
polymath lingerie-model-kickboxer-mathematician-musical-virtuoso types
Bastards.
One wonders whether the he-became-a-bigger-and-bigger-asshole trajectory of Kingsley Amis resembles his drunker-and-drunker curve
Yes. (Mind you, JGB was a fairly hardcore daytime tippler.)
My take on the post problem is that this is people suspecting (usually correctly) that they are incapable of writing a good thesis but refusing to admit it (by either writing a bad thesis or dropping out) for years.
re: 348
A guy I know who is a techie-type [more I think hardware and network support than a hacker as such] is world no. 3 in the light-contact form of our martial art. I'd put pretty good odds on him in actual-ass-kicking contests. But he's not really a l33t hacker type. Lots and lots of quite successful scientist/academic types though represented among competitive fighters, at least in the UK and Scandinavia, as the clubs tend to be concentrated around universities. So there are quite a few people who are academic and sporting high-achievers.
358: hacker/martial artist is not a terribly uncommon overlap, at all. It just... is different in real life.
Some of my henchmen are hacker-ninjas, some are ninja-supermodels and some are supermodel-hackers. But I have yet to recruit a supermodel-ninja-hacker. I think this is why my plans for world domination always fail.
357: I don't think so. Whatever this is, I suffer from a version of it, but I get good feedback on anything I do get done. Lack of confidence/perfectionism plays into it, but I don't think it's particularly likely to be well-founded lack of confidence.
I'm sure I've told this story here before, but one year at this hacker con in Vegas this kid (who I think was underage) was walking through Caesar's Palace wearing his cDc Ninja Strike Force shirt, which has the NSF crossed swords through the world logo on the back, but on the front has a giant chinese character (The "wu" in "wushu"). All of a sudden two plainclothes casino security guys come up to him and ask if he could come with them. The kid is terrified, basically, since he's in a casino, underaged, presumably drunk, and god knows what else he's gotten up to over the weekend. The security guys escort him up to the main security office, where the head of security for Caesar's is sitting behind a desk. Kid sits down, Caesar's head of security says "so! You do martial arts? I love martial arts! What styles do you practice?" and on and on.
That's what happens when you join my ninja army, kid.
men in literature often fully deserve the mary sue monicker, in that they are presented as having no discernible likeable qualities (and often a number of actually unpleasant ones) but somehow "deserve" to and in fact do get the perfect girl at the end of the book. they thus serve as a stand in for the author's wish-fulfillment to be painted upon. just recently daughter x asked me, "why would envy adams ever have gone with scott pilgrim?! and why does that awesome girl like him now? it doesn't make any sense?" in motherfucking deed.
it's funny, I can tolerate this sort of thing much better in an older novel (pre 1900 let's say) but if some shit was written in the 1950s, it was time to know better. I'm looking at you, norman mailer. and we all know you're masturbating in there philip roth, for christ's sake come out and write a well-rounded female character. no, not that kind of rounded.
Scott Pilgrim is an interesting case--the comics moreso than the movie--in that the main narrative is Scott and the reader coming to realize that, indeed, he's lame, and is worthy of neither our (the reader's) attention nor that of the various women in his life. But this then presents something of a performative contradiction, or at least metatextual tension: the very fact of penning a 7-volume graphic novel undermines the anti-Mary-Sue message.
men in literature often fully deserve the mary sue monicker
Dan Brown comes to mind.
I'm sure you're familiar with love songs on the order of He's Just My Bill, my man, my Joe, my Max, and so on where the girl who sings them tells you that, although the man she loves is anti-social, alcoholic, physically repulsive, or just plain unsanitary, nevertheless she is his because he is hers, or something like that. But as far as I know there has never been a popular song from the analogous male point of view, that is to say, of a man who finds himself in love with, or in this case married to, a girl who has nothing whatsoever to recommend her. I have attempted to fill this need.
366 is no good without a link, Tom.
"Sharks gotta swim, and bats gotta fly..."
[M]en in literature often fully deserve the mary sue monicker, in that they are presented as having no discernible likeable qualities (and often a number of actually unpleasant ones) but somehow "deserve" to and in fact do get the perfect girl at the end of the book.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Those characters are heroes! Shining beacons of role modelry to us all! Guiding lights!
[Good stuff, self. Way to play it cool.]
363 - Gary Stu! But there's something slightly different about the male version in a lot of crap fiction, because except in certain cases it doesn't represent an authorial stand-in character.
I read that "Twilight is awesome because the girl is so passive just like real high schoolers" and was somewhat depressed by the outpouring of love for the Dragon Tattoo books, but perhaps they're more readable without the botched translation. (And there's a male protagonist who's a male Mary Sue. And the female protagonist is awfully close to being a strong female character.)
369: but the point about a Mary Sue is that she has lots and lots of likeable qualities!
Yeah, there are two types of annoying male heroes, and I'm not dead sure which is closer to a Mary Sue. There's the James Bond "dude is just sofa king AWESOME" style, which looks like half of the Mary Sue thing and then there's the "Annoying whiny loser who everyone loves for no reason" thing, which is the other half.
And the female protagonist is awfully close to being a strong female character.
Nah, she's Gary Stu's (strong but vulnerable, independent but willing to screw him anyway, just because) fantasy girlfriend. Lots of Nice Guys have fantasy girlfriends like that.
a male protagonist who's a male Mary Sue.
Is he ever. "I'm just a simple investigative journalist. Nothing special. Except that all attractive women want to fuck me, and although I'd like to share myself equally among them all, my compellingly loving personality makes some of them want to have me for themselves alone."
Pathetic Loser Everyone Loves is much closer to a Mary Sue, I think. He shows up a lot arm-in-arm with Manic Pixie Dream Girl (who would really click with Nice Guy if she hadn't friend-zoned him).
373 - Click the link! Always click the link! I am not Apo!
372: James Bond is, in the books at least, a real, if not profound, character, with some pains, fears and affections. The type has since devolved. The protagonists of travel-trash paperbacks tend to be fortyish Special Operations veterans with strong jaws, square shoulders and sort of unexamined moral convictions who meet, love and leave a lot of lonely strong, independent, thirtyish women* (Lee Child's Jack Reacher is the ne plus ultra) and meet, beat up and kill a lot of (i) white trash imbeciles or (ii) sophisticated Europeans who want to sell dual-use nuclear technology to Iran. And that's it.
* I think I have noted before that all these passing love interests are really into cars. It's like speeding is for female characters in thrillers/mysteries now what alcoholism was for male characters in the '80s and '90s.
True. Jack "The bullet was deflected by my pectoral muscles. But I'm really sensitive and smart, too!" Reacher is a much better example than James Bond.
(Lee Child's Jack Reacher is the ne plus ultra)
I read one of those. The plot was absurd on so many levels that I had trouble finishing it. The villain was a former zek who started a criminal empire after being placed in the gulag for flinching in the face of the Germans at Stalingrad. For some reason that I can't recall, he wanted to frame a Gulf War vet for killing a bunch of people.
375: It is a good comic at the link.
And yet they get respectfully reviewed by the NYT. There is no justice in the world. (Actually, they really do suck less than lots of other airport-newsstand books; they're globally absurd, but reasonably engaging page-by-page. And there are the delightful moments when the Brit who writes them totally fucks up American idioms; he mostly gets it right, which means that the occasional glaring howlers are really funny.)
I take an ironic pleasure in the moments when Reacher is just inexplicably, unconscionably unpleasant, like when he spends a whole chapter telling his late brother's girlfriend all his late brother's faults (chief among them: not being Jack Reacher); it's like a glimpse into the model reader's dream of being able to tell people how much better he is than they know.
I used to read a great deal of James Patterson, starting with the Alex Cross stuff. Eventually I got tired of wondering how you could get an erection and not ejaculate and whether this was necessary or sufficient for becoming a serial killer.
Aside from the comedic ones, most female protagonists of thrillers/mysteries seem to be the "grappling with secret sorrows" type rather than the hypercompetent type. One exception would be Sister Fidelma. Try as you might to explain how accurate everything is, Peter Tremaine, you still have Sister Fidelma being the only judge who thinks slavery is wrong, the only religious who is open-minded about pagan magic, the only woman who can ride a horse fast, the only educated person who is patient with the handicapped, and also beautiful, and also possessing a disarming sense of humor, and also a member of a royal family, and also she's visited all these places like Brittany and Hispania, et cetera.
376 - I started to compose a long, snarky response about the period when Bond has had cosmetic surgery and suffered amnesia in the death gardens of Dr. Shatterhand and is recovering, living the simple life of a village fisherman and banging the hell out of Kissy Suzuki, but then I realized that you were essentially correct and also remembered the scene at the beginning where James Bond is thinking about how the inscrutable Oriental mind works when playing rock paper scissors against Tiger Tanaka. I am genuinely fond of those books, but Christ, the racism. (I am not even going to think about Live and Let Die.)
383: A character being "[t]he only..." is a corollary to the screenwriting maxim that the action hero is "the man who knows [the jungle/the Indians/the Force/where the bomb is]" (pace Steve McQueen). It's a crude shortcut to special status for the protagonist to make everybody else suck.
Lawrence Block wrote a book sometime in the early 70s, maybe, that stuck with me as an interesting commentary on that character (the violent yet sensitive loner-hero). The narrator is a Vietnam vet, comes home, wants to work for the CIA, gets rejected after failing a psych test, and then feels compelled to radically simplify his life -- he moves to an atoll off the Florida coast, camps out, and lives off minimal groceries bought at a country store that he rows to in a small boat. No possessions beyond camping gear and a series of paperbacks he buys from the store.
Some guy from the CIA finds him; the CIA guy has a caper he wants to pull off, stealing some huge shipment of cash, and identified the narrator from his failed psych test as the perfect partner in crime. The narrator says no, and the CIA guy pressures him into it by saying that he'll fuck up the narrator's peaceful, simple lifestyle unless he goes along with the caper.
Most of the book is them pulling off the caper, and the narrator gradually emerging from his shell and re-engaging with other people. And then they pull it off successfully, and the narrator kills the CIA guy for bothering him and goes back to his island. I liked it as a nice statement that anyone fitting that violent-loner-hero model would be really very very crazy. And Reacher is totally that guy.
get an engineering masters. Of course, I have no background in anything engineering-related, and have no sense of what I would want to engineer, were I to engineer stuff.
If you haven't done an engineering undergrad degree, I'd suggest either industrial or agricultural engineering. Both are accessible; they work on things that exist in the real world, so you can see them. You'd have to get through math and basic physics first, which you should do anyway because the world will make much more sense to you. But, most importantly, there are more (relatively high-paying) jobs for ag engineers than masters students, and I bet there are some fields of industrial that are the same.
If those don't appeal, civil is the next easiest. Transportation doesn't seem to have any difficult or impressive content, from an outsider's perspective.
All that aside, if you won't take my good advice for a secure, comfortable life, my second best advice would be to get a masters in disaster management. That looks to be a booming field.
Transportation doesn't seem to have any difficult or impressive content, from an outsider's perspective.
Do you sit at home and practice being condescending?
It comes naturally to me. (But I was also trying to tease Knecht.)
You'd have to get through math and basic physics first
I took sequences in calc, analysis, and algebra at Chicago (and a zillion econ classes, of course) so this should be doable, though I've never really liked math.
You only need enough math (Calculus) to understand basic physics, and doing the physics (I and II, Statics and Dynamics) is pretty fun. 'Cause then you're all "WHOOOAAA. That billboard has to stand up under its own weight, which is nothing compared to the wind load on it, and who knew?!" So the world gets more interesting. But mostly, I'd like to emphasize the part about more job notices than graduates.
In physics, I had a great deal of trouble with statics. My hanging signs were always rotating.
Were your opposing force arrows the same size? They were supposed to be.
You only need enough math (Calculus) to understand basic physics
Elasticity, failure of materials.
Size isn't everything. (I really loved force diagrams -- I'm secretly hoping Sally or Newt has trouble with them so I can help.)
395: They weren't the same. That's why I say they were rotating. I wasn't actually building signs.
... and then feels compelled to radically simplify his life -- he moves to an atoll off the Florida coast, camps out, and lives off minimal groceries bought at a country store that he rows to in a small boat.
How very Travis McGee.
366. For men, as long as some self-hate is included, there are many examples. Neil Young's Like a Hurricane, 867-5309, My Funny Valentine. Many songs about obsessive love are none too flattering to either party.
That was kind of it -- the punchline of the whole book was "That guy? The square-jawed loner with the dead-eye aim and the strong right hook? He's a psycho. All the violent books you read star crazy people."
399: Jack Reacher could, in the words of Calvin Trillin, stand in the shadow of Travis McGee and never see the sun.
You make them be the same size with the power of your equals sign. That's, like, the whole point of Statics.
It appears a lot of programs have a Dec 15 deadline. Shit. I guess I should have been thinking about this before now, especially since my GRE scores are out of date. I'd go curl up in bed now and hide, but I just sold my mattress, since I'm moving to a new place furnished with a single bed.
403: They were equal at the start. I did much better with dynamics.
402: Damn right! Reacher is a put-on. McGee, like all series characters, was impossibly lucky but otherwise possibly real.
was impossibly lucky
It netted out with the luck his girlfriends drew. It's the law of conservation of luck.
400 -- The Jimmy Soul "Get an Ugly Girl To Marry You" calypso song, Queen's "Fat Bottomed Girls," several country songs that I can't exactly recall right now.
Oh, hey. While packing stuff up, I just came across the (40th Anniversary Edition! with Job-Hunter's Workbook!) copy of What Color is your Parachute? that my mother sent me awhile back. I'd been too paralyzed to read it, but having seen Teo's 325, I'm thinking perhaps that was a mistake.
407: Yeah. Like having Starsky's or Hutch's girlfriends wear red shirts. Sure doom. (Though some very few of Travis' survived and did well.)
387:
To clear up some confusion of mine: are you saying you can get/attempt a masters in engineering (industrial, ag) without having pursued engineering at the undergrad level?
If this is true, this might be great news. I've recently discovered--after 6+ months at a law firm--that I have no interest in law, that law was only an unthinking backup to not pursuing philosophy PhD (which I won't do out of fear of ending up like the OP) and that it unfortunately did not grow on me. I'd love to get back into math-y/science-y anything, but thought that road was basically foreclosed to those who didn't major in math/sci in undergrad. (My math experience is trapnel's: calc, anal, alg at Chicago.)
I'm coming up with a hotel manager who didn't ever have much of a role in a book who managed to break up with him and survive, and the frigid artist who he introduced to her full womanly sexuality and the true meaning of art, and then she was raped by Nazis making her too unstable to stay with him because she'd just get dependent. But I think she showed up in a later book where she was doing okay. Did any others live?
Heroes' lovers die. It's an axiom of the medium. Something Iliad something. Did Sonny Crockett ever meet a woman who didn't die by the end of the episode or, at latest, the next?
Oh, the movie star's assistant lived. But did have a massive brain injury requiring her to break up with him.
(And I'm not knocking McGee. Read all of them with great enjoyment. Just found it impressive that in an apparently gossip-heavy community where he was well known that anyone would sleep with him by book three: "You may be compellingly attractive, what with the gin-colored eyes and all, but I don't have time in my schedule for a brain tumor this week.")
(My math experience is trapnel's: calc, anal, alg at Chicago.)
412 - She dies in The Green Ripper.
414 - I don't think she's the same one as the brain injury, is she? I thought she just flipped out and decided she didn't want to be with him any more. There's one who leaves him because he's her last fling and she's dying of brain cancer, and then their kid shows up years later in The Lonely Silver Rain. I'm still a little bummed MacDonald never wrote A Black Border for McGee.
Yrruk, my undergrad was in environmental science, and I went to an engineering masters program without a single engineering undergrad class. Which meant that the masters took me two years instead of one, since I spent an extra year doing Statics, Dynamics, Strength of Materials, Construction Management, Hydraulics and Engineering Econ. I also worked out a deal with the prof that my masters degree was contingent on passing a standardized test called the EIT (Engineer in Training), since that is supposed to be equivalent to the undergrad engineering degree.
You might have to do some fancy dancing and talk to someone in person about why you have always had a burning passion for how cranes in container ports offload to truck queues, but my ag engineering masters degree was starved for applicants.
All this said, I wouldn't apply to the more technical engineering disciplines (mechanical, structural) without an engineering undergrad. But if you can show someone a transcript with successful math classes and talk fast, yes, you can get into an engineering masters without an engineering undergrad degree.
It's been a long, long time. The rule is, one can't just be a girlfriend. Heck is the least one has to go through, hell more often. I think it's related to Chekhov's gun rule. I haven't read enough of the kick-ass women (Plum?) books to know if it applies to guys.
417.1: No, not her -- there's a hotel manager in the one with the balloons. She wants to tie him down but he just can't be chained, so they break up. (Come to think, there are a couple of those -- an English slightly older woman? And there are a couple of women who become romantic interests on the last two pages of the book, so there's no time to kill them on screen.)
417.2: The flipout is triggered by a blow to the head that hospitalizes her.
Good god. My entire brain is consumed by plot details of genre novels. I loathe myself. (Is it apparent that I've got a writing deadline looming?)
Furthermore, if you are going to do this stuff, there's moderately interesting professional work in re-designing factory machinary and stuff. Not thrilling, but solid. But if you are going back anyway, and can find a small sub-niche, I'd look for work that will have to be glamorous. Study wave action on beaches, and you'll be the go-to person for beach replenishment (big upcoming field, with climate change). There's likely only twenty of them. Music hall accoustics. Seismic forensics, so you're forever looking at dramatic collapsed buildings.
My ag engineering program got requests for water fountain designers. Someone's got to design fountains for luxury resorts. They don't build themselves, you know.
I hope I'm not the only one who remembers the slip number of the Busted Flush.
What do agricultural engineers do? (I really, really want this just to be a euphemism for "farmer", but I expect I'm going to be disappointed.)
Do they just work to produce ever-larger/faster/better combine harvesters, etc.? That's what this makes it sound like. Like some sort of subspeciality of mechanical engineering. I could also imagine them doing things like creating new genetically-modified foods, or new pesticides, or what not.
Oddly, I don't. The marina's Bahia Mar, the small motorboat is the Muñequita, and Meyer's first boat was the John Maynard Keynes, replaced after it was blown up by the Thorstein Veblen. But not the slip number.
424 without seeing 418 or 422. I didn't know that's what your degree was. I thought you had a degree in hydrology, or something like that.
Hydrological engineering, I mean. Or dam-building. Or something.
Meyer's first boat was the John Maynard Keynes, replaced after it was blown up by the Thorstein Veblen
Awesome!
The world needs more pulp novel/intellectual history mash-ups.
(though, 326 reminds me, I want to emphatically not make a courtesy call to Neal Stephenson on this one).
Regardless, if I had a farm I would definitely refer to myself as an agricultural engineer.
423: {sigh} No, you're not the only one, Flip. I used to drive through Ft. Lauderdale regularly in the Seventies and often thought of contacting MacDonald but never did. Shoulda. (My whole fuckin' life is in danger of becoming a retrospective list of maudlin shouldas. Need to stop that.)
429: Amusingly, the destruction of the John Maynard Keynes is witnessed and described to the police by a lady on another vessel who, she tells police, noticed the boat because "any mention of Keynesian economics made her husband very cross."
http://www.flickr.com/photos/71823169@N00/2213290284/lightbox/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/71823169@N00/2213290284/lightbox/
What do agricultural engineers do?
Dunno what the other branches do, but irrigation engineers design field level irrigation systems (sprinklers, drip, selecting filters and pump systems). That's bread and butter work. More fun stuff comes at the district/project level, where you might get to re-design (or line) a canal reach, or put in a set of gates or a regulating reservoir. There are lots of old systems out there that need attention.
While I was there, one guy I didn't know was working on a machine that reduced carrots to little rounded cylinders. I thought it was the stupidest thing I ever heard. Who would want that? Carrot sticks exist in the world! Who would ever buy whittled carrots when one could buy a real carrot, peel it and slice it? Had I talked to him, I'd have told him it would be a ridiculous failure.
432: I'd forgotten that, and I love it.
"Salvage consultant" is the best job description ever.
Shoulda waited a bit more to see if the click really clicked. See? There should (!) be some software here that prevents identical posts. Some sites have that.
We had it a couple of servers back, but don't seem to any more. Something about mecha-sheep. Becks or Ben would know.
How soon our full name is forgotten.
Are there Evil Mecha counterparts to Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop? Because that would be pretty cool.
Have people here played the Ass/ass/in's Creed games? You're an Ass/ass/in doing good and ill in a historic city. Amongst these have been Acre and Jerusalem, Rome and Florence, and in an upcoming game, Constantinople. They have spent a fair amount of time making the major landmarks (somewhat) accurate, but I don't know about the city overall. Questions arise like: this back-street intersection, did it really look like this? These are questions we can ask and to a large extent answer, but I don't know how accurate to this scale AC games are. As an urban morphologist, I think these are the little designs that are really important to cities, and therefore to virtualizations.
On the other hand there are scholarly 3D visualizations of historic cities like this this and this andthis. They are, presumably, pretty accurate. But that means that there are lots of blank space that they fill with blank buildings.
I really care about getting the little streets and plazas right because those spaces are such wonderful ones to be in. But I want them to seem lively like the AC games, not solid dead spaces that might be accurate. While of course I'd love to work on the former (anyone know anyone at Ub|soft?), there is a lot of cool work happening in academia, and thus the attraction. Much is in history, but also arch hist and geography. After listening to y'all I'm going to talk to the profs I know to see if there is any work as a technician. That might ultimately be perfect for me.
re: WCIYP, I read that before I went to planning school, so it obviously did a lot of good. I kid, I kid, but I think that I could have gotten more out of the "what would you like your daily work to be like" parts, as opposed to the "what are you passionate about" parts. The latter I did find - cities, maps, pedestrianism, etc. Definitely a great read, but do the exercises!
re: Transportation Engineering, I've done some research into this, and think it could be a path for me, but one for which I'd have to go back to school. The thing to know about going to school in such, and most jobs in such, is that you will be designing absolutely terrible spaces. The field is very conservative overall, and is still very much obsessed with car throughput, roads that are safeish for cars, but terrible for other modes, etc. There is other work, and there is some movement towards engineering more multimodal spaces, but know it will be an uphill battle.
I would absolutely confirm your impression of Transportation Engineering. You'd be working for the dark side, for sure. But, you know. Nice pay, good benefits, pleasant colleagues.
Rhymeswithmaria got a job with a video game company just from having relevant non-game-related knowledge and experience, so it can be done sometimes.
Is there work in technical illustration for museums or academia that you might be interested in? People certainly get work drawing extinct animals, so there might be something similar for old architecture.
People certainly get work drawing extinct animals...
...having sex with cars.
My links didn't work, here they are:
Rome Reborn
Roman Cologne
Winchester, Hampshire, c.1400
Huh. I'm glad I never investigated Transportation Engineering that far. I'd been thinking about it in terms of transit policy for a bit, as I've done history work in that area.
After listening to y'all I'm going to talk to the profs I know to see if there is any work as a technician. That might ultimately be perfect for me.
This is sort of the advice I'd give, even if you were to go into a PhD program. (Except for status perception reasons, avoid the word technician if you've got a PhD or are getting one.) Of course, if you want to become a professor, then go for that, but not to the extent of missing out on opportunities to keep up or build your skills with GIS, visualizations, game design, whatever it is that interests you and is not traditionally academic.
There's a growing number of positions out there for types of academic technology work where you're in "real' academic research, just not necessarily a professor. It sounds like you're already aware of this, but look around for humanities labs/digital humanities centers, etc. - they're variously named, but in the same broad field. Are there a lot of these jobs? probably still not, and of course funding has to keep up, but I get the sense that it's still early enough that the number of people with relevant skills and an interest in the humanities is actually not that large, yet. And I know we've made fun of this before, but you can find good advice under the "#alt-ac" umbrella (meaning alternative academic careers).
This really depends on your program, but I found in mine that as long as you could maintain good standing, keep the support of your adviser, and look like you're doing something with potential, there was a lot more flexibility to shape your program than you might expect. I learned this a bit late, but it would certainly have been possible to say "you know what, I'm going to go learn stuff off the standard academic path and if that means taking my exams a bit later than you want me to, that's what's going to happen" and then done that. Although I kind of ended up doing that anyway when I learned Russian for a dissertation topic I ended up not doing, and I was never conversational enough for that to become a real transferable skill.
Anyway, to try to close this rambly comment, if you do go to school, I'd advise resisting anything that would push you into a training for professorship-only path. You'd be going for yourself, not for anyone else's sense of what a proper academic should do, you'll have access to a bunch of resources that you couldn't easily get otherwise, and you've already said you wouldn't go without funding, so you should go in and take everything you can get your hands on, if you're going to be there anyway.
On the other hand, don't go.
RE: all that Mary Sue Talk:
The other night, reading in bed, I discovered that AB was completely unaware of the existence of fanfic. Through her eyes, I could practically see her brain trying to come to terms with it. "So wait, you're saying that there's, like, Frasier fan fiction?" A few taps on the iPhone, and there we were, Nials and Daphne and their teenage children....
She also therefore was unaware of the Mary Sue, which prompted me to actually look up the term. I knew its meaning, but never its origin before, and thus hadn't understood some of the connotation.
One thing I'll note is that I personally run into the term most often in the context of male writers, specifically the dynamic duo behind the Left Behind books. The Slacktivist always refers to the dual protagonists as the respective Mary Sues of the dual authors.
And I think this gets to a key point: to an extent, Mary Sues are by definition the province of bad fiction, because the story exist solely to show off the Mary Sue/satisfy the writer. Lots of "literature" features Mary Sue-like protagonists (Athene Parthenon loves him and so do sexxxy nymphs and his respectable wife too and he's a master mariner and soldier; sure, pal), but there's usually more to the story than just the wish-fulfillment/self-actualization/whatever, plus the presence of good writing can make even an egregious Mary Sue entertaining. Whereas, in the hands of a bad writer, all you have is this sort of baldly obvious "Lookit how awesome I ammy protagonist is!"
I'd been thinking about it in terms of transit policy for a bit,
I should mention that my cousin has been working for a couple of years (almost a decade, now that I think about it) in transit-related program activities without having any specifically related degree.
She's worked for a variety of organizations designing and running trip reduction and mass-transit programs. I think somewhat to her surprise it's turned out that after she talked her way into the first job she's been able to continue finding similar positions with gradually increasing responsibility.
it's turned out that after she talked her way into the first job she's been able to continue finding similar positions with gradually increasing responsibility.
This is exactly right. Here's the key: if you have a vaguely relevant degree (and Planning really is close enough for any engineering firm that's doing transit work - there's a planning element to any transit/transpo project bigger than a driveway) and you prove yourself competent/useful, you're in. It's a lot like how no one ever looks at your grades once you've gotten your first job/grad degree. Additional credentials are helpful, and more skills are obviously useful, but if you want to be a planner, rather than an engineer, then being an engineer doesn't nec. help you all that much.
Indeed, my background as an architect was very practical & hands-on, but for 4 years I was shunted into planning work because I had an aptitude for it. If you prove yourself invaluable to an engineering firm because you're better than anyone else at planning-related functions, then they won't care at all whether or not you understand physics.
One thing you could do would be to interview for planning positions with engineers while saying, "I'd be open to pursuing engineering if it's critical to my job." It shows you're willing to invest in the field, but it doesn't actually commit you to enormous time and expense that may not be necessary.
if you have a vaguely relevant degree
Too true says the guy with the political science degree sitting in the medial school.
372: A Mary Sue is the improbably talented hero type. Fan fiction is written by amateurs who create a stand-in version of themselves. When a normal person makes a stand-in, they imagine themselves only more talented and attractive. The loser hero who is inexplicably attractive is mainly the province of the neurotic middle-aged male professional writer. Though it sounds like the female hero in Twilight is essentially that, which maybe is why the books are so popular.
Version control news: having explained very carefully to colleague which files were the ones I changed (have you ever tried sorting the folder by date? there's a thought!), and then checked out a bunch of stuff, worked on it, checked it back in, what do I find but...
...an e-mail with 7.5MB of attachments, from 30 minutes after I finished....
*headdesk*
This settles it. Mary Sue is just Chuck Norris in disguise. Get used to her or else.
In an academic paper written for the UC Davis School of Law, Anupam Chander and Madhavi Sunder argue for Mary Sue as a viable character.[16] Rather than a mere exercise in self-indulgence, Chander and Sunder see Mary Sue characters as representing "subaltern critique and empowerment", challenging a "patriarchal, heterosexist, and racially stereotyped cultural landscape." by "valoriz[ing] women and marginalized communities".
In an academic paper written for the UC Davis School of Law...
This is the sort of thing that makes me sympathize with the idea that law journals are a blight and should be abolished.
The abstract is not promising, either, if I've correctly identified the paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=562301
Well, here's another person for whom that post really resonates, and I still think about doing a Ph.D. It would be a long, hard slog, and there are a bunch of steps I'd need to take even before applying anyway although I'm confused about them now.
I want to do either health policy and health care financing/insurance structure or health services delivery research. And I'd like to throw a tiny bit of law into the mix.
I think that I need an MPH first. I'd try to get a job at a university with tuition remission and then maybe apply for a fellowship of some sort to avoid debt. But then I might apply for a Ph.D. program.
I'd love to be a superstar, but it's unlikely, and I'd definitely need to learn better networking skills. There do seem to be non-academic jobs, not only in government but also at consulting firms, RAND. LinkedIn and the profiles of the authors of Health Affairs tell me so.
Still, there are my massive problems with anxiety and my lack of obvious skills to get me in the door.
Oh, and if I were to stay in the U.S., I'd really only want to live on the Eastern seaboard--or maybe San Francisco.
Feh.
This Tim Burke post is kind of relevant to this thread.