The School/Uni Thread

I'm not sure where to apply, or if I am even a possible applicant (3.2 gpa is hardly praise-worthy).

I'm also unsure if I want to continue with philosophy.

It doesn't help that I am not interested in becoming a tenured professor; I don't want to teach - I want to write. Applied ethics is my area of choice, and I'm just completely unsure of what route to take now.


I've heard that if you take about four years off and then apply for grad school, your chances of getting in are better because they state in the system that you are a "student of special circumstances"; I guess being a non-traditional student at that point is somehow more attractive (I have no idea why). At the same time though, that's four years (i.e. half of the Ph.D process) of potentially not doing anything related to what I want.

I'm not even sure how long I would have to remain in school just to bump up my gpa. Fuck, I don't even have the money for such things. It would be different if I was in a field that was actually lucrative like comp sci, loans wouldn't be a problem then. But I am at the end of my rope loan-WISE. I've paid for all of my schooling by myself, with absolutely no help from anyone else - tangent: FUCK COMMUTING.

I just don't know what the hell to do at this point. If I venture to grad school and fail then it will have been a lot of wasted time with nothing gained. The longer I am out of work, the worse this is going to be too; hypothetically, let's say I am accepted to grad school, but fail out in my fourth year - that means that when I am 28 I will essentially still have had no real (i.e. higher than $8/hr) job experience. I would be completely unmarketable! FUCK
 
Work = peon positions in retail. The reason being was this: "Good luck finding an internship program for philosophy!". I could have tried for public policy internships, but priority went to poly-sci majors : /
School = UCR. I'm a transfer, which is why I was able to get my B.A. in about a year. If it weren't for the lack of offered classes in my major (at a given time that is) I could have been done in 6 months.

I also lost a sizable chunk of previously completed classes because parts of my IGETC weren't accepted. Stupid fucking bureaucratic wankery.
 
Pessimism said:
I'm not sure where to apply, or if I am even a possible applicant (3.2 gpa is hardly praise-worthy).
Click to expand...
At least you don't have a 2.2 gpa like me. I made so many bad decisions in college. My internship and extracurricular web projects most likely saved my ass on the job search.

Pessimism said:
I'm also unsure if I want to continue with philosophy.

It doesn't help that I am not interested in becoming a tenured professor; I don't want to teach - I want to write. Applied ethics is my area of choice, and I'm just completely unsure of what route to take now.
Click to expand...
So how exactly does one make money writing philosophy texts?

Like, could you give an example of a job posting you might find in the classifieds for this, or are you planning to try getting published in a journal or whatnot?

Also what does a grad degree really get you in terms of marketability if you're not going to teach?
 
Essentially applied philosophy could be easiest categorized as eschewing the traditional highly focused studies that occur in philosophy on particular philosophical schools/philosophers (Example: becoming a scholar on Kantian political thought, or an English/French major studying the works of Proust) and instead focus on how said idea's from previous thinkers and current thinkers can shape the social systems as a whole towards a specific goal (Ex: how to be both morally acceptable and efficient). The most applicable areas of interest are usually biomedical ethics and politics (either as a whole - dealing with say the government and its workings at large, or with a specific subset of policies -like environmental politics).

For example, an ethicist in the medical field would really begin trying to change the way moral agents (patients) are treated in hospitals, especially when the concepts of informed consent are brought up. There seems to be a fine line between corporate pragmatism and moral responsibility being fulfilled in the healthcare industry - my job in this regard would be to comb through policies and make it to where patients are on equal footing when it comes to decisions that are going to be made about their health (mainly because laws in today's age value autonomy higher than beneficence).


As for the grad degree, most businesses for some odd reason feel that a general B.A. is on par with a high-school diploma, so they upped their requirements. In defense of this thinking though, if it weren't for schools churning out illiterate monkeys then this wouldn't have happened. Many businesses I have heard will just trash your application as soon as they look at it if you are missing that degree.


I would also love to publish.
 
Ah, good call. That could be a pretty interesting job, albeit still a scarce one I imagine.

I wonder if even polisci people are highest on the food chain when it comes to policy analysis work, as opposed to lawyers.

At any rate, best of luck.
 
Classes/lab is pretty good so far this semester, except for one. For Perception I have some really old guy that is a radical behaviorist (aka outdated view) who goes on and on about completely random stuff, and doesn't explain things very well. All that goes on is he puts up his notes on the projector, we copy them, he babbles on, and repeat.

German, however, is really fun, and I have an awesome professor. It seems like it'll get fairly difficult (especially with der/die/das and other things, to start with), but at least I'll enjoy a good portion of it. The honors rhetoric class is also really good, just a lot of writing (though I suppose that's expected).

And next week I'll start running studies by my self in the Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience lab, which I'm looking forward today. A grad assistant (who also likes metal, ranging from maudlin of the Well to Magrudergrind) and I ran a participant today, though she seemed annoyed with it all, and started texting during it too (wtf?). Hopefully I'll get some nice people :lol:

So how is everyone else's semester/term starting off?
 
I am studying to get a B.A. in Economy in University of Buenos Aires (UBA). I know that in USA it is quite an easy career but here it isn't..... just because UBA is the best university in the country and it is public so the Faculty of Economic Sciences is full of fucking filter subjects >_>

This will be my second year. The first four-month period starts in March 20 :D

I will use those first four (actually three) months to repeat Calculus 1 and to get some part time job and/or studying Portuguese.

I failed Calculus 1 epically (in my case thanks to my incredible stupidity when it comes to take Math exams, the lack of any prior knowledge of the subject, and the bitch we had for a teacher.). Calculus 2 is a nightmare so if I don't do C 1 perfectly there is no chance I can pass C 2. In fact, I already started studying, I want to get at least to the basic derivatives before February ends.

I will start with the second year subjects in the second 4 month period.
 
I have my last audition for the Cincinnati Consevatory of Music feb 1 (@ UC) luckily it's a regional audition in san fran so it's not to far. except i have to bring two guitars and my amp >.> anyways I hear if i get accepted from the Berklee College of Music on the 31st...this has been my dream school for 4 years at least so monday is a very big day. my audition/interview for them was in early december and it honestly went extremely well i thought, i have nitpicked all of my auditions so far but really it could not have gone better.
 
I'm still working on my MA thesis. It should be done in the next couple of months. I've actually been working on it for about a year but a few months ago I had some kind of intellectual crisis and decided that what I was working on wasn't going anywhere fruitful and was far too unwieldy so I completely changed the topic and got rid of about 3/4 of what I had already written. So the only thing that survived my purge was the first chapter. The other day I sent my adviser an outline of what I've come up with for my new topic and he liked it. It will be nice to finally get this done and enter the job market and possibly apply to Phd programs next semester (ok, not probably, almost certainly. I'm so obsessed with this stuff that I would feel like I cheated myself if I didn't do a Phd.)
 
Getting a couple of gen ed classes out of the way. I can already tell my speech class is going to be total AIDS. The history class on the North American West seems interesting so far though, and it's helping me tighten up my approach to reading historical texts.

Calc 2 is proving to be the gayest fucking thing ever so far. The guy I had last semester (who I have for discrete mathematics now) is the head of the department, so he accordingly placed serious emphasis on rigorous proofs and interesting shit like that. Maybe it's just the nature of the second part of single-variable calculus, but it's been nothing but memorizing identities and simple algorithmic processes so far. I hope it changes when we get to infinite series.

Philosophy is cool. The guy teaching one of my classes right now is finishing up his dissertation on some aspect of Aristotelian categories, and Aristotle will be the main focus of the class. This is beneficial to me since the guy I had for the first proseminar openly disliked Aristotle and made Plato the sole focus of the class.

Most of the professors in the philosophy department have taken a liking to me, and the math department head dude stopped me after class and asked about how far I'm planning to go in the department. It feels good to actually feel like a part of an environment instead of being some punkass kid in class.
 
Research Methods for Rhetoric & Composition - My Thesis chair is teaching this class, and really the only reason I'm taking the class is to get credit for doing research for my thesis. Pretty useless otherwise because I know everything he's going to talk about but whatever. He's a cool guy...strange...but nice.

Shakespeare -- Taught by a British man with a very dry sense of humor. Right up my alley. My grad program requires a 600 level Pre-1800s Brit Lit course, so that's why I'm taking it. A lot of my friends are in the class, so that makes things nice. The course is specifically looking at how Shakespeare's plays have been staged throughout the years and what problems arise between staging and having multiple editions of a text

German 101B -- Pretty self explanatory. Second semester German. The professor is also crazy. Very loud. Tells stories about pagan rituals he partook in Switzerland. Srontgorrth, the der/die/das thing doesn't become any easier. I still can't remember which ones go with which words. It's all arbitrary it seems like.

so it's shaping up to be a decent semester.
 
Cythraul said:
I'm still working on my MA thesis. It should be done in the next couple of months. I've actually been working on it for about a year but a few months ago I had some kind of intellectual crisis and decided that what I was working on wasn't going anywhere fruitful and was far too unwieldy so I completely changed the topic and got rid of about 3/4 of what I had already written. So the only thing that survived my purge was the first chapter. The other day I sent my adviser an outline of what I've come up with for my new topic and he liked it. It will be nice to finally get this done and enter the job market and possibly apply to Phd programs next semester (ok, not probably, almost certainly. I'm so obsessed with this stuff that I would feel like I cheated myself if I didn't do a Phd.)
Click to expand...

How long is your thesis that you have to divide it into chapters?
 
So here's the situation as it currently stands....

Out of the 6 grad schools to which I applied, I have gotten 5 rejections (Harvard, Yale, Penn, Illinois, UC Santa Barbara). I'm still waiting on Michigan, which is the school I knew I had the best chance at, but I should prepare for the worse anyway. Their Greek & Roman History PhD program is my only hope now (technically a MA-to-PhD type deal).

This was a harsh slap of reality in my face. I should have prepared for this. Competition is tough in these economic times. Everybody is applying for higher degrees, and those like me who haven't even earned their BA's yet are necessarily at a disadvantage.

In the event I'm not accepted to Michigan I will stay at UMaine. My academic advisors say I can earn grad credit as a "special student" without actually getting into their History Masters program. But assuming (and rightly so) I can get into their MA program I can begin that next Spring and once I'm through (quicker than normal I bet) I'll have a much better chance of getting into a good PhD program.

I'm very likely to be to top graduating senior in the Liberal Arts College at UMaine. I was hoping to move up from that place, but reality is reality. Hope it all turns out for the best.
 
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