Tuesday evening

[pameladean]

Eric and I usually have a date on Tuesday. Because of the apartment management's policy about keys, this week we had one on Wednesday as well, since he's leaving today to spend spring break in California. We had agreed that we wouldn't try to eat dinner together on Tuesday and that he'd call me after he'd had some food. He called around nine in extreme doubt that he wanted any company, and we had a rather fraught conversation that resulted in my offering to arrive over there around eleven. This gave me time to watch "Angel" with Raphael, and I thought would usefully minimize my crowding Eric. He was actually very glad to see me when I got there, and wouldn't have minded seeing me sooner.

I'm not sure I'll ever get that phone call sorted out. Attempting to become a graduate student is very hard on a person. (I did this myself, but in a very odd way. I so hated the notion of leaving Carleton that I did nothing at all about applications until the last minute and then cobbled up three. I was accepted by all three. The University of Michigan couldn't give me any financial aid; the University of New Mexico -- no, I don't remember why I wanted to go there -- couldn't give me enough aid. SUNY-Binghamton gave me lots of financial aid and boasted a professor of English who had once taught at Carleton, so I went there. I didn't like it at all, but the graduate English department was actually excellent and I did learn a lot before bailing with just my M.A. Anyway, I did the whole thing reluctantly and haphazardly and was lucky.)

Things were fine once I got there. Eric read his historiography essays and I read Liavek V, and we very happily shared some leftover shrimp lo mein from Saturday, which already seemed a decade ago.
There was something particularly soothing and settled about sharing the one pair of chopsticks and the one plate. We had some good conversation, and I remember getting very giggly, but I can't at the moment recall the jokes.

Pamela

Comments

The Carousel City

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

I'm getting all nostalgic, just from the mention of Binghamton. Mmm, spiedies.

I was raised in upstate Pennsylvania, just over the line from Binghamton, and I actually had an apartment there the last year I lived back east. (I moved here in July 20001.) It's a very livable little city, even if it is dying since IBM and Singer-Link pulled out.

Though I got my MA in Philadelphia, at Temple University, I know what you mean about grad school. I would love to teach again, but I would never go back for a PhD.

Re: The Carousel City

[pameladean]

Oh dear. I am sorry to say that I hated Binghamton passionately. Neither the campus nor the city was remotely bicycle- nor pedestrian-friendly. I am a Midwesterner and the hills unnerved me utterly. The weather didn't help much either. I like more sunshine. Mostly, though, I just really hated the university. I should have tried somewhere smaller, but that would have required planning.

I did learn to eat knishes there, though.

Pamela

Re: The Carousel City

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

More sunshine? Isn't one day a week enough?

Seriously, Binghamton is more overcast than Seattle, and it genuinely is overcast six days out of seven. The weather is, umm, crisp. (I admit to missing it -- from the ease and comfort of Silicon Valley.) And if you don't care for hills, Binghamton will give you the creeps. I personally agree with WH Auden on plains: "Dear God, don't ever make me live there!" Flat country makes me deeply uncomfortable. It's like sitting with my back to a door.

The pedestrian-unfriendly tag varies, IMX. Vestal Parkway is a mess, and I would never walk there. The city itself is a good place to walk. You just have to remember that in the east, near-misses are a sport.

Re: The Carousel City

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Yeah, me too, on plains, it feels as though there's nothing to keep the sky up.

I'm not sure Auden's right about the kind of people who prefer the different landscapes, because it does depend a lot on where people grew up. I come from a place called "the Valleys", but naturally, at least for a glaciated limestone landscape, valleys do imply hills. (You know the song "She'll be coming round the mountain when she comes"? When I was a child, I thought this meant she'd be coming from the Rhondda, the next valley over, and a most eccentric way to come, as most people who came would come up or down the valley, where the good roads were, and not on the little round-the-mountain roads.)

[daedala.livejournal.com]

That sounds like my experience with undergraduate school. (Grad school was entirely different -- I was so burned out then, it wouldn't have mattered where I went.)

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

You don't know me, but I assume you don't mind fans reading your journal, since it's open and not friends-only. =) (I hope you don't mind, anyway.) I have a community on livejournal, by the way, for people juggling relationships and grad school and such--loveandacademia. Check it out if you like.

Incidentally, Stanford's Asian Studies MA program told me they had no fellowships or financial aid, but by the time I got there, they gave me work-study which pays my tuition and gives me a salary. It's great, but working and studying is almost more than I can handle. And now I have to decide about what PhD program to apply to, if any. Ergh.

[pameladean]

No, I don't mind a bit. Nice to meet you.

I'll check out the community when I get a chance; thanks.

I just had a teaching assistantship, and that was like taking two extra classes. Ergh indeed. I liked the reading literature part, and I didn't even mind writing papers, but teaching was not my forte.

Pamela

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Ah, applying for grad school. I, too, made three serious applications.

One was to the Sanger Centre, where I did one interview in I think it was the February of 94, with one of the handful of people I've ever met who's struck me as scarily bright. Then around about this time of year I went to Heidelberg for the EMBL interviews, which were deeply odd. At the time EMBL had five basic divisions, and the way the application process worked was that you specified who you wanted to work with, and spent a day doing interviews with everyone from the division containing their group - at the end of which, with luck, you had someone wanting you - and then another day of interviews with everyone from the division that was your second choice. They had somewhere upwards of 1200 applications and took 60 people to Heidelberg for the interviews. Then they fought among themselves about budgets for a couple of days, and then they did a second round of interviews in which you sat at the focus of a semicircular table and the five division heads and two Deans of Graduate Studies bombarded you with questions, which was nothing to do with information and all to do with stress management sfaict. And then they gave graduate positions to 27 of us, including me. That was the night I got hammered and played poker, which story I'm sure I've told you before.

The Sanger Centre had turned me down by the time I got back from Heidelberg; the application I had in with the MRC's Human Genome Resource Centre was responded to with a request to come for an interview months later, when I was in the middle of finals.

It really wasn't intentional on my part, but by the time I started work on the PhD, in January 1995, all three of these institutions were on the same campus. That felt like I'd wandered into a parable by mistake.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

Attempting to become a graduate student is very hard on a person.

That it is. In my experience, it wasn't as hard as figuring out how to finish the degree and finishing it, but the transitions were odd and difficult.

After making inquiries about the graduate program in my undergrad department, I found myself enough sought after that the image that sticks in my mind was of one prof chasing me in the hall to ask me why I hadn't done the paperwork yet and whether there was anything he could say to encourage me. So I signed up, I started - actually, the department had a program where the 4th-year project (probably "senior thesis" in your idiom) was the first bit of your master's work, so I started before I'd quite finished the bachelor's degree - and then I found myself crying at the kitchen table on a visit home to my parents because I didn't know how to do the kind of critical thinking they wanted, and I thought I was supposed to already know how.

When I applied to PhD programs, I'd been working for a few years. Part of my financial planning for graduate school was to take advantage of my employer's dental plan. I remember making daytime phone calls to various universities and potential supervisors while I was home convalescing from having five teeth extracted. I made a lot of enquiries; I followed through two formal applications; I had offers of support from three universities (one prof made me an offer without me applying); I visited two; eventually I chose one.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

My graduate degree was odd in that EMBL were at the time purely research with no formal teaching, so they required you to have a pro forma supervisor and committee with either the University of Heidelberg or your undergrad university, which was the option I took.

Trinity College Dublin do a four year first degree, following which, if you want to be a graduate student, you do a year's work and they decide whether you will be put on the MSc or PhD register based on the quality of your research. They can also technically fail people entirely after that year, but I've never heard of that actually happening. That was a lot of stress I felt I did not need.

Also annoyingly, I realised quite late on when I was finishing up my PhD thesis that it wanted to be about 20,000 words, which was about half the length of most of those I'd seen from the Genetics Department, and when I wrote to Graduate Studies to check what the formal limits on the things were, I got the general letter for all faculties, which is basically designed to keep Trinity's Joyce mafia in check, the only thing it says about PhD length is "we'd like it to be under 200,000 words, and if it's long enough that it must be bound in two volumes, tell us in advance". They accepted a 25,000 word, somewhat padded thesis with no complaints in the end, but I could have done without that worry, too.

All of which makes me doubly grumpy that Cambridge are still awarding automatic MAs to anyone with a BA after three years, on the grounds that of course you've done an appropriate amount of further reading in your subject since graduating.