I went to my thirtieth college reunion this weekend. People are super worked up about colleges for their kids now. My college got 27,000 applications for 1,000 slots. Just nuts.
Mental toy: imagine Chua's description of parenting as applied to a group not already favored by stereotypes and/or money. Suddenly looks more abusive than predictive of academic and financial success!
Maybe after another 30 years of the winner-take-all society people will move beyond "a winner-take-all society is actually good, and I have to make sure my child is one of the lucky few who are chosen as winners basically randomly".
..,the legendary "triple package" of conscientiousness, status anxiety, and a strong sense of their own superiority to everybody else.
The first two make trolling easy. The last one makes it fun.
Color me shocked! just shocked! that politically suspect bullshit armchair theories of the wealthy elites turn out to be politically suspect bullshit.
After the revolution, law and business professors attempting to do social science will be summarily executed.*
*Economists too, or at least that Ke ith Ch en guy. Also all psychobiologists.
5: wait, wasn't it you that told (approvingly) the story of how you watched a Chinese friend of yours hit her five-year-old daughter in the face with a dictionary, because she wasn't learning to read fast enough, as a praiseworthy example of how the Chinese take education so much more seriously than we do?
6: It was an abridged dictionary, so no big deal.
There's a passage in Portnoy's Complaint in which Portnoy goes on about how Jewish mothers made their sons feel that they were the most unique and wonderful creatures, brilliant like no one had ever been brilliant before, and at the same time, that they were utterly worthless pieces of shit. I wonder if Chua quotes this as evidence in her book.
6
Approvingly is the wrong term. It's true that economic/precarity anxiety + a life determining exam system and highly competitive university system and few other forms of social mobility make more people want their children to exceed in school more so than say, in the US. I wouldn't say I actually approve of the system, actually quite the opposite. I rather prefer the US strong public university system where (at least theoretically in the past) any kid who wants to can get a decent low-cost education.*
*Also the European model of free public universities, although I'm not really into tracking students at young ages.
Also, it was her kindergarten workbook. Only about 40 pages long.
IMHMHB, "Tiger Mom" style parenting in Mainland China gets traced to the publication of 'Harvard Girl' in 1999, and her middle-class parents' somewhat unique style of "Harvard at all costs" parenting. This gets taken as parenting according to some sort of unique East Asian cultural essential traits, but they actually based their parenting almost entirely on an early 19th century Prussian parenting manual, The Education of Karl Witte.*
*There's now a backlash against this sort of parenting among many Chinese people (except my friend who hit her daughter with the school book), and now you find children who are spoiled beyond belief without anyone ever disciplining them.
and now you find children who are spoiled beyond belief without anyone ever disciplining them.
Boys, I'm guessing.
12: I've heard rumors that the stereotype of mainland Chinese students at US universities has been shifting from "super hard working and academically focused" to "major partiers", although I can't confirm this. If it's true, maybe related to 12.2?
14: I know in Turkey, for example, where they also have an all-determining, standardised university admission test, the cohort which goes off to study in the US consists of 1) highly driven, talented, cream-of-the-crop types, and 2) spoiled mediocrities from rich families who wiped out on the exam and couldn't get in anywhere good in Turkey.
13
Yes, and grandparents of boys are the worst offenders. It's especially true in places where son preference is strong.
14
US/Anglophone Universities are now safety net schools for wealthy Chinese delinquents. It's why wealthy parents aren't pushing their kids to work as hard--they can always ship them overseas for an education.
15: 3) Women who wear hijab and thus can't attend university in Turkey, in my outdated experience fairly evenly split between groups 1 and 2.
they can always ship them overseas for an education.
And buy them a BMW which they will drive like shitheads.
15: I think this is the (probably fair) stereotype about almost all foreign students in the US. Or at least when it comes to students for whom the cultural/linguistic/legal barriers are high enough to pose a genuine obstacle. (I mean, people the US don't think this about Canadian students, and it's not a big stereotype about ones from the UK (fairly or unfairly), but for the most part that's the general impression.)
I would assume the same general split shows up when it comes to Americans going to college in the UK or Europe. Or it should anyway.
I would assume the same general split shows up when it comes to Americans going to college in the UK or Europe.
This hasn't really matched my experience, to whatever extent it's representative...
The Roc Islanders I'm supposedly educating strike me as overworked rather than hard-working (or spoiled). There's no way at all that the private education people pay for here is economically worthwhile, other than through credentialism run mad.
Huh. I suppose we have more than a few couldn't-quite-clear-the-bar-for-the-Ivy-Leagues schools in the US, so maybe the dim rich kids are sticking around?
I went to a conference about 4 years ago about the change in East Asian university students and its impact on the model minority stereotype (among other things). One speaker gave a presentation on tensions between Chinese PhD students, who tend to be academically extremely successful and from more middle class families, and Chinese undergrads, who tend to be wealthy fuckups. There's a lot of anger towards the "wealthy second generation" (fu'er dai) in China, and it translates to academic campuses in the US.
I'm hoping to change the whatever stereotype people in China have about white Americans to include "They swear loudly at bad drivers."
23
The US has a whole swathe of expensive private schools for wealthy-yet-mediocre students. No need to pay through the nose for nonresident tuition overseas when you can do it in Connecticut instead.
25
You'd appreciate the schadenfreude on Chinese social media when someone in a Lamborghini kills themselves in a single car accident.
I suppose we have more than a few couldn't-quite-clear-the-bar-for-the-Ivy-Leagues schools in the US
Is this about me going to the University of Michigan?
He can find that schadenfreude right here.
Yeah, pwned by 23. Also, studying abroad* just isn't usually that appealing to mediocre American students.
* To be distinguished from semester abroad, which is beloved by rich, shitbird undergrads from sea to shining sea.
I think it's more the Franklin And Marshall type schools that they end up in, really. Or at least when I lived near to it that was pretty much the consensus about who went there.
Still, you'd think there would be some people pushing to get their kid into Oxford or whatever if they couldn't get accepted as a legacy at Harvard. There are probably enough rich-fancy-schools that aren't even the backup-in-case ones that playing the odds works pretty well if you're very rich though.
32
At the tip top level, children of Chinese officials use the Ivies as a back up, because 1) the Ivies admit kids of rulers, and 2) the kids are bright enough to not make a Harvard admittance a total joke, even though they wouldn't make the cut for Peking University.
My former subletter was sort of in this category, a clearly bright enough and hard-working enough Princeling to get multiple Masters from elite US universities, but wealthy enough that the degree was mainly a hobby. He was doing an LLM here, and complaining that the other Chinese students were "boring" because they studied all the time as they "were concerned about getting good grades." He wasn't particularly wild or debauched, more just really laid back. He didn't drink alcohol and his parents also didn't get him a car.
IIRC he did his undergrad in Singapore, another choice for wealthy Chinese students who don't like the rat race.
32: What makes you think Oxford would have any interest at all in someone who couldn't even hack a legacy admission?
I've always been under the impression that "sort of dim rich kid" is a recognizable category of undergraduates at places like Oxford or Cambridge, just as much as at equivalent US schools.
I thought they went into restaurants, per the "dim son" theory.
36: Absolutely, but in Oxbridge they're mostly English.
the kids are bright enough to not make a Harvard admittance a total joke, even though they wouldn't make the cut for Peking University.
What's the difference between students at Harvard and students at Peking U?
I'll accept funny or serious answers.
39
I'll leave the funny answer up to more clever commenters, but the serious answer is admission at Peking U is based solely on your gaokao (entrance exam) score, with no consideration of HS grades, "well-roundedness," or "leadership abilities," or whatever else is used to justify people with lower test scores getting admitted. From talking to people, it's really hard if not impossible to bribe your way into a top Chinese university with a low gaokao score even if you are from an elite family.
Also since they're technically state schools, Peking U and other top schools in Beijing/Shanghai have local admissions quotas. I don't know the exact figures, but something like 40% of students have to be from Beijing. This means it's way easier to get into the school if you have a Beijing residence permit, and way harder if you're from elsewhere. (This is one reason why Beijing/Shanghai residency is really desirable.) Gaming the system by getting Beijing residency is also super challenging if not close to impossible. Wealthy elites from other cities have extra incentive to send their kids abroad, since it's even harder to get in.
Beijing A & M is a perfectly good school.
40 is (an example of) why I think the phenomenon is easy to extend worldwide. Every system has its unique ways of assessing people and people who come up short against the people in their own one aren't as obviously non-competitive outside of it. Any particular grade means one thing in one place and a different thing in another, or people are competing when it comes to a particular test and the rest of the system is pretty lax (while somewhere else it's the reverse) or whatever. There's a lot of space for people to slide through, especially if their parents have serious social capital and wealth.
I don't think 40/41 answers how these students are bright enough to survive at Harvard. I'm pretty sure I'm not bright enough to survive at Harvard (although I'm a hell of a lot less dumb than a lot of Harvard people, to borrow LB's axes of intelligence.)
From talking to people, it's really hard if not impossible to bribe your way into a top Chinese university with a low gaokao score even if you are from an elite family.
I have no actual knowledge whatsoever, but that seems to contradict everything else I've ever heard about how contemporary China works.
44
1) You are absolutely bright enough to survive at Harvard, and 2) the elite students who get into Harvard are also reasonably bright. They're just not in the top 1% in China.
45
You would think, but higher education at the elite levels appears to be less impervious to corruption than every other part of Chinese society.
You do get cheating on the gaokao, and parents trying to game the gaokao test and test prep system, but that's different than getting into university with a low gaokao score. Cheating/corruption with US college admissions is a whole other ball game. There are entire industries designed to write English language admissions essays, fake LORS, and help students cheat on the SATs.
Yes. People have been successfully prosecuted for it here.
Serious question: would an ambitious mainland Chinese student with an option to do either chose to go to Peking University (Wiki says enrollment is around 32,000 people) vs. Harvard (enrollment for the college is much much less, and percentage of mainland Chinese graduates even smaller). If so, why? Better training for politics? Access to a civil service system (but, if so, there's huge competition against the other enrolleds). One would think the Harvard degree would give you better access to the larger companies in mainland China, but maybe not.
You are absolutely bright enough to survive at Harvard
I'm not being self-effacing, but I'm weirdly dumb for this place, in a strict academic sense. On standardized tests, I'm generally 92-93%, not 98-99%. (For example, on occasion I've accused Neb of misreading something. Guess what.)
47:
Ton of incentive for Americans to participate in that industry, too. Think of the kinds of connections you'd get in China after doing that sort of thing for a decade.
44: The only hard things about Harvard are getting in and flunking out. Taking into account that many (U.S) non-selective schools try to weed out the bottom scrapers, and Harvard doesn't, graduating from Harvard is somewhat easier than from many bottom rung state schools.
Is this just a gentlemen's C thing? If you understand nothing, you get a C? Or is everyone getting As? I don't want to go if I can't be an A student.
I didn't go to Harvard, but I'm pretty sure it's a Gentleman's B+ these days.
AIHMHB, it is extremely difficult to give a failing grade to a Harvard undergrad. Lots of paperwork and appeals processes involved.
Easy As? You know you're better than that, heebs.
If you can't get the lyrics right you'll never go to Harvard.
This is a different song. You've never heard of it.
51: Dude, you got a Ph.D. in mathematics from a perfectly respectable Ph.D. program. You would have done okay at Harvard.
51
Is this a humble brag? Above 90th percentile is well within the range of fitting in comfortably at Harvard.
50
I suppose it would depend, but my guess is most people would choose Harvard. Harvard gives you better access to cushy multinational corporation/finance jobs, lets you network with a global elite, and is definitely a leg up if you don't actually want to go back to China. If you want a career in Chinese academia (which most elites don't because it's very low paying), Peking U would give an obvious advantage, but I doubt that's really influential. If you don't already come from an influential family, it might also give a leg up for the civil service or getting into government/the party. Most people who are choosing between Harvard and Peking U are already pretty set for life though.
Taking into account that many (U.S) non-selective schools try to weed out the bottom scrapers, and Harvard doesn't, graduating from Harvard is somewhat easier than from many bottom rung state schools.
Much easier, given the relative likelihood of dropping out for financial reasons.
Is this a humble brag?
Are you kidding?
Heebie, don't worry. I agree with you. You are not that smart.
That's definitely the least tactful of all the many ways you've told me that.
You all are so smart and funny and skinny. You're like a size zero.
IMHMHB, "Tiger Mom" style parenting in Mainland China gets traced to the publication of 'Harvard Girl' in 1999, and her middle-class parents' somewhat unique style of "Harvard at all costs" parenting. This gets taken as parenting according to some sort of unique East Asian cultural essential traits, but they actually based their parenting almost entirely on an early 19th century Prussian parenting manual, The Education of Karl Witte
This is fascinating.
On the broader dumb rich student thread, the opinionated academic has some real shockers who regularly fail her French Advanced Translation courses, hard....despite being French native speakers.
The explanation of this is that as a student in her department, you can do the year of study abroad at a very, very prestigious French institution, which institution recognises that year as equivalent standing. Therefore, if you were too dumb/lazy to get in to that institution [not named because this would be identifying] through its savage competitive exam, you could try and get into hers, do the year abroad there, and parlay that into actually getting in after you're done here.
It took me a while to remember who it was exactly, but Al Franken's commencement speech at Harvard had this bit in it:
But seriously, it is an honor to speak here today to you, the graduating class of 2002, and to congratulate all of you-for getting into Harvard in the first place. Because let's face it, once you get in here, as long as you don't kill someone or embezzle $100,000 from your student organization, you're going to graduate.
And to those of you who are graduating with honors-congratulations on doing some of the reading and on going to many of your classes, and getting notes from friends on the classes you didn't go to, and on handing in most of your papers on time. Way to go! Good work!
To those of you who did not graduate with honors-"Wow! Whoa!" But then again, congratulations on your hockey season.
Or think about it this way: Are you smarter than Barbara Bush?*
*Yeah I know, Yale instead of Harvard but same thing.
It seems likely to be true that you could graduate from Harvard without putting in excessive effort, but it is also true in my experience that the vast majority of Harvard students put in an enormous amount of effort. They all, for instance, do all the reading. I had no idea any undergrads anywhere did the reading. I don't think the "work super hard to achieve" switch turns off quite so easily.
8.
i don't remember that part.
all i remember from that book, which i read 30+ years ago, is "buttermilk and Clorox"
Typical Harvard classes aren't that difficult. On the other hand, hard Harvard classes are really challenging, honors thesis expectations are high, and Harvard extracurriculars are very consuming. Just graduating and getting B+'s is not that hard, if you can manage your time and write a coherent 10 page paper a couple times a semester. You also only take 4 classes a semester, not 5.
(That's not because it's a gentleman's B+. A Harvard B+ is roughly equivalent to a high A-/low A at Berkeley. But if you were getting A-'s and A's at Michigan, you wouldn't have trouble getting B+'s at Harvard.)
I completely agree with 12, 14-18, and 24. There really is a big split between the kids of the super rich who have never worked at anything, and got where they are by their parents connections and cheating, and the poor (or middle class, or rural) smart kids who worked their asses off. The mainland graduate students are almost entirely in the latter group, while the undergraduates are a mix of the two, with the proportions varying by how good the school is.
Chinese undergraduates are currently the main way that US state schools stay afloat financially.
When I was at Cal, my brother was at Stanford. Everyone knew that a C at the one would be an A at the other. I'd gone with my brother to freshman orientation; they really wanted to make sure the new students knew that you might not get all As, as they'd done in high school. Some students even got Bs! They also wanted the parents to accept that sometimes a B was ok.
(At Cal, we also had to walk 9 miles through the snow to class every day, headwinds coming and going. I hear the weather in California has really changed since I left.)
At least when I was there, all Harvard undergrads were required to be graded on a forced curve for most classes. (exceptions for seminars, I think?) No part of the curve was failing (so no one was forced to fail, and extremely few students actually did fail), and very little of the curve was for "C" grades, which means that in terms of a conceptual understanding of the material, a "C" meant what most people think of as "failing". But, that said, the vast bulk of the grade curve was for B-/B/B+. "A" grades were actually fairly hard to come by. I'm sure I'll get the percentages wrong, but I believe something like 15% of students received A- and 5% received A, with A+ not being part of the curve and reserved for awards in a professor's discretion for truly exemplary performance. So, everyone passes, but they mostly get Bs.
There really is a big split between the kids of the super rich who have never worked at anything, and got where they are by their parents connections and cheating, and the poor (or middle class, or rural) smart kids who worked their asses off.
This is completely true, but not just true in China or of Chinese students!
At least when I was there, all Harvard undergrads were required to be graded on a forced curve for most classes.
This is certainly not true now, and it seems deeply improbable that it was ever true.
There is no such thing as an A+ on a Harvard transcript.
78 -- just as Rae Dawn Chong predicted
That was cryptic, but I know that some of you (Oudemia?) feel me.
A Harvard B+ is roughly equivalent to a high A-/low A at Berkeley
I'm skeptical of this but it's mostly reflexive.
Harvard doesn't have an A+, right?
My recollection from core classes was that it was something vaguely like 15% A's, 25% A-, 30% B+, 30% other grades (mostly B and B-). Smaller upper level classes had higher grades (but also typically only had good students)
I couldn't get an A in any serious class that wasn't math. Science classes I got A-'s and humanities I got half B+ and half A-. The GPA is calculated in a weird way (A = 15, A- = 14, B+ = 12, B = 11, etc.). At graduation they said what percentile each of those numbers was, and 20% of students graduated with an average of 14 or higher (which is exactly what I had). The people I knew who were in the top 5% (which you need for Summa) had well over 14.5. One person got straight A's in the 4 years I was there.
I "taught" ie TA'd at Berkeley and briefly at Harvard's low-wage Connecticut equivalent, both in the humanities. I'd have put it a little differently -- the A/A-/B+ students were about equivalent, no difference at all with the "smart" kids, but there were more and worse B-/C students at Cal and a few who truly just failed while turning in work. So the top end similar, but a bigger drop at the bottom. Obviously these weren't classes grading on a curve.
You all talk about drunk, lazy legacies at ivy league schools as though they are a bad thing. Where else are all these annoying, self-motivated grinders and perfectionists going to learn about diversity, if not from people like me?
70:
Is that because the embezzlers get fast-tracked to the MBA program?
I'm not sure I've ever been anywhere that had an A+ as an actual grade you could get on a transcript. Instructors could grade with them within the courses if they felt like it*, but at the end of the day the final grades topped out at an A. As far as the standard 4.0 scale that a lot of places use I'm pretty sure that's how it looks anyway.
*Or, I dunno, smiley faces and pictures of trees or whatever they wanted as long as there was a translation scheme for entering final grades and they didn't push it to the point where people forced the dean to get involved.
(My law school graded on a 100 point scale. Since 90 was still an A, mathematically you'd have had a way better chance of an A average than places with a 4 or even 15 scale. Still, only 5 or 6 students out of 200+ made it.)
80/84: Wait a minute... I have a Harvard transcript with an A+ on it. It's from the law school, not the college, but I think the grade scale works the same. (I TA'd for a few years at the college and remember them being the same.)
(And the law school classes were on a forced curve as described in 77, as were the undergrad classes I TA'd.) (don't want to be accused of sock-puppeting, so I'm come out and acknowledge that 77 was me.)
88 was true of Cal when I was there - all those A+s might look pretty but did nothing to move the gpa dial north of 4.0.
Actually I'm with urple, I had the suckers actually on the official transcript but for GPA purposes they counted the same as As. I only remember that part because Franz got a bit worked up about it. Eh whatever, the classes were interesting, that's what counts.
Stereotype of mainland Chinese students: In my experience here at Robberbarron-Bloodmoney University, it's shifted noticeably in the last 5 years towards "well-organized cheating". To the point where when I busted 1/5 of my class cheating on an assignment, I was very pleased to discover the foreign Chinese, foreign Indian, and white-American students all collaborating, rather than having separate rings.
Harvard: I've worked with quite a few students with Harvard undergraduate degrees, and been intellectually impressed by exactly one of them. OTOH they were all frighteningly good at presentation-of-self.
At the trade school down the river I had some A+ but I'm know they were for internal use only. Transcripts were straight A B C. Also freshman grades didn't appear at all on transcripts.
And my grammar skills reflect my educational background.
As long as no Korean even thinks about looking at my notes.
MIT has an A+ that counts extra towards GPA, but few other schools do.
No forced curve at Harvard that I knew of.
It's incredibly hard to kick someone out of Harvard even with evidence of gross malpractice. Every year we'd have a student who blatantly plagiarized and the worst we could do to them was to force them to take a year off of school. Also true of the student who financially defrauded a professor (or said professor's grants rather).
In the 90s, over 80% of Harvard students received honors. Summers knocked it down to 60% or so. GPAs were high (average around 3.5). On the other hand, 50% of admitted students got 4.0s in high school.
98: I apologize that the Korean members of the cheating circle slipped my mind. Reviewing my records, I can add that for better or for worse, the Thai, Japanese, EU, ABC, Afro-American, and Arrakian students were not part of it.
I got honors at Nebraska, which probably counts for more because such a small percentage got them.
On a related note, I was just invited to plant corn.
MIT has an A+ that counts extra towards GPA, but few other schools do
Hmm, that was not my experience, although might depend on time frame. When I was there +/- were internal only.
A couple months ago at my university job I had to fix a ridiculous bug where letter grades were crashing the front-end framework because they were tracked by value and the identically-valued A and A+ were causing an index collision.
"Neb Nosflow is a computer programmer. He finds index collusion hilarious."
Because let's face it, once you get in here, as long as you don't kill someone or embezzle $100,000 from your student organization, you're going to graduate.
That was not entirely in jest.
While we're on the subject of prestige, are explicitly biomedical graduate programs considered to be less prestigious than not-explicitly-medical ones?
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While I am happy to take affirmation wherever I can get it, would I be alone in wishing to invoke the power of Nosflow to suppress our Chennai correspondents?
Even if he deletes them, they're just going to keep showing up until someone figures out how to stop them at the source.
I was thinking IP blocking, or analyzing the attached links. (But if the government of Chennai wants to intervene I wouldn't say no.)
They can probably get around IP blocking, and I doubt there's anything about the links that can lead to more effective blocking strategies. But I'm hardly an expert on this.
Fortunately, we have numerous independent developers from the 99th percentile of CS graduates.
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Tell me more about these ekranoplan sex grottoes.
Surely the words "grotto" and "ekranoplan" would be whitelisted.
85 fits with the impression I got having been an undergrad at Cal. I've never been affiliated with Harvard in any way, though.
Also, in my experience the most "precocious" humanities undergrads I've seen tended to have family who were already established academics. No need to learn the ways of academia from scratch.
I have the impression that the real risk of failing is much higher in UK universities.
I don't know what percentage of people fail undergrad philosophy at Glasgow, but a decent percentage won't get admitted to Honours. And the B. \Phil at Oxford -- 2 year masters, where everyone admitted will have been a top scoring undergraduate -- used to have a pretty horrific failure rate. 20-30% in any given year wasn't uncommon.
Friends who teach in Japanese universities often complain about how they aren't allowed to fail anyone, even students who don't attend classes, submit a single piece of work, or even turn up for the final test. I assume it would be easier to fail people in top-level institutions, but the declining birth rate means that even mid-level universities are finding it hard to enroll enough students, and keeping the fees coming in is a higher priority than maintaining academic standards.
108: It's not clear to me what you're asking. Grad programs at universities with vs without a medical school? Degrees in biomedical engineering/computation/whatever vs similar degrees without "medical" in the name?
I'm also a bit unclear on what 108 is asking. Once you get down to the molecular/cellular level, the distinction between biomedical and non-biomedical research is pretty fuzzy.
Do you mean programs based in arts & sciences schools versus those based in schools of medicine? Programs in areas like evolution and ecology versus molecular biology type areas?
My department had a famously high weeding rate*, but didn't hand out many Fs; if you were getting a D, they'd speak to you, but as long as you were doing the work (which was really quite a bit in raw student-hours), they'd give you a few chances. However, almost everyone who left the department went elsewhere in the university. One friend transferred to Pitt to get an anthropology degree, another, who made it through 3 years, but with increasing slackerdom, ended up effectively dropping out. He ended up brewmaster at a microbrewery out west after a brief MTB career.
*93 admitted, 68 made it to 2nd semester, 54 to 2nd year. They've since moved to an "admit fewer, weed fewer" model, probably under pressure from outsiders to raise retention rates, but IMO it's a mistake, because it's hard to know in advance who will have the particular suite of skills needed, since it's not really modeled by anything in HS. Two of the 45 who ended up graduating in my class would almost certainly never have gained admittance in the first place had the dept. only admitted, say, 60.
He ended up brewmaster at a microbrewery out west after a brief MTB career.
Motor Torpedo Boat
Mouth to Beer
Major-league T-Ball
123, 124:
I mean programs in arts-and-sciences schools versus those in schools of medicine.
127: Well, the Graduate School of Public Health has a much weaker philosophy program then the College of Arts and Sciences.
127: I think that the level of prestige is changing very quickly. I know of faculty who have moved from good R1s lacking a med school to schools with a med school in order to have better funding and quicker translation from lab to clinic. I think working in a lab associated with a med school is more prestigious for a grad student. For biology-ish stuff, joint faculty appointments are common, and the students do the same kind of work, but I'd say that the credentials of the arts-and-sciences degrees are still better for a new PhD. There's still some residual suspicion that folks in really interdisciplinary labs get half-assed training in multiple fields rather than extensive training in their subject area.
You might get meaningful tenure at an Arts and Sciences department.
There's still some residual suspicion that folks in really interdisciplinary labs get half-assed training in multiple fields rather than extensive training in their subject area.
I spent some time in one (in a non-grad student capacity) and I got that worry from being around the lab and the school. I was wondering how much that generalized and how much people perceived it to generalize. I'm considering doing grad school there in the near future but the potential for getting half-assed training worries me.
If it makes you feel better, I've managed to work pretty steadily for 20 years on a completely inappropriate degree and residual privilege.
On second thought, I don't know why that would make you feel better. But it makes me feel better.
I'm not exactly down about it. I love my current job so it's not like the alternative to not going to grad school is all that bad, even if there is a lingering sense of regret over not going for it. But probably an even bigger sense of regret over avoiding the kind of environment that gives me Moby-level snark.
That's from the social sciences, not medical schools.
And even then I was never jaded enough to apply to law school. The closest I came was buying an LSAT prep book.
I bought a book called "The Ten Day MBA." But I haven't read it yet.
Trivers, how your studies are perceived will be somewhat specific to how projects are assigned/managed and what you want to do. I'd get the most standard degree possible in order to be able to tailor your resume for the widest array of positions (not like that's a lot anyway! The twenty "good" jobs a year go pretty quickly to people at top schools). As I understand it, you're a computational/data analysis guy? I think that if you like interdisciplinary work, the way to do it is to carve out a niche in lab where you don't do "cradle to grave" projects, you contribute to large, ongoing efforts, carving out dissertation-worthy problems to solve OR to design projects where you do a tiny bit of work outside your area in the beginning or end as proof-of-concept or model validation or similar. The problem with the former approach is that then your committee frets over your not having sufficient "intellectual ownership" on a project.
I like interdisciplinary labs and projects, but for my classmates, the tried and true approach seems to have led to better professional results, even if I think their grad research was pretty hidebound.
I was part of interviewing a post-doc candidate from a famous interdisciplinary lab (Nobel laureate). It became rapidly clear that she was the lab's clearinghouse for a particular technique and basically knew nothing about the rest of the projects she touched. (Q&A was painful. She just kept answering, "I don't know. Someone else did that part, so I'm not really sure about the details.")
I'll shut up now and let someone who knows better tell you how wrong I am. I'm close enough to have opinions, but in an adjacent enough discipline that they're not very valuable ones.
It seems like the time to go interdisciplinary is generally after you've got your foot firmly planted in a discipline.
You can't drop out of graduate school if you don't enroll.
108. If your career path is to become a PI, then worry about the reputation.
IMO there are many ways to do good work without doing that. ydnew's example of someone in a prestigious lab who wasn't allowed to think outside a narrow role is something to avoid-- learning as much as you can about what's upstream and downstream of your primary responsibility is worth doing. Not all bosses will be supportive, but you have some say in who you work for.
If I'm reading correctly, it sounds like you're considering a particular lab at a particular place. If so, and your primary focus is analysis, you might consider talking with the PI about needing to learn enough about biochem and maybe about sample prep to model nonrandom systematic error relevant to your project. If all of this is right and your focus is analysis, IMO doing good work quickly and flexibly trumps institutional reputation. Neither funding agencies nor universities are doing well with tenure-track analysis positions, but the need for competent people is pretty high and not likely to drop.
There are pretty frequent cases of inability to communicate despite good intention between "collaborators" who can think about biology and those who can think about computers. Avoid these situations at all costs, better to change cities than to slog that out. In any case, I think the half-life of specific training is maybe a decade. You need to keep learning.
Science is at least 34% writing emails to keep everybody on the same page.
If your career plan is to become a PI, then stop right there, unless you're going to be a student at Harvard or Stanford or Penn or maybe six other places (depending on field) where a prestigious glamour publication would be seen as unsurprising. Not many people become PIs anymore. If your career plan is something else, do you care that much about the prestige of your institution?
I don't think that's the case in medicine, unless Pitt counts as glam. Nobody has IUP on their resume or anything, but plenty of state schools that aren't public ivys.
Not a particular lab, in all likelihood. The way it works is that this place didn't have anything resembling a computational biology program until maybe even this year. What they do have is an excellent reputation and more money than God, but not quite as much as Stanford or Harvard.
After undergrad I ended up stumbling through dumb luck into a bioinformatics tech type internship straddled across two very good labs. Both were headed by NAS members. With very little supervision, I cobbled together a lot more code than they were expected that summer and they offered me a hastily cobbled together job there. I took that instead of going into a dead-end physics program. I wrote software and solved math problems for them for a year (one of which is getting written up into a publication). And when I left (because I basically couldn't afford to exist in the metropolitan area on what I was getting paid -- credit card debt was piling up) I went out of my way to get them set up with the best replacement they possibly could, commented and refactored everything to make sure that everything I wrote would be something that a smart person with no experience in the language I was working in could hit the ground running with.
So there's the trifecta of 1) them trying to kick off a comp bio program there 2) me having an undergraduate record which, while not horrible, will leave admissions 3) some rather influential people in the school being willing to provide exactly that assurance. I think I'd have a much easier time getting in there than at schools of equal or greater prestige.
I'm not so worried about the job market. I'm gainfully employed now in a job that I'm very happy with, and the comp bio skill set is such that even if I totally fail out of academia, I'll surely find some way to get myself swept up by industry in the next technocratic fad (the current one going under the name of "data science") or at least software engineering. So the worst case scenario isn't what happens after, it's more that grad school is by all accounts (including my own one year trial run in that lab) incredibly stressful. It's stressful for a few different reasons. One is that the work is so engaging, it's hard to put it away, and when it's not going well, it feels like *nothing* in life is going well. I think that's something I can learn to cope with. The second is the basic lack of financial security, which drove me to almost daily panic attacks at one point. That might be better after another year of dumping my surplus income at my current job into a savings account and with a second income from a probable spouse by then (and we've talked about this and she's totally supportive). I guess it's more of a question of whether or not I want to get on that emotional roller coaster again and how well I can handle it and stay centered and focused.
But I'm taking one of those MOOCs (it's on computational statistical physics) and it's hardly rigorous or intensive but by golly does it remind me how much I miss being around real science.
Some day, I'm going to figure out what "data science" means.
144, 146:
It's funny that you mention the importance of emails and Pitt in the same thread because my first bioinformatics research experience (the one at Forgettable State U, not Prestigious School of Medicine) pretty much consisted of me failing at email with my PI's more famous collaborator at Pitt. I guess they got what they were paying for, though, which was $0. Nobody ever had funding at Forgettable State U.
In 147, "me having an undergraduate record which, while not horrible, will leave admissions" should be "me having an undergraduate record which, while not horrible, will leave admissions with some doubts"
I was originally a physicist, now fairly close to what you're interested in.
With very little supervision
Kudos on playing that well, but that's not a great setup.
The situation you describe could be lovely, IFF there's someone senior to set sensible goals for the computational work. You don't want to be in the position of being the junior person with slightly shaky analysis to suggest the data is incommensurate with the desired publication. If the data:expectations ratio is good, then a good situation, but IME you don't usually find that out until you've done most of the work. I agree with Mobe's remark about keeping everyone informed, especially if initial goals are unclear.
That was the hard part and that was part of why I left. I was working really hard at trying to do everything neatly with good enough software practices that things would be sustainable after I left. But at some point it just got overwhelming being constantly in the position of having no real idea of what reasonable expectations were. And more than once I got put in the position of having to say "hey that's actually a really hard problem and I'm excited by the challenge but I need some adult supervision here" and when they became frustrated that the delivery of features slowed (and it always does as a function of the number of lines of code in your library) I was stuck with no one to either advocate for me or, if the fault really did lie with me, to help me get things rolling again. And of course without much experience it was hard sometimes for me to see if it really was my fault or if the expectations were insane.
With the hindsight of a year of working with experienced programmers under my belt since then (and getting some real mentorship with software development and statistics was as much of a reason I left as money was), I really do think I did about as well as I could have without real computational help. But institutional silos being what they were that would have been hard and expensive for me to get, so I was stuck with the internet. Which reminds me that C/osma Shal/izi's ADA notes and the Python/R communities online are absolute godsends for people who find themselves in the kind of position I was in (which is probably not very many).
I don't think you need to googleproof Cosma's name.
But what if he shows up in comments here?
147: Not entirely sure which "more money than God" one you're thinking of, but let me be honest, if it's the one with the, er, Stringiformes mascot, their reputation in my (again, not your) field is the equivalent to New Money. If it's the prestigious in-state public one, that might be good enough to seriously consider.
Really, the best thing you could do is to forget that your undergrad record makes you (in your eyes) less than stellar. Grad school admissions are flexible. Your previous advisors' (bosses') job is to pick up the phone and call profs you're interested in on your behalf amd talk you up! Really, don't shoot yourself in the foot by not trying for top tier schools. You have a skill set that's pretty rare and much more experience than a typical grad student. Your GRE should be not-embarrassing but doesn't need to be genius-level. E-mail directly to labs you're interested in. At schools I attended, PIs could essentially e-mail whoever was doing admissions and say, "I want this person to come work for me" and it would happen.
The other thing is that with a new program, I would worry quite a bit about (a) there's almost no established reputation and (b) whether your committee will be on the same page in terms of level of difficulty, how much work/time a PhD takes, etc.
lw and ned are giving you good advice. Be careful about assumptions re: job market; it can look different with a PhD than a BS.
Last, two incomes makes the finances better, but grad school can be hard on relationships, usually in predictable ways. I wouldn't count on two incomes (sorry). I think the way to approach it is to have pretty clear ideas about where you'd draw the line at "Fuck this, I'm taking a Master's and leaving."
"Fuck this. I'm taking a master's, two boxes of copier paper, this mouse, and then leaving."
Speaking of the job market, should people know anyone who's looking, I've got seven openings right now for various aspects of chemistry at various levels of experience. Make every workday a meetup!
Allow me to be the first to suggest Fresh NaCl.
I'll just get my coat.
My level of experience with chemistry is that I know you can mix hot milk with vinegar to form a type of plastic.
That's precisely our latest area of research! What an amazing coincidence!
159: surely your optimum hiring strategy consists of "urple, and six firefighters".
My son had to make a poster about it. It looks pretty good but he forgot to stick a little pharmaceutical company logo in a corner.
That reminds me how much I like casein knitting needles, which also means I should probably look for a vintage casein fountain pen too.
re: 167
Casein guitar picks are also a thing, although I've not got any myself.
Popular, I think, because people want to try what turtle/tortoise plectrums once felt like, and real ones are impossible to find for sensible CITES reasons.
I'm pretty sure you could make a guitar pick. A knitting needle would be hard to shape I think. If a tortoise had a hole in its shell, you could probably make a patch if you could get the tortoise to stay still long enough for it to harden.
169: you could just make a clay mould from an existing needle and then pour the casein into that and leave it to harden.
Just put the tortoise in the fridge for a bit and it'll slow right down.
170.1: Probably, but in the uncured state, it's still pretty lumpy and coarse. I think it would take a lot of pressure to get something solid. Of course, back when they did this for commercial use, they probably used a slightly less child-friendly formula that worked better.
If you put your tortoise in the fridge, be sure it is on a plate or something. You don't want it touching your food because they can spread salmonella.
174 I'll keep it next to my armadillo.
Looks handing for making shivs. Makes me wonder if milk and vinegar are contraband in prison.
177 I like to keep my infectious bacteria where I can keep an eye on them.
You should still wear pants to work.
178: the new Evil McGyver Barry Freed is slightly unsettling.
re: 169
There's youtube videos and blogs online about it, I think. Then again, I suspect paying 5 - 25 quid* is probably easier than trying to carve a mould.
* 25 quid for the most expensive super boutique-y ones
181 Not necessarily evil. Just looking out for #1.
But Evil MacGyver with falconry sounds so appealing!
Little evil, thy name is the double post.
Barry is just being efficient. I hear getting teeth out of a sandworm takes forever.
"Evil MacGuyver" is such a great concept for a show. Who wouldn't watch that? You could have some terrorist who is prohibited by religion or something from using guns or store-bought bombs. Even better if the terrorist has a perfectly normal American family and seemingly strong wife who's unaware of his obsessive MacGuyver terrorism but suspicious about all that time in the hobbyists' garage. And the only person who can track hom down is an eccentric, obsessive, hard-drinking retired detective who was laughed off the force for his obsession with MacGuyver-like tactics. But the FBI doesn't respect his methods.
The retired detective should be a woman, probably Jane Lynch.
Maybe not a terrorist - a non-violent or at least non-lethal Evil MacGuyver would be better (and fit with the original concept). (Hannibal Lecter is basically Incredibly Evil MacGuyver. All that business with picking locks with a ballpoint pen, using someone else's peeled-off face as disguise etc.)
The way I see this is each episode as basically a caper; but it's the antithesis of Leverage or other caper shows because half the fun with that sort of thing is watching them plan and prepare the heist, whereas our guy just goes in cold and relies on frantic improvisation on the spot.
Isn't James May's recent career basically evil McGuyver?
Good point about James May but he's not quite evil enough. I agree with Ajay that maybe mass killing is the wrong way to go but evil MacGuyver has to be more evil than James May. Like maybe if James May trapped businessmen inside his gigantic Lego house until they paid a hefty ransom.
189 "Honey, do you have any spare pantyhose? Also I need an old ball point pen, like a Parker with a metal casing would be best and I can't find your nail polish remover anywhere. Are you all out?"
Like maybe if James May trapped businessmen inside his gigantic Lego house until they paid a hefty ransom.
I thought you said more evil.
Evil MacGuyver would surely be a career thief with a penchant for gadgetry, not unlike Westlake's Andy Kelp. N.B. being funny and charming is quite compatible with being evil.
This isn't some light Ealing Studios whimsical remake, Chris Y. Reboots these days need to go dark. Like James May kills someone without quite meaning to using his contraption of Legos, and decides that he likes it.