A Tang Thang

There is something about the graduate school admissions process that resembles the state of nature. I'm not even talking Hobbes/Locke/Rousseau here -- though by all means nasty and brutish, the admissions game is by no means short, and reason most definitely does not govern it. I mean the state of nature which preceded such "natural precepts" as striving for peace in favor of the natural precept "I want that banana, so gimme it or I will end you", where a funded acceptance might serve as the proverbial plantain.

Let us examine the following possible scenarios of the process. In honor of fellow crazed student Maggie's impending birthday, I have solicited the help of her favorites, the orangutans (afterward Tang), to provide a visual component to this study.

There are four general outcomes to the process, with each having several substages. If I can get a social scientist to diagram that for me later, we can explore those further. For now, we'll stick to the main categories: Acceptance, Waitlist, Rejection, and Nuttin'.

The good news first! Acceptance!

In the state of nature it resembles this:




Go, you! You're in! You are on your way to the highest tree in the forest, the ivory tower of nature, if you will. You might as well go beserk from the treetops and let everybody know: you are going to be Dr. Tang!

Less immediately enthralling is the Waitlist...

Which looks, both in the state of nature and in whatever state you reside in, like this:



Sad Tang. You are ranked somewhere between first alternate and eightieth. The admissions committee may or may not tell you this information. It is also possible that they may be lying to you. About everything. Adding to your misery is the fact that the goddang Accepted Tang is swinging about the jungle, throwing nuts and berries all over the place, and you just wish his vine would break already.

Still, it could be worse.

It could be Rejection.

I need no words. Big Aman here is taking care of it.



A lot of programs receive 200-plus applications for about 10 slots. That means each program produces at least 190 Big Amans annually between January and April. Multiply 190 and the hundreds and hundreds of programs, and add in Yale which rejects roughly a gajillion people per annum, for the total number of rejected applicants in the Big Aman army. The result is terrifying.

So it isn't really a wonder why the Adcoms like to play their Wild Card: Total Lack of Information!


No, Sad Eyes and Pouty Lip won't make the DGS return your calls, answer your emails, update the status website, or otherwise acknowledge you as a human/primate/whatever being. It is better for them if you exist in a state of anxiety, constantly refreshing the webpage and hitting redial, than for them to give any concrete information that might result in them a) having to prepare the campus for the giddy swingers, b) having to deal with Eternal Waitlistees, or c) facing their Big Amans.

It remains unclear if the graduate school itself is a civil society. I will report more on this in the future. In the meantime, I will give a shoutout to Wildcat U, which has ensured that this blog can exist for the next 5-15 years. ::throws nuts and berries::

Before and After: Spring Break Open the Wine

It's "break or be broken" over here! If Cancun ever sounded good to me, it doesn't anymore, and I will instead retreat to a mid-Atlantic hideaway where the Interlibrary Loan people will never, ever find me.

Back in a week or so!

Snow Day! Finally, Time to Waste!

Classes canceled! This is even better than the second grade snow day because we don't have to go a day longer in summer and miss the annual field trip to the zoo. As a side note, there should totally be a grad school field trip to the zoo.

Because I brought you the virtual zoo yesterday, I will instead discuss the beauty of procrastination through self-enlightenment, reflection, and the predictive abilities of The Google. This morning, once I realized I had all day to peruse the stack of books by my bed instead of the usual Monday Two Hour Crunch, I came across an omniscient comic strip that predicts my future. A good use of my time, for sure.

Here it is!













Fine, fine, I'm already hitting up Happy Hour despite my technical first-year status. I seem to be straddling "Revolutionize your Field" and "Hope they have Pepperoni Pizza", trying desperately not to fall into the pit of "Get a Job".

This little doozy and more can be found at the PhD Comics website, http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php. We should all thank Jorge Cham for providing these cartoon likenesses of ourselves.

Also, we should all thank the snow, without which my future would not have been told to me.

The Power of the Cute and Fuzzy

As the grad school notifications began to roll in this week, I found myself in a state of total anxiety. There are few things as nerve-wracking as "waiting for the postman to deliver your future", as an anonymous grad hopeful put it. After the first waitlist followed by a rejection, I turned to the only thing that would make me smile.

Freakin' cute animals.

I stumbled across Buddy by accident. Here he is:



Completely adorable, yes? He is like a hug on a webpage.

I then moved on to cover several more categories of wonderfully cute baby animals.

Little chickies:


Puppies:


Baby Wild Animals:





Barnyard Babies:


How wonderful! All of these photos came from the fantastic website www.babyanimalz.com, and many more photos await the panicky applicant. Seriously, you'd have to get rejected from approximately 195 programs to run out of photos to pacify you.

Just in case that does occur, my roommate discovered that the children's section of the library holds a ridiculous number of books devoted to baby animals, the purpose of which is likely split between second graders doing reports on baby monkeys and parents getting sick and tired of reading Seuss every night. Ark selected "Harp Seal Pups" by Downs Matthews (Simon and Schuster, 1997), to calm me down. The book now resides on the bottom shelf of my nightstand, and it is a highly effective relaxation tool. I'm probably going to have her renew it...sorry, 7-10 year-olds this book is actually intended for.

Caulking and Floating

Through the tenacity of my mother and the glory of eBay, I obtained a copy of The Oregon Trail for Christmas. At the age of 22. And guess what...it is even more amazing than I remembered.

The game triggered a lot of procrastination ("Hey, Western history is history, too!") and many Oregon Trail-related Facebook statuses. It also led to an interesting discussion between yours truly and my friend Clare, who also lives the grad student life, in which we debated the ways in which The Oregon Trail is similar to graduate school. Clare offered up "life at a grueling pace" while I bemoaned the "meager rations and lack of good health care". True, we don't have to forage for food, and the chance of a hostile Conestoga overtaking our wagon train is low. But I take Clare's point. We pack all of our belongings into a vehicle of finite size and move off into the unknown, spewing Manifest Destiny rhetoric about how we're doing this "to make a better life" than we could have with our humanities BAs. And the grad student mind is a lot like crossing the frozen Snake River, in that it could crack at any time.

I expected The Oregon Trail to provide me with good clean fun. And it has, save for when my party ran out of food at Deep Sands Pass and I had to trade Alana's last dress for some salt pork (whoops). What I did not expect was the mad rush of fellow graduate students, begging to come over and play. It is like third grade, except that now we know how nasty dysentery really is and the fleeting obsession with the Donner Party has passed.

I must give these Oregon Trail people due props for the quality of the 5th edition game. Great visuals, accurate representation of the fauna and flora, a little weak on Native American representation but very, very good on class hierarchy (shocking!). These things matter when you're a social history graduate student trying to explain why you're playing The O-T on the department computers.

Playing the Waiting Game, Part 2

Why have I gone M.I.A. this past week? Why, because I've been dividing my time between thesis revision and procrastination, of course! Turns out procrastination got the upper hand. Schools begin to notify acceptances in late January/early February, with the Johnny-come-lately contingent emerging from hibernation sometime in mid-March. The result? Total insanity from Martin Luther King Jr. Day straight through Easter.

The real problem with this extended notification system is the total lack of safety valve. One cannot pace oneself in the process. I told myself, "Don't worry! Throw yourself into your work!". I read 600 pages, wrote 35 pages, then mentally collapsed. Somewhere between playing with my roommate's and my insane collection of HappyMeal toys and spending 30 minutes Hoola-Hooping in my living room, I realized that I only really had the capacity to sit in front of something amusing and mutter, "Heh. Heh. Heh heh!".

And so, I present to you, CRACKED.com.

Here is just a taste of what this website of awesomeness has to offer:

"The 6 Cutest Animals That Can Still Destroy You":
www.cracked.com/article_15853_6-cutest-animals-that-can-still-destroy-you.html

I will warn you that CRACKED sometimes goes off the deep end. It is not guaranteed to be appropriate, and you probably shouldn't click on that link if you are at work. Especially if you work around children. Yeah.

But what CRACKED provides is so much more than humorous lists. It can be educational! I can guarantee that I never, ever had a professor tell me, "Stay away from platypus. They will punish you". And really, what good is your graduate degree if you shimmy right up to one of those killer dolphins? CRACKED will tell you, not much.

"Enjoy Every Day as if it were a Spa Day"

Since coming to graduate school my roommate and I have learned all about Hobsbawm, the Progressives, how hot it is in the South, and how to move cars from spot to spot to avoid those pesky 2-hour parking restrictions. Through some combination of "Top Chef" induced procrastination and being generally hungry people, we have also discovered many foods that are now necessary for our continued existence as students. We thought we would share a sampling, a smorgasboard of sorts.

*Now before people go freaking out about why we don't eat any salads, do not worry -- we do eat healthily much of the time. Because we eat so healthily, we can afford to splurge on our favorite treats. If you're already gone too far down the Little Debbie and Cup 'o' Noodles Path, this culinary adventure might not be for you.

Foods We Cannot Do Without—

Fro-Yo

All the yummy deliciousness of Ben & Jerry’s with fewer calories and grams of fat. We like Cherry Garcia, but have been known to hit up the Half Baked (and sometimes, we are). Non-frozen yogurt afficionados might enjoy any of Edy’s Loaded varieties, which are made with skimmer milk.

Gummy Bears

After discovering that the affectionately-termed Doof Lion (local grocery) carried a mesmerizing selection of gummy candy and that the Walmart could supply us with 1.25 lb bags of the bears, we were hooked. Who doesn’t like to buy in bulk?

Foods You Feed to Third Graders after Pee Wee Football

This includes Bagel Bites, chicken nuggets, oven-bakeable French Fries, and the healthiest possible choice in this category, Morning Star Grillers Prime soy hamburgers. No, we aren’t getting endorsement deals for these items, but with the amount we consume we really should be.

The Chocolate

See quote above? It was inside a Dove’s chocolate wrapper. The gift that keeps on giving.

Pasta

The classy grad student’s alternative to ramen noodles.

Snyder’s Pretzels

We routinely enjoy the Hot Buffalo flavor, which is shockingly good. A spicy pretzel – who would have thought? It’s good to see what the power of invention is producing for our palates. Fans of the less spicy might enjoy Honey Mustard and Onion.

Salsa

We put it on breakfast burritos. We put it on crappy soy chicken patties. We put it on crappy real chicken patties. We put it on the fake quesadillas that we make from shredded co-jack cheese on whole-wheat tortillas. We serve it to our friends in a nice-looking bowl with slightly stale chips. It will always taste good and it will never go bad. Perfect.

Apple&Eve Fruitables Juices

A fruit-vegetable juice blend with no sugar or high fructose corn syrup. Far and away the healthiest thing we consume all day.

Are there any that we're missing? We are always open to suggestions!