Penny Arcade gets all poignant.
And this is why I am a liberal Democrat, via cnn.
Little professor discusses how to increase your popularity with students with one simple step.
Dame eleanor hull provides grading poetry.
I want this book. Someone send it to me for Christmas!
Speaking of which, I took this website from the comments.
Heehee, a full cup with a lid.
Should you apply to grad school? TBurke says no (he’s wrong about law though).
Cornell is [doing loser stuff with respect to their mental health services for students], from a ianqui.
Caffeine altar from offbeat home.
We are respectable negroes talks zombies.
Two photos I totally stole from Wandering scientist’s twitter feed.
We were in this week’s carnival of personal finance.
December 8, 2012 at 11:03 am
Hey, I didn’t say that all of Cornell is lame! Just their policy about students asking for special treatment is lame.
December 8, 2012 at 11:31 am
No, WE said Cornell is lame.
December 8, 2012 at 11:58 am
Though we understand they make excellent ice cream. But other than that…
December 8, 2012 at 6:03 pm
Not to be a jackhat, using the word “lame” in a link to a post about disability accommodations feels… weird.
December 8, 2012 at 6:07 pm
oops, totally did not notice that
hm…
December 8, 2012 at 6:08 pm
ok, fixed
December 9, 2012 at 6:10 am
The law school comment in the “should I go to grad school” post is only partially correct. Even in the context of current softness of the legal labor market, it is perfectly reasonable to go to a top tier law school. The issue is that law degrees from second and third tier law schools are no longer a route to decent employment, and they are way overpriced.
December 9, 2012 at 6:15 am
Yes. But the idea that law school is a no-brainer is incorrect.
ALSO, I know a ton of people who went to top tier law schools and were miserable as lawyers but were trapped in high powered corporate firms because of their loans. (Or they had babies and dropped out and were miserable.) From what I can tell, big firms are nothing like Ally McBeal– no bar in the basement, for example.
December 9, 2012 at 9:38 am
Yeah, well the misery aspect is a different one. But a top-tier law-school is as much a no-brainer from a purely economic perspective as any other professional or graduate school training.
And yes, there are no bars in the basements of big law firms. Was there really one in the Ally McBeal teevee show? (I never watched it.)
December 9, 2012 at 9:44 am
It isn’t a no-brainer economically if you quit your job before you finish paying off your loans!
December 9, 2012 at 10:04 am
Of course, but that has nothing to do specifically with going to law school versus medical school versus business school versus graduate school. I’m sure there are plenty of people who end up hating their jobbes no matter what they are, and who would suffer adverse economic consequences if they quit.
Anyway, the point is that going to a second- or third-tier law school right now is a really bad idea economically, regardless of whether you would ultimately enjoy the profession of law. If you end up enjoying the profession of law, going to a top-tier law school can be a very good decision, both personally and economically.
December 9, 2012 at 10:11 am
If you put in the probability that you end up needing/wanting to quit, it is more difficult to recover from the huge law school bills than from many other professions (because the price tag is so high), and once you’re off that first corporate job, it’s more difficult to recover salary-wise than in many other professions. Also you should not pay to get a PhD (at least not anything other than the lost wages from not working those years)– if you do you could be in bad financial straits after. A big problem with those corporate law firms, from what I understand, is that many are enormously sexist, so even women who like the law may end up quitting, and once you quit the big corporate firm the salary expectations plummet. (Again, this is from what people tell me… I have no personal experience.)
So just enjoying the law profession doesn’t make it a no-brainer economically either, even from a top school. You can also get hit with bad luck and a cruddy working environment if you want one of those high salaries to pay off your debts.
December 9, 2012 at 10:29 am
While there are definitely still substantial structural problems, the big corporate law firms are doing a much better jobbe now with gender equality in the workplace.
December 9, 2012 at 10:32 am
I find that really hard to believe, given the women I talk to. Do you have statistics? I could believe they’re at 50% hiring (though law schools are graduating more than 50% women…), but I bet that pipeline is still shrinking fast at the big corporate firms. (Just like it was the last time I read a study on it, several years back.)
December 9, 2012 at 10:46 am
http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1341144178069&slreturn=20121109124344
Like I said, there are still substantial structural problems, but it is a lot better today than it was a few decades ago.
December 9, 2012 at 10:50 am
People I know having problems in big law firms weren’t even born a few decades ago! Saying we’re better about gender than we were the 1970s and 1980s isn’t saying much, and doesn’t mean that getting a law degree and a corporate job is a slam dunk financially, because you still may have to quit because your bosses are jerks, and you can’t just get another big corporate job that easily.
Not to discourage women, because obviously we need trail-blazers, but it’s definitely not a no-brainer to go to law school, even a top law school, unless someone else is paying for the bulk of it.
December 9, 2012 at 10:52 am
Um… those data show that in all but one top firm, the % of women partners is small! Given that women have made up more than 50% of law school graduates for quite some time, you’d at least expect numbers greater than 20%!
December 9, 2012 at 9:52 am
Graduate school is not about learning. If you learn things, it’s only because you’ve already internalized the habit of learning, only because you make the effort on your own and in concert with fellow graduate students. You learn because that’s what you do now, that’s your life. Don’t go into it expecting to extend the kinds of heathily collaborative relationships you�ve had to date with your teachers and don’t go into it expecting to extend the kinds of educational nurturing you�ve had to date. Graduate school is not education. It is socialization. It is about learning to behave, about mastering a rhetorical and discursive etiquette as mind-blowingly arcane as table manners at a state dinner in 19th Century Western Europe. Graduate school is cotillion for eggheads.
While this may be true for the humanities and social sciences, it is not even close to correct for the natural sciences. The whole point of graduate school in the natural sciences is for each student to establish collaborative relationships with her thesis mentor and, frequently, other scientists in the same lab or others, with the goal of these relationships to produce new understanding of the natural world.
December 10, 2012 at 8:20 am
It’s definitely about socialization, but I agree with you that it can also be about collaboration. I’m about to get tenure *knock on wood*, and I still collaborate with my graduate advisor and, to a greater extent, with fellow lab members from grad school. I love having these collaborators and friends. But then again, my advisor was exceptionally awesome.
December 9, 2012 at 10:27 am
If you are in the mood to be disgusted by humanity, go read the comments on the Wall Street Journal article cited by Ianqui.
December 13, 2012 at 6:45 am
Thank you for the link!