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Old 11-20-2016, 03:37 AM   #91
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Is a Liberal Arts degree really as junk as everyone says because I'm getting one anyway just wondering how fucked I am

 
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Old 11-20-2016, 03:39 AM   #92
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I don't really understand going to college to study a specific profession you might as well go to trade school and damn you better really like that trade because you're qualified to do nothing else

 
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Old 11-20-2016, 03:52 AM   #93
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Unless you're really interested in being a psychologist or something I just mean a lot of people are telling me to go to school for IT or Pharmacy or something and I'm like hell naw

 
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Old 11-20-2016, 05:43 AM   #94
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I don't know how things work where you are, but degrees are very often treated more so as an indicator of intellectual capacity, ability, work ethic and blah. Having a Master of Arts in Film Studies, for example, is less likely to land you a job as a critic for a reputable publication than it is to get you the lower management position at a telecommunications company that you always dreamed of.

 
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Old 11-20-2016, 06:25 AM   #95
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Who successful has a Political Science degree?

Idk The President of The United States

You heard of that guy

 
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Old 11-20-2016, 06:27 AM   #96
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But yeah Buzz that's generally how it works here too

I'd be happy to score the community organizer job Obama had out of college and just leave it like that

 
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Old 11-20-2016, 11:38 AM   #97
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But yeah Buzz that's generally how it works here too

I'd be happy to score the community organizer job Obama had out of college and just leave it like that
he was organizing in his community before he got paid for it. you don't just land jobs like that.

 
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Old 11-20-2016, 01:27 PM   #98
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I don't know how things work where you are, but degrees are very often treated more so as an indicator of intellectual capacity, ability, work ethic and blah. Having a Master of Arts in Film Studies, for example, is less likely to land you a job as a critic for a reputable publication than it is to get you the lower management position at a telecommunications company that you always dreamed of.
This. Because of educational inflation and the fact that literally everybody except for fuzzyroes has a high-school diploma, the post-secondary degree has become the new arbitrary qualification employers tend to look for. It doesn't matter as much what you study unless you are going into a specialized field.

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dk, did you check your email yet?

i had so much schoolwork due this weekend. i had two deadlines saturday and one on sunday. i cried saturday morning cause powerpoint froze and i lost my work. i couldn't help it--- i just cried. but in the end, everything was fine and done on time.

BUT i did miss a teeny tiny assignment. i am taking an online course and in addition to submitting our own work, we are to respond to at least 2 other students (this is "class participation") and between everything else i had to do, it just slipped through the cracks. i am- or was- pretty disappointed in myself, but thankfully i've already done some extra credit for that course. it's still a bummer, though.
Glad the PowerPoint worked out. Yeah, missing even small assignments sucks.

I eventually just emailed my prof from an alternate email address so that I wouldn't have to check my school one. Except that made me too nervous to check that one as well, but eventually I did. Gave him a doctor's note, and he says I can hand in the assignment any time during the semester. Took a bit of stress off, but I wanted to do it sooner rather than later when I have even more shit due, but I'm having the worst writers' block I've ever had and, even though I have the outline of my paper all done and I know what I'm going to write, I just can't get it out and get stuck rewording the same paragraphs or sentences over and over. It's only a 12-page paper, but I just can't do it. I feel like how people with dementia must feel when they can't complete simple tasks that used to be easy for them. I don't know what's wrong with me. I can't focus on anything. I've been stuck on page three forever.

In not checking my email, I missed the email telling me of the Wellness Center appointment I had, so I lost my place in the waiting list. I told the counselor I spoke to that I'm too anxious to check my email, and she said the Center would call me instead. They didn't. But it's still my fault for being such a wuss and not being able to check my email until it was too late.

Even though I've checked it now, I was too anxious to scroll all the way down and look at all the unread emails.

 
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Old 11-20-2016, 03:26 PM   #99
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dude, this sounds pretty serious. there has to be a way to get an advocate for yourself during this time. someone to help you with appointments, and communication with others, while you're in this sort of crisis. also, have you seen a medical doctor? i don't know how you feel about meds but considering the problems you're having, even before a solid diagnosis it might be advisable to start on a medication. some kind of anxiolytic or antidepressant. im not saying you should or not but i think a trip to a doctor, even a GP or a nurse practitioner even if they have them there...

about the email. could you just delete all of the unread emails and start over? would that help? i know that's not an ideal way of dealing with it but if deleting them would get you at inbox zero and allow you to start looking at it every day again, it may be worth it?

i hope you start feeling better

 
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Old 11-21-2016, 02:08 PM   #100
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I have my follow-up appointment with a medical doctor in the Wellness Center today. The appointment that I'm off the wait list for is with the non-medical counselors (I think they tend to be psychologists).

I dunno, last time I saw the medical doctor, she told me to start normalizing my sleep schedule, get more exercise, eat better, etc. I haven't really done any of that yet. I'm guessing I can't move forward with any treatment until I actually try to fix shit on my own. But I don't know how I'm supposed to have time to get more sleep and exercise when I'm already behind in assignments. I guess nothing's stopping me from eating better, I just haven't been able to bring myself to.

 
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Old 11-21-2016, 03:21 PM   #101
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Old 11-22-2016, 09:36 PM   #102
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Of what, and where?
History prof at a Big 10 school.

 
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Old 11-22-2016, 09:59 PM   #103
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History prof at a Big 10 school.
oh. probably not northwestern though huh.

 
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Old 11-22-2016, 10:01 PM   #104
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nah, just jokes. History profs impress me. History is hard. congratulations on your smartness.

 
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Old 11-22-2016, 11:02 PM   #105
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I have my follow-up appointment with a medical doctor in the Wellness Center today. The appointment that I'm off the wait list for is with the non-medical counselors (I think they tend to be psychologists).

I dunno, last time I saw the medical doctor, she told me to start normalizing my sleep schedule, get more exercise, eat better, etc. I haven't really done any of that yet. I'm guessing I can't move forward with any treatment until I actually try to fix shit on my own. But I don't know how I'm supposed to have time to get more sleep and exercise when I'm already behind in assignments. I guess nothing's stopping me from eating better, I just haven't been able to bring myself to.
There comes a time when depression and/or anxiety gets so bad that it is very hard to do any of this basic stuff without some kind of help. Medication, intensive therapy, etc. I can't tell you you are or aren't at that point but don't get down on yourself for not doing the stuff. You're overwhelmed. You need help. Don't let some asshole doctor tell you all you need is some exercise and to eat salad. Obviously those things will help but if you had no problem doing them you wouldn't be here. Like I said, I'm not a professional yet but if I heard that someone was so anxious they can't open their email I would be working on an actual treatment plan and also referring for blood work to rule out anything funky like thyroid issues. Have they done blood work? Offered you an SSRI or benzo? Got a really good history of the problem?

I know you're in the midst of it and maybe I'm doing some projective identification on some level but I'm kinda angry no one is taking the ball and trying to help you. Not at you. You're taking some initiative, which is really a good step. Some doc telling you her 3 minute memorized speech on sleep hygiene and turning off your devices an hour before bed and have you tried warm milk and are you taking vitamins really grinds my gears

i hope you know you can talk to me anytime if you need to. i'll try not to play therapist (which i've been accused of but don't think i do much anymore).

 
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Old 11-22-2016, 11:03 PM   #106
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anyway how'd it go? sorry i got a little ranty

 
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Old 11-22-2016, 11:26 PM   #107
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my paper is about 90% done. the skeleton is done, i just need to write a conclusion and an abstract and fill in a few statistics and classical sources for stuff like my explaination of what inclusive fitness is and stuff like that. i left holes. and a bit of general editing of course. it's due monday. it's been exhausting to write it and i never want to read about game theory ever again... naw but i learned a lot about a topic i didn't know much about and i think i went beyond what the professor was expecting. 20 sources. 17 pages. needs about 3 hours cleanup work, maybe a little more. it'll be a good first third of a thesis in a couple semesters. it really ended up being more about game theory than deception which i did not expect but it took me where it took me i guess

 
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Old 11-27-2016, 06:51 PM   #108
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just submitted my paper. 19 pages 23 sources so glad im done

 
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Old 11-30-2016, 12:26 AM   #109
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man someone else sent me their paper to look at and it is like pure shit. like it might be a C paper for a psych 101 class if the professor was feeling nice

i fixed the reference page for her but she already sent it in and there's a ton of other mistakes and i'm not going to fix them all and i was honest and told her it wasn't great but what do you tell someone like that

im sure she won't fail because the prof knows she's a neuroscience major (and very smart. just can't write for shit.) and it's honors and she did try but oh god i wish i never told her i'd help... and then how am i gonna help two days after it was due? part of it is english as a second language issues but she went to a writing lab and they helped her a lot with that stuff and i'd never hold that against someone (although we did have literally the whole semester for this one paper). it's just, inappropriate citations, way too much quoting, the formatting is wrong, and very little proof in the citations. she wrote a paper and then looked for stuff to back what she said. not the right way and it shows. lord help me look her in the eyes tomorrow and not make her worry that she's going to fail

 
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Old 11-30-2016, 06:51 PM   #110
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i wish i were more willing to let people proof-read my work; it just makes me uncomfortable to show anyone anything i write. someone reading my journal or a school assignment would elicit the same anxiety.

 
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Old 11-30-2016, 11:45 PM   #111
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nah, just jokes. History profs impress me. History is hard. congratulations on your smartness.
For me (and for pretty much everyone who gets one of these jobs), it is mostly luck. Believe me, if I can get a job as a prof, then most people technically can. That should scare the shit out of everyone. It should also make people question the 'expert' opinions which tend to come out of large public research universities. For students, it means that you should not take school seriously at all, and should actually consider getting out unless your end goals specifically and directly require you to go to university.

 
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Old 12-01-2016, 01:01 AM   #112
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i wish i were more willing to let people proof-read my work; it just makes me uncomfortable to show anyone anything i write. someone reading my journal or a school assignment would elicit the same anxiety.
Totally different for me. School assignment I have no problem with people reading... journal, no way. Actually I think I'd have a problem with my therapist reading my schoolwork for some reason. Not a problem like I wouldn't let her, but it'd cause me anxiety

 
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Old 12-01-2016, 01:06 AM   #113
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For me (and for pretty much everyone who gets one of these jobs), it is mostly luck. Believe me, if I can get a job as a prof, then most people technically can. That should scare the shit out of everyone. It should also make people question the 'expert' opinions which tend to come out of large public research universities. For students, it means that you should not take school seriously at all, and should actually consider getting out unless your end goals specifically and directly require you to go to university.
Aren't you required to publish and stuff?

Like in psych departments, they aren't really professors per se. They're researchers who also teach a couple of classes and supervise dissertations and theses. So really they need to either publish scholarly articles/books/etc and/or do research that gets funding from somewhere to keep their jobs. Some of it is surely luck - there's a lot of people and few positions. But they definitely have to do publishable work to keep their jobs

 
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Old 12-01-2016, 06:26 PM   #114
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Is a Liberal Arts degree really as junk as everyone says because I'm getting one anyway just wondering how fucked I am
let's put it this way - it's extremely hard to find [good paying] work, even with a practically useful degree. With a M.S. in chemistry, I have worked for a moving company for the better part of a year, completed one month out of a six month contract as an analytical chemist before being cut a day before my health benefits would have kicked in, and am currently a driver helper for UPS. Granted I am unwilling to relocate, which has exacerbated my problems significantly, but with a degree in something like English or sociology I can unequivocally state that I'd be doing this shit for the next decade rather than the next year or so before I get enough experience to earn a full time job in my field with benefits, rather than a temp burner job.

One thing that is the same regardless of your degree is that you'd better get used to the idea of not working in your field once you graduate. My buddy has a degree in English. Lived at his parents' for several years after. Now he does IT for a middle school.

Lastly, if you're getting a "junk" degree, you are going to be paying for it. I did community college and then a state college (~1k and $5k per semester, respectively), and was actually PAID $25k per year to do grad school. That certainly is not the case with a "junk" degree (unless you are the best of the best of the best in that field) and especially will not be the case in the US for the next 4 years. So I'm extremely lucky to have ZERO student debt and am STILL struggling post-college.

Not all of that was necessarily directed at you, just kind of dumping my experience here in word format to demonstrate, anecdotally, that college is not necessarily going to affect your upward mobility and may not even necessarily have a net positive affect on your standard of living

 
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Old 12-01-2016, 06:31 PM   #115
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For me (and for pretty much everyone who gets one of these jobs), it is mostly luck. Believe me, if I can get a job as a prof, then most people technically can. That should scare the shit out of everyone. It should also make people question the 'expert' opinions which tend to come out of large public research universities. For students, it means that you should not take school seriously at all, and should actually consider getting out unless your end goals specifically and directly require you to go to university.
Agreed. Mostly. Unless we are talking about a professorship in an empirical science in which case you need a multi-page resume filled with awards and publications and you most certainly would be considered among the world's experts in that field.

 
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Old 12-01-2016, 06:37 PM   #116
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Oh and one more thing:

ALL of the high-level clients with corporate contracts I moved with the moving company were in sales or marketing. This was with industry-leading scientific firms such as 3M, Cargill, Medtronic, Ecolab, etc. Not a single goddamned scientist. So if your aim in life is to make fuckloads of cash, get into marketing. It's particularly easy to bullshit your way into a marketing job.

 
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Old 12-01-2016, 06:54 PM   #117
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There comes a time when depression and/or anxiety gets so bad that it is very hard to do any of this basic stuff without some kind of help. Medication, intensive therapy, etc. I can't tell you you are or aren't at that point but don't get down on yourself for not doing the stuff. You're overwhelmed. You need help. Don't let some asshole doctor tell you all you need is some exercise and to eat salad. Obviously those things will help but if you had no problem doing them you wouldn't be here. Like I said, I'm not a professional yet but if I heard that someone was so anxious they can't open their email I would be working on an actual treatment plan and also referring for blood work to rule out anything funky like thyroid issues. Have they done blood work? Offered you an SSRI or benzo? Got a really good history of the problem?

I know you're in the midst of it and maybe I'm doing some projective identification on some level but I'm kinda angry no one is taking the ball and trying to help you. Not at you. You're taking some initiative, which is really a good step. Some doc telling you her 3 minute memorized speech on sleep hygiene and turning off your devices an hour before bed and have you tried warm milk and are you taking vitamins really grinds my gears

i hope you know you can talk to me anytime if you need to. i'll try not to play therapist (which i've been accused of but don't think i do much anymore).
The doctor was actually asking me if I am comfortable taking meds from day one, and seems open to a lot of treatment possibilities and wasn't telling me that I would just be all better if I slept more and ate right or anything like that. I just didn't want to get on meds right away, but then I decided to give it a try and I'm on sertraline right now. Been on it just over a week, since my visit to the doc. I'm supposed to see her again next week.

I dunno, I haven't noticed that much of a change yet. I'm guessing it's too early for the effects to be noticeable.

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my paper is about 90% done. the skeleton is done, i just need to write a conclusion and an abstract and fill in a few statistics and classical sources for stuff like my explaination of what inclusive fitness is and stuff like that. i left holes. and a bit of general editing of course. it's due monday. it's been exhausting to write it and i never want to read about game theory ever again... naw but i learned a lot about a topic i didn't know much about and i think i went beyond what the professor was expecting. 20 sources. 17 pages. needs about 3 hours cleanup work, maybe a little more. it'll be a good first third of a thesis in a couple semesters. it really ended up being more about game theory than deception which i did not expect but it took me where it took me i guess
Sounds like it was a good paper. Have you got any feedback yet?

I'm pretty swamped with stuff right now, and handed in another late paper today.

Next week I have my thesis proposal, and my thesis idea isn't even all that clear. I wanted to do some sort of experimental design that would have to do with implicit biases and policy preferences (had a bunch of different ideas, but couldn't decide on which I wanted to do), but my supervisor said it'd be hard to get the funding for an experiment. So, instead I may have to do a metastudy on experiments that already exist. That sounds boring as fuck but I already suspected that I wouldn't be able to do an experiment at the undergrad level.

Problem is, I would think that I would need to have a narrower scope and look at implicit biases in one specific issue (like how priming gender affects people's opinions on this issue or how priming race affects opinions on that issue), but my supervisor is actually saying that it should be more broad. I don't see how that will work. Like, I'm just going to write about biases and politics in general? How will I synthesize all these studies when they are all talking about different issues? It seems like I actually need a research question, because the question "how do implicit biases affect politics" is just way too broad. I dunno, I don't really trust my supervisor's instincts on this, but she's the expert.

 
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Old 12-01-2016, 06:56 PM   #118
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I don't know if I'll eve have the energy to finish this project if I'm not passionate about it. I'm kinda disillusioned with my degree and the only reason I was excited about my thesis was that I was sneaking social psychology through the backdoor of my political science project. But without getting to do an actual experiment and just doing what pretty much sounds like a literature review, I don't know how I'll maintain interest.

 
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Old 12-01-2016, 08:38 PM   #119
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With a M.S. in chemistry, I have worked for a moving company for the better part of a year, completed one month out of a six month contract as an analytical chemist before being cut a day before my health benefits would have kicked in, and am currently a driver helper for UPS.
When it comes to chemistry, isn't it becoming more and more the case that a doctorate is necessary?

It's not my field, having said that, though I'm quite exposed to it and have heard reference to the concept of people "mastering out" by not pursuing the PhD.

 
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Old 12-01-2016, 08:57 PM   #120
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So many words in this thread

 
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