Somebody Open Up A Window

Where has this site been all my graduate student life? I love it because, if you study social history, most of history is decidedly in the non-LOL camp. But this is hilarious anachronism. Early American historians and 1776 enthusiasts, enjoy.




More evidence that Rhode Island was, indeed, using the necessary during all such proceedings. Also, North Carolina defers to South Carolina.

Monday Motivation

It's Monday, 12:30, an all-nighter, during summer? I fear I am the kayaker when I'm aspiring to be the shark.



see more Very Demotivational

"Analyze Your Writing"...More?

I stumbled across this I Write Like application thanks to UnlikelyGrad and deemed it perfect for 5-minute procrastination.

When I submitted a section of this blog, it said:

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I guess I do enjoy a dose of hysterical realism. However, my academic writing also yielded a result of David Foster Wallace. Research paper = parodic fiction.

So...who'd you get???

Random Advice

Since the end of the semester, several of you have asked me what happened to Meta-Wednesday and when it is coming back.

Although the very nature of Meta-Wednesday is to float about in the ether, existing even though we don't know it exists, it is on probably-permanent hiatus. Meta-Wednesday was a coping mechanism for a very intense theoretical class I was taking in the spring semester. Replacing Meta-Wednesday, for now, is Random Advice, which allows me to eat as many fortune cookies as I want under the guise of amusing you.

But FailBlog beat me to this one! Couldn't have said it better myself. Here you go, dissertators:

"Best" Places to Live?

This CNN Money list of "Best Places to Live" intrigues me. Of course, nobody will ever agree about these things. My New York City friends will have a conniption fit that these small towns and cities fill the top ten, and people in Montana will be pretty peeved to have been left off the list entirely. As someone whose grad student career could have taken me to either New York or Montana, I found that location was a critical deciding factor...but only after I had applied.

Because it took me awhile to come to this realization, my applications literally spanned the country. Major initial limitations were 1) could my boyfriend move there/visit regularly with reasonably low costs and annoyances, and 2) is there a good chance that I won't go absolutely insane living there (a little nuts was OK). Beyond that, I wanted to go to the best school possible. I'd love to believe that the fact that I ended up living in my favorite area of the country was simple coincidence, but that would be a lie big enough to set some pants on fire.

The best advice I got once in the thick of it was to choose the 3-5 most important things about location and see how the potential choices stacked up. Here's what I picked:

Proximity to People
After ten months of living in the south, I realized I wanted to be closer to most of my family and friends while I still had the choice of location. Even though I had wonderful cohort-friends in Va. and I miss them now, there were serious problems with the distance: it was impossible to get away for holidays, my nearest "emergency contact" was 6+ hours away, and I missed a lot of social events, including seeing a close friend visiting from another country who I won't be able to see again for a few years. Things just go more smoothly for me when I'm not two plane rides away from the majority of people close to me.

The Right Feel
I've been pretty spoiled: both my college and graduate school towns were very fun, adorable places to live that were fairly convenient for day-to-day life. I don't want to drive 30 minutes to the grocery, I like to have a pharmacy in town, and I don't want my domicile to be described as a "secluded homestead". The flip-side of the coin is that I don't want to live in a dangerous place, nor a place that is so bustling with activity that I'll never get any work done (or sleep, because I need quiet!). It also couldn't cost a bazillion dollars to live there. I like to go to the movies from time to time and I need to buy things like granola and toilet paper on a regular basis and not run through my stipend by January. So I devised this list of obvious questions and just started asking random locals and students:

1. What transportation, in town and out of town, is available? How will people get here to visit?
2. What is the cost of an apartment and utilities? Are necessary things expensive here?
3. What is there to do in the town for fun? How late are places open?
4. What types of stores (grocery, convenience, gas stations) does the town support?
5. Is this area safe? Has the town had crime problems or natural disasters in the past?

Climatic Compatibility
I don't do rain. I will contend with blizzards, tornadoes, hurricanes, ice storms, hail, wind shears, and Nor'easters but not perpetual rain. Oddly enough, though, I don't much like deserts either. So while friends desperately applied to southern schools to escape the northern cold, I ran screaming from much of the west, as well as any place that had every experienced a landslide, which is too scary for me at the current time.

The moral of the story is this (ooh, a teachable moment!): do as I say and not as I do, and try to think about these things way, way ahead of time. I'll admit that I didn't visit all of the potential places, because once you get that letter you often have a matter of weeks or potentially days to decide. I should have visited as many places ahead of time as possible instead of applying to some places that never would have worked out. As it is, I'm glad that things worked out in spite of my inability to consider basic geography, but for each person like me there's a Texan shivering in their parka in Madison, and I'm not sure what the Wisconsinite is doing about the Texas heat. Also, if this list motivates anyone to move to Fishers, Ind., I'd sure love to hear it.

Books and Their Movies: What Works, What Doesn’t?

Summer movie season always brings out the same problem for me and my grad student (and non-grad student, book loving) friends: what the heck to do about movies-based-on-books. The general rule of thumb is that you should read the book first, right? Well, that’s all well and good when you don’t have 100 academic tomes beating down your door to be read. I find that I often cave and see the movie first, but it’s not an uncomplicated decision.

One problem: I’m running out of time to read the books and see the movies. I have not read the Harry Potter books. I know, I know! I’m culturally deprived. But…I’ve seen the movies borderline religiously. I’m not quite waiting in a pop-tent outside the ticket window, but I’m close. I figure, if I only have 25 hours in my life to devote to Harry Potter, I’m going to watch the movies. I do think I’ll eventually be talked into the books, but I find myself satisfied with the movies. But in the meantime, how do you sort the books that have to be read before the film from those that don't?

Another problem: There are books that I love, and I fear extreme disappointment from a film adaptation. I put off watching Little Women for a lot of years, but was pleasantly surprised (I guess a cast with Claire Danes, Kirsten Dunst, Winona Ryder, Susan Sarandon, Eric Stoltz, Christian Bale, and Gabriel Byrne helps). But when The Lovely Bones came around, also with an impressive cast, I froze. I adore The Lovely Bones and I can’t risk seeing it ruined. Even films that come out well can feel like a shell of the novel. I think White Oleander is a good movie, but the adaptation was so sanitized; the book is gritty and hard, while the film is sad. I have to force myself to try to evaluate the book and the film independently.

I might be onto something, in considering the book and its adaptation as separate entities. After all, if an outing to the movies is supposed to be a break, I don't want to have to do pre-reading! So I’m seeking guidance. Are there movies based on books worth seeing, with or without reading the books? Are there movies you think are better than the book? Should I just get on with it and get all the Harry Potter books from the library right now? The entire series would be a good tool in the procrastination kit...

Opp Choice: To Inflate, or Not to Inflate

I was just going to skip June entirely, what with the Africa trip, the post-trip recovery session, and the pageant that is celebrating a birthday when friends and family are far-flung, but then a fellow grad student dropped this on my desk, which snapped me back to grad student reality.

Law School's Employment-Boosting Strategy: Grade Inflation

At first, I wasn't shocked, because I don't think this is particularly new, even leaving aside UofC's bucket of oddness. But then I thought about it again, because this article isn't just about grade inflation; it is about a variety of institutional coping mechanisms in the midst of rising debt and unemployment among recent graduates.

I'll tell you that I have never been ordered to raise or lower a grade based on an agreed-upon standard designed to boost students' post-education job opportunities. But I'll also tell you that I've seen graduate students, professors, and students themselves have radically different opinions on what a B paper looks like, let alone if any Ds or Fs should be handed out. We've all had instructors who love to give B-minuses on every assignment, and we've also probably had instructors who dole out the As for simply showing up and staying awake. Getting these instructors to agree on a grade scale based on the actual work would seem futile, but rallying them behind a "cause" to inflate might work.

I have to wonder if law schools have been doing this for awhile, and now the trend is just strong enough that more schools have to jump on the bandwagon just to keep up. I imagine that in law schools, where rankings are important and students often burden themselves with debt, managing expectations is important. In some academic positions where 6 spots open a year, a program can throw their hands up in the air and blame the hiring process, which is shrouded in much mystery. Law firm hiring may also be shrouded in mystery, but if you go to a school that will pay a firm to hire you, things might be a bit clearer.

Does this vary between programs, or between schools? Is grade inflation, at any level, becoming a problem? What do you think of some of these solutions to increased job competition? And, what will this mean for those of us who missed this mass inflation?

**For those waiting on an update on the trip, it will come after the 4th of July, once I can upload the billion pictures of elephants we took! Stay tuned.