Recent purchases - Part II

[hendrix]



it sucks. my gf wants us to move to some socialist country and live a life of hipster poverty. but i think instead we're both going to get like 50k/year jobs and buy lots of clothes.

Teger.

New Zealand will have you. Alternatively, you could do what the rest of NZ is doing and go to Australia and earn like $100K being a checkout chick.

i appreciate Teger's insights. I pretty much at loss with regards to why I want to do with my life. Med school is out of the question, so the only other real option is a phd program, so it's good to know the type of atmosphere i'm getting myself into. i don't really want to be stuck in academia my whole life though. ideally, i'd like to get out and get job at a pharma company as a lab rat.

What.

Mikey, you're a long way off being sucked into the hole of doom.

Also. You don't want to do a phd straight after honours. Better to get a job as a lab assistant/research tech for a couple of years first.

 

[Master Milano]

Just followed some sf folks on tumblr, this feels oddly stalkerish:foo:

 

[dfagdfsh]



Thanks a bunch for your perspective Teger. I guess that's what I figured I'd hear, but it does seem a lot bleaker than I thought. Hopefully I'll have some luck navigating the post-grad world, but I don't know if I'll be totally ready for it right after undergrad. What might be sort of helpful for me is that my interests do lie in the sort of exotic, esoteric stuff (queer theory, feminist theory, post-colonialism, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, etc.), and my undergrad advisor is pretty well known in the field of queer theory (and I get to work with him this entire summer). However, as you mentioned, resources are scarce, post-grad demands a lot from your 20s, and it's unsure whether or not there will be any posts to fill once I've (hopefully) finished getting a degree. My aim is to take a year off after undergrad (and do what? I'm really unsure...) and then try to get into either doctorate program. This will probably mean an English program, but—and this is just kind of a far-off hope—I'd like to try to get into a Masters or PhD program for philosophy as well.
The way that you describe the environment of the post-grad world is pretty scary—I feel like DFW's "Westward The Course of Empire Takes Its Way" touches upon that a little bit: people are kinda jittery and afraid of their peers; everyone wants everyone to do well because they have similar interests and are all interesting people, but, as you mentioned, there's the "zero-sum game" mentality; the academies would rather just use you than grow you; and you have to be hugely self-motivated to get even a little bit out of the program. This is all a frighteningly striking contrast to undergrad studies. Right now, I guess you could say that I'm being coddled fairly well. My advisor is extremely helpful, trustworthy, and genuinely interested in my development. Not to brag, but working with him on my project this summer pretty much means that my living expenses will be entirely covered, and I'll have $1,000 to spend on research materials. Being a humanities major, that essentially means books, which are not too expensive. This is what undergrad programs are willing to do and it's great. (A part of me thinks, cynically, that this sort of post serves as a nice selling point for the university, but that doesn't diminish the fact that they will be doing something that is genuinely intended to help me develop.) I'm betting that this sort of thing won't really happen after undergrad. So it's all kind of bleak—okay, it's more than "kind of bleak"—but I'm staying hopeful (I've got to).
Once again, thank you for the insight; not everyone takes the time to answer big—and potentially stressful—questions like those. Also, not many people are willing to be as honest in their response as you. For what it's worth, I hope that things do work out for you both during and after your Masters program. It sounds incredibly tough, but it also sounds like you've done a lot of great things.

Graduate school can have that type of atmosphere, but it's really dependent on you seeking out and working with someone - they're not going to come looking for you. It's good that you're into more bleeding edge stuff, but there's a growing trend right now in the humanities of what I like to call 'distance from subject': more and more people think that the only way you can study, say, African American literature, is if you're black, as white scholars inherently apply their own anglo-centric viewpoint to the subject matter, rendering their conclusions worthless. I think that it's dangerous nonsense, but, what can you do. Luckily History is a lot more conservative than English or Women's Studies, so you see a lot less of it, and it's mostly relegated to African American history, which holds no personal interest for me.

I'm glad I went to graduate school and I've done well here. But the prospect of graduating is still terrifying. Even with all my 'back up' plans there's always a sneaking suspicion that everything will far apart and I'll be homeless, jobless and dead in the gutter. I'm also in a unique situation wherein I don't have anything to fall back to -- I don't really have a family, and I don't have a support system in place that I can rely on if I don't get accepted into a PhD program and don't get a job offer. While on one hand it places a huge amount of pressure on me -- I'm stressed out about these things pretty much constantly -- I also feel that it drives me to perform better, as I have everything at stake every time I enroll in a class.

 

[Master Milano]

 this is pretty funny, thanks for posting

 

[VLSI]

 

[jet]

tanks for poolside chillin

 

[VLSI]

Those are cool. Are they the ones from topman?

 

[BreezyBirch]

Needs trunks and a pair of poolside wingtips

 

[jet]

brogues are in the mail

 

[BreezyBirch]

Be wary of reedo's rage

 

[DLester]

jacket fits?

 

[Zeemon]

http://www.luisaviaroma.com/index.a...rColor=MDE=&season=sale&seasProdID=54Iordered a lanvin silk cotton hoody in beige
here is a code for 20% off for sale items: FR20AW4

 

[Raindrop]

 

[artishard116]

preorder

 

[Feji]