Post Punk Kitchen Forum

What's the point of School without the hoops to jump through! Otherwise, they would just have to give us the degree.
Personally, I have a love/hate relationship with parenthetical references.

Thanks, Desdemona!
Talked it over with my BF last night, and he says I simply have to apply.
Soooo... I'm going to update my CV today (thank goodness not much has happened since the last letter of application I sent) and get everything else together and email it in one huge pdf and add that I'm sending the hardcopy via mail. This way I should be able to make the deadline.

Ooooh, this is so exciting!

Aaaargh. Lay waake for hours in the middle of the night, just because my mind wouldn't shut up about the application and everything.
Finally got up and spent some hours reading Forteana. Went back to sleep some time after six.
When I was halfway awake I wrote an application for a small one-time scholarly stipend, and now I feel ready to go back to bed. But food!

It is exciting - (try to) stay calm and keep us updated!

I'm still alive - just super busy with moving preparations and stuff!
Just stopping by to say that I've got a job interview!!
Everything is super stressful ATM, and I've got no idea how to make this work, but whoo!
I'll keep you posted.

Is anyone else looking to apply for academic jobs this cycle? It's crazy trying to keep on top of things while writing my dissertation. Plus finding something that's a perfect match seems impossible. Good enough will have to do. Not to mention having to figure out what the heck I want to research for the next 5 or so years and I guess having to make up sample syllabi since my school rarely if ever lets gradstudents teach their own courses.

I'm finishing up my master's project revisions today and handing it in tomorrow! I really hope this is the last round of revisions. If so, I will get my graduation paperwork signed and I'll be all set to have my MS in October! The last thing I need to do is study for the registered dietitian licensing exam. Once I pass that I will be IJDI, MS RD. I'm pretty excited about that, but now I have to find a job! It seems like 90% of all RD job postings are for working in a hospital, which is the one thing I know I don't want to do.

I'm going on vacation before I start really looking for a job because I figure this will be my last chance for a real vacay for a while. Lets hope I find a job pretty quickly so I can star paying off these Columbia loans.

You are so fancy with all your titles! Congrats! and good luck with the job hunt!

Thanks, you too! I'm so impressed with people who stick it out to get a phd!

I just got my first grad school bill. In three weeks I'll be in another country working on my Masters degree. I'm slightly terrified.

Congrats IJDI!
Finnophile where are you going to be studying?

Horay, ijustdiedinside!

I've been getting way too little done recently. I can't tell if it is laziness or a near complete lack of direction on my project. Probably both. Being distracted by apartment hunting probably didn't help.

I'll be studying Political Science.

I'm entering the second year of my PhD, which includes one more semester of coursework (Victorian novels and Jacobean drama: nothing but fun!), my first language exam (French), a 1/1 teaching schedule of first-year writing, and - GULP - my comprehensive exams in May. So of course I'm drinking tea and thinking about what to do with a hugeass spaghetti squash and all that zucchini from the farmer's market. You may address me as Cleopatra, Queen of Denial!

My supervisors just finished reading a ms. I'm preparing for publication. The first says: I’m not used to having a colon inside a parenthetical phrase set off by commas, followed by an m-dash… The second says: You're not allowed to have sentences 7 lines long.

....That means I'm winning at academic prose. Right?

Well, obviously! And if you're in any doubt, there's always this handy resource!

http://writing-program.uchicago.edu/toys/randomsentence/index.htm

Dear academics,

When discussing sound changes in the history of English, please refrain from the following:

• Avoid the creation of your own system of marking pronunciation, when there is a fit-for-purpose, widespread, internationally recognised system already in use. Especially when the characters of your system have to be added as gifs in a PDF that appear three times larger than the surrounding text.
• When stating something unprovable, where multiple theories exist, and it makes no difference at all, use expressions like "something like x" or "either x or y, which then developed into z", rather than stating something as fact without discussion as to why you believe that you are right and other academics are wrong.
• If you include a place, please also include a time period, and vice versa. "It began in Northumbria" is not as helpful as "It began in Northumbria in the eighth century".
• If you say "this was not universal" when you mean "this did not happen in the North of England", please consider rephrasing your sentence to indicate what you actually mean. Likewise, saying "some dialects" is not as helpful as "some dialects, including x, y and z.

Yours gratefully,

Gulliver, Master Linguist in Training.

I like linguistics. I'm a cognitive scientist who began as a linguist. Historical linguistics (at UCSC) was one of my favorite classes.

I will be starting the second year of my program next week and I'm desperately trying to get my master's thesis completed before I start seeing too many clients at a time. It was definitely supposed to be done this summer, but there have been a number of technical difficulties with our stats software and licensing and all that fun stuff, so now I feel like I'm scrambling. What a fun way to start the year, right??

You can do it, superherogirl! That's crazy that you're writing your thesis after only one year! I did mine at the end of my third year, but it would have been a lot better if I had done it earlier. You'll be great!

Speaking of which, I just found out that my advisor turned in my graduation application, which means she approved the final draft of my master's project, so I am like OFFICIALLY DONE! OMG!

Today I was ecstatic when I realized I only have 75 pages more to read by 9 am and I somehow managed to read ahead in one class! It was like winning the lottery!

I start teaching a week from today; guess I should finish that syllabus, huh? This will ALSO be my last semester of coursework before exams and (gulp) dissertation, but for now it's fourteen weeks of Jacobean drama and Victorian novels - nothin' but fun!!!

I'm on word 3622 of my "2.500 to 3000 word essay" and there's not really anything I can do without. It's not my fault they set the word count too low. The assignment description does say "there's no wrong way to do this exercise", and I'm going to prove them that they are wrong and my way is the only right way and everyone else can only gaze in admiration. Fo realz.

I have a habit of analysing things way too much in my papers, or at least more than I'm expected to. I once got over 100% for an exercise in a formal assignment because I was awarded extra points for being so thorough. And by "thorough", I mean "awesome".

But 600 words is quite a lot over, and I'm not even finished...

It sounds like you've over-written in a credible way, so I'm not sure what to advise. Normally, when I have so many assignments to grade, I get really annoyed when students write over the limit (because they usually haven't figured out how to write concisely, or how to present argumentation properly; but if you've gotten over 100% before, you've probably got both of those covered). At the same time .... words can always be cut, and I think it's fun to try to make yourself (myself) as concise but readable as possible. I treat it like a Choose Your Own Adventure challenge.

Been there. But even if you really feel that you need all the space to make your points, there are still ways you can tighten it up. Go back and take out the adverbs, then start on the prepositional phrases, and make sure you're using an active rather than a passive voice (an approach that tends to be less verbose). Something I am continually working on is finding the right word(s), rather than just unlatching my entire word-hoard and bludgeoning the reader with verbiage (see what I did there?). Good luck!