Poor kids and their college essays

Yeah, and it's usually shit pizza, lowest-common-denominator cheese pizza or pepperoni-only pizza, since SOMEBODY always pitches a bitch if there's mushrooms on the pizza, or onions, or peppers, or some of the girls from the living section don't want too much meat on the pizza, etc etc., so the big honchos wuss out of the arguments by ordering the blandest pizza possible.

 

Ha! I made it a point only to apply to schools that didn't require an application essay!

 

I bet you've got a post graduate degree, huh? Fill us in professor.

 

Two, baby, I got two ...

 

One thing a degree tells an employer is you can take on an extremely long term project and accomplish it.

If you are good at something, most fields will reward you for this skill. You also do not want to spend your entire life chasing money but miss out on enjoying life. It's a balance that is tough to figure out.

Rich people also understand that contacts are much more important than others think they are. And they are right.

 

According to this piece, the "do what you love" mantra "devalues work." Tough balance is a good way to put it, 93Devil. On one hand, you want work that is meaningful to you - and somewhat enjoyable, as well, or at least work that you are engaged with. On the other hand, you know, bills.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/do_what_you_love_love_what_you_do_an_omnipresent_mantra_that_s_bad_for_work.html

DWYL is a secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation but is an act of love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, presumably it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace.

Nothing makes exploitation go down easier than convincing workers that they are doing what they love. Instead of crafting a nation of self-fulfilled, happy workers, our DWYL era has seen the rise of the adjunct professor and the unpaid intern: people persuaded to work for cheap or free, or even for a net loss of wealth.

 

Guess this thread is as good as any to post this. Megan McArdle linked to this

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0An-UdyZNOVCQdGVJN3hWU0EtbjRwR2t1R1JLR19Hd0E&type=view&gid=0&f=true&sortcolid=-1&sortasc=true&rowsperpage=250

on her blog today, as sort of a follow-up to an entry from a few weeks ago titled "Can't Get Tenure? Then Get a Real Job". Many of the folks who tell their stories on this spreadsheet fell into the "Do what you love ..." trap. Now they owe 5- and 6-figures for student loans. I borrowed a bit for my PhD, but: 1) the amount I borrowed was a trifle compared to some/most of these folks; and 2) I was targeting a discipline in which one can reasonably anticipate landing a tenure-track job. I can't for the life of me understand why an otherwise intelligent person would borrow $50K to $60K to earn a PhD just so that person can enter into a one-in-a-million lottery for a $60K job.

 

Because they don't look at it as a lottery ticket. There is at least something of a meritocracy in the job market, and all of the PhD candidates think that they'll succeed in a meritocracy because they always have.

From experience: You have no clue how smart high-level graduate students are until the first day that you are in a classroom with high-level graduate students. It's jarring. Kind of the way you don't know what it's like to have a kid until you have a kid.