a wolf angel is not a good angel

I have a post about what blogs are about, but first: it appears that we have a response to the discussion of Becky & academia. Since HNN requires real names, I’m not going to be responding there.

I’m not clear about how she was instalanched, and I’m not so sure it matters. (Though if her fiance sent it without informing her, she can’t really be said to have caused it.)

Why call his attention to your blog if you don’t want the attention? And, what’s more, why put your personal issues on the net, if you’re unwilling for them to be discussed? Or, must the discussion only include approval of your position? I don’t know whether the problem is because Becky is white or female or wealthy or bi-polar or what, but she’s no more a conservative and no more an intellectual than George Bush is a conservative or an intellectual. Maybe she should buy a baseball team.

Approving or disapproving of her position isn’t the point. Many comments disapproved of her position (I tend to disagree with her, and indeed agree that she’s expecting far too much), but they based it on what the blog is about, and not what it isn’t about.

I was responding to this:

The Valkyrie of Discarded Thought was dropped from Cliopatria’s History Blogroll for some of the good reasons Becky shouldn’t pursue a doctorate in history. Run back through her blog’s archives since 1 January 2004. There’s simply no evidence of a passionate love of history. There’s no evidence of a curious mind. If Becky had those things, she might blog something like Caleb McDaniel’s Notes Toward a Philosophy of Teaching at Mode for Caleb. Becky’s Valkyrie has plenty of evidence of a superficial self-preoccupation that has no business being in graduate school.

Now, clearly this wasn’t an academic blog in the strictest sense (it was a blog by someone in academia, and about experiences in academia), so not having it linked from a non-personal blog makes sense. However.

My argument was that given her blog was not an academic blog but a personal one, her lack of posting about history should not be read as dislike of history; equally, interest in superficial things — and, horrors, a personal blog that’s self-involved — doesn’t mean one has nothing else going on and is only interested in superficial concerns. You just can’t judge someone’s *academic* ability based on a *personal* blog. You can judge a lot of other things, but “doesn’t deserve the spot in grad school”? No.

Via Claire, a discussion on Cliopatria about a grad student who’s decided to leave with a masters.

Now, I’ve only skimmed two of her archives, and it’s true she talks little about her love of the program, but it’s a *blog*. Sheesh, if you assumed that my blog was all of me, you’d assume I’m a whiny depressive bitch who likes cats. Now, this happens to be true, but also reductive. No one puts everything out, and people tend to rant more than rave about how wonderful things are.

I have other comments — it’s true that profs help some out more than others, which ends up being a self-fulfilling cycle, it’s obnoxious for someone to tell you that taking a walk will help if you have bipolar — it’s also obnoxious to think that just because you have mental health issues you get the nicest office and that the department should pay for a light box. (In ARIZONA? You don’t even know what shorter colder days are.)

All this is irrelevant because the little bit I skimmed bored me, so I decided to stop and talk about myself. (Whiny depressive self-involved bitch)

By the end, certainly, I wasn’t talking about my love of linguistics; I talk about it rarely now, too. And I talk about myself a lot, and about silly superficial things. I am a human being, so I do not always just think Really Deep Thoughts and blog about them. Sometimes I think them, sometimes I blog about them, but often I don’t, or I talk about a silly quiz or my cats. Maybe this means I should write tests for vets.

I wonder what this says about how I came off, especially as I was making the same decision to leave. If I complained about something on my blog, does that mean I didn’t complain about it with people there? Not particularly, it just means that I talk about the same things a lot.

Maybe Becky isn’t intellectually curious. But it’s unfair to decide this based on her blog. Is every student who fails to create a study-related blog not intellectually curious? I doubt it. (I can’t say anything about her collegiality because I didn’t see her posts complaining about things at her school. I think it is probably fairly idiotic to do so if you name yourself, your school, and your department, though.)

This is hard to write, because I’m not sure how to word this. It is indeed true that there are people in graduate school who shouldn’t be there — who aren’t curious, who aren’t collegial, whatever. It is also true that some people who leave do belong in graduate school (in that sense). It’s just as well that many people who leave do, but not because they are superficial dullards. And it’s true, too, that even good academics — or intellectuals, to be more general — can be superficial and blog about things like sex and boots and designer shoes and photos of their pets.

I got friendly with an undergraduate my first year in grad school. She was working on the same language family, so I could help her some, because no one in the department had background there. And I liked her, too, so we talked some. She graduated, started working; we lost touch.

Today I get an email from her: she wants to go to grad school. Her questions are in two parts. One is easy (easy enough, anyways): what grad schools are good for computational linguistics? The second: what do I think of this idea? And . . . I don’t know how to answer that one. I don’t intend to lie — she deserves much better — but I also don’t want to focus quite so much on the bad of it. She thinks of getting an MA first, which I think is a stellar idea, as long as she doesn’t need to pay for it. I guess I don’t want to come off too bitter, or too unfairly. But I want her to be entirely sure she has a really good idea of what she’s in for. Sigh.

But I am glad to have heard from her.

My turn to get into the “what should faculty expect of students?” question, but only limited parts of it (I agree with much else of the discussion, both sides).

Some of the comments at Dr. Crazy’s post are a bit touchier (mine especially) — because, I think, the conversation’s been going on a while — and those are what I’m looking at.

Teachers at that point are there to facilitate the student’s own research and that’s not the same thing. It’s also important to remember that most grad students (2/3 in English, I believe) do not finish their programs, and so professors are not going to go down with the sinking ship and bust their asses to coddle somebody who will probably drop out anyway.

Now, I accept that there are always a few students who just aren’t very good. But 2/3? If you think that you’re that wrong in who you’re accepting, then you’re doing something VERY wrong. (A lot of what I’m thinking here has been said already — and better — by Dorothea.) A sink or swim response to graduate students puts all responsibility on the individual students and none on faculty or the entire institution. I call bullshit.

It’s a chicken and egg question. Some would say that those who finish are up to it and those who don’t aren’t. Others would say that the sort of description I gave is to blame. I honestly don’t know. I do know that it’s not like the world is a different place (if one stays in the academy) when grad school is done, so maybe the attrition rate is a good thing if those people aren’t going to be happy living this particular kind of life? Again, just thinking about these things.

Since I know a number of professors who weren’t happy in graduate school but are perfectly happy as professors (and good ones), I don’t think “well, good on you for getting out early before you get stuck in academia” is accurate, either. There is responsibility for graduate students, but there’s more responsibility for faculty and administration here. “I suffered and came out well in the end” is nice, but why make people suffer if it’s unnecessary?

The attrition rate isn’t a good thing (though I guess without it the job market would be even worse) — especially since it’s not all in the first year or two. I just can’t see how anyone can think it’s a-ok for every other student that you admitted to somehow have their own individual problems which have nothing at all to do with systemic problems.

My computer decided it was not fond of this post, apparently. I was, but that’s too bad: I need to rewrite the whole thing. Oh yay.

I strongly suspect I’ve already decided what to do. I suspect this based on the happiness I felt when someone suggested I should leave now, based on the resignation I felt when my family suggested I stay.

That said, I’m going to think it to death anyhow.

If I stay, I would have the lovely feeling that I can actually finish something I start. I left my first degree program in what was supposed to have been my last semester (in reality, I would have taken one more). I left my PhD program without a PhD. I’ve dropped hobbies and plans and all sorts of things. Follow-through is totally not my forte.

You could argue — and argue well & correctly — that it was right for me to have left these programs, and that indeed the biggest mistake was not to have left them earlier. (Well, perhaps not with the PhD, because it is good I have an MA. But it was good to have left it when I did. Look! I am alive. It is good!)

But do I know yet that it’s right? I’m frustrated with the first few weeks, and I’m not ecstatic about being in school (again). Doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t do this. It would be good for me to be a better programmer; it would be even better for me to learn machine learning & NLP techniques. I would be more employable.

And yet — when I’m this uninspired, I stop showing up (check); I don’t do the work well (check). What would be the point? Why waste time and money? I *can* learn how to program on my own — it’s not the ideal way for me, but I can do it. And I could go visit my friend in Prague (and visit other nice places nearby, while I’m there, why not? I’d love to see Vienna . . . ).

Oh well. I will sleep on it again. I’ve put energy and work and all into this (not particularly much money, though, yet). I don’t want to drop it all. On the other hand, that idea of sunk costs still works. No point throwing good time after bad. But shouldn’t I just suck it up, deal with the frustration, take what I can, and come out better on the other side?

See, I can’t tell if that last line is speaking from intelligence or bloody-mindedness. That’s where my problem lies.

I must seriously consider whether or not I want to continue in this program. I feel intensely frustrated, and I don’t see what I’m gaining. Do I care how computers deal with floating point arithmetic? No.

I have until September 30 to withdraw without (financial) penalty. And I can’t decide what’s in my better interests. Yes, it would be good to be better at programming. But in the end, can I manage to suffer through this long enough to get good at it, when — especially when — it’s not something I particularly enjoy? I don’t mind it, but it’s not really what I want to be doing. And right now I feel like I’m totally wasting my time in these classes. Argh. Ugh.

Time to have real serious discussions with people, I guess. Cause I don’t want to be fucking around anymore.

I am feeling disenchanted with this program. Learning to change bases and write a program that can add, subtract, multiply and divide fractions (simplified, but still) is not something I need to be doing. I do feel that this will help me in the long run — at least, I hope it will; at least, it should — but right now I’m wondering what I am doing. (No, I know what I’m doing: skipping class and avoiding my job, though I get to set my own hours on that, at least. Still, it is not good.)

I have a bit longer and I can still drop it without cost. I just don’t know if I should or not. If we get to a point where I can program competently, and where I’ve learned some useful stuff about NLP and possibly machine learning . . . if. It’s not impossible; other NLP dudes are teaching NLPish courses in the winter. I’m just a bit disappointed and a lot unmotivated.

Possibly I expected something else. Better organised, faster moving classes, more cohesive a group, I don’t know. Something more practical, perhaps? Something where I felt I was gaining skills that will eventually be useful. (SRH: I *can* convert without going through other bases, but it requires me to do base-7 or whatever arithmetic. There are a few pages up about how to do it, but they all tend to say the same thing.)

I know things aren’t particularly hard for me right now, but at the same time, they’re not easy, and I would like, just once, for things to be easy.

Last night at dinner, my cousin (well, my mother’s first cousin, my second cousin, but she’s very close to my grandmother), who is a professor in art history (or something — she’s actually got an MA, not a PhD, but she teaches and curates and goes off to Venice lots, having cleverly designed her research specialty as “Canadians painting in Venice”) started talking about how her students tried to get out of exams, or handing papers in late.

Her most original excuse was that a student couldn’t take an exam because she had to have an abortion that day; her worst liar was the student who forgot that his grandmother also had died a year ago, for a different one of her courses. But the best was a colleague of hers (a grad student, 2nd year of teaching), who for the first time ever got “my grandmother died” excuses (6 of them) and not only accepted the excuse but sent condolence notes to the students.

With luck, my schedule should be changed for me (yes, for me: of course you wouldn’t expect a COMPUTER SCIENCE department to have web registration). Actually, even web registration wouldn’t've helped.

First, there’s a course “AI” which is allowed. Okay. The program website says I can take a course called AI. I check: it’s offered this semester. I show up; I ask the prof if he’d mind if I took the course, would I have the background. Yes, no problem. I decide, after looking at the machine course, that I’ll just stick with this one. So I don’t go yesterday. Today I ask the secretary to change courses. She looks up the AI course number on the sheet. Not offered this semester.

Sure it is, I say, in poor French. I was there.

Eventually we figure out that it’s a course with a different course number and, indeed, a different course *title*, because the program website has the wrong title for the course I’m really allowed to take. (The course numbers are different, but really, who looks at course numbers on a site that’s clearly dated? Half the schools I know change course numbers every year or two anyhow. Yes really.)

So the secretary — who, continuing in the tradition, is very nice and helpful — says she’s not allowed to make the change. Fair enough. She phones the professor in charge of the programme, who isn’t there. I leave her the paper and say I’ll try to catch him, so she can change it once he gets in touch with her.

He’s not in his office. I forget entirely what he looks like, so forget the lab. I email him (in even worse French: I am so too lazy to use accents). No response. No response. Okay, it’s lunch, but argh. Finally I phone my mother to complain and when I go back, miracles! he is is in his office. I stop in and ask him.

*He* doesn’t care, but the professor in charge of the course said absolutely no one from my programme in his class. Funny, he told me I was allowed to take it. (Possibly because I have an MA in linguistics and have worked on two separate databases, the PennTreebank and a proprietary one based on WordNet. And n-grams are not that tricky.)

I’m sure this was made so he didn’t have hordes of unprepared people in the class.

So we need to okay my taking this class with him. Then we can okay it to the secretary. Then, at a glacial pace, eventually, I might get to take the course. So far the professor seems to have said (again, officially) I can take the class. Now it just needs to percolate through. Hopefully this all gets done before the add-drop period ends. I don’t know when that period is, though, because I can’t do any add-dropping.

I’m sure there are places that are more poorly organised, but this makes registration at my Cegep, where the course numbers were all put on sheets of 8.5×11 paper on some bulletin boards, and when they were full (or full for that morning or afternoon, anyhow: the registration rules were Byzantine, you were given a date and time to register based on your programme, and the good courses obviously filled up quickly, but they reserved certain slots of certain classes for people who were forced to register in the last week or at 4:30 on some day, only I think they did this randomly, or maybe they were just all on hallucinogens) that particular sheet of paper would be covered with red acetate, look well-organised.

Registration there was quite something. Because I was in a pseudo honours programme, we got to register before any of the other pre-university programs. The vocational programmes took very few of the same courses as the pre-university ones (English (4), French (2), philosophy (3), gym (3), 2 options), so they only took the cool weekend gym classes, and even those were rare. So mostly I got all of my first or second choices. I also was careful to get there first in my group: 40 people who have the same free time slots means 40 people who are looking for the same classes. It was remarkably organised chaos. They had advisors (who I always skipped, because it meant waiting way too long), and I’d have my schedules in order of preference and hand the computer people who inputted the courses the first one that looked free (sometimes the people hanging the red acetate were a little behind). Sometimes if you waited a course would magically free up, but you could only register for all your classes at once, so this was not a good idea, because all of your other courses would certainly be full.

This is like that, but more opaque.

Not that I’m famous, exactly. Or that I’m famous inexactly.

A discussion at kmsqrd about the costs things have makes me (more) introspective.

When I was a little girl, we would take a family vacation every summer. Once while we were preparing to tour a building, probably some dead presidents home, I asked Dad, “Why are you giving him money?” “That’s the price of admission,” he replied in a straightforward manner. Like most things my father said, I didn’t think much of it at the time, but later I came to understand the importance of the price of admission.

We pay to do all kinds of things in our lives. Some of what we pay for we can easily see like movie tickets, concert tickets, parking tickets and the like. However, much of the time the price of something cannot be seen, I didn’t expect college to cost me confidence, or my job sucking my brain dry, or losing laughter to suppress anger. When was the last time you took account of the price you’ve paid to be where you are in your life today?

It depends which prices, for which things. It’s clear, I think, that I have thought extensively about what some things have cost me. It may be less clear that I avoid thinking about some of the costs of those things. There are other things, with other costs, that I no longer think about regularly.

I’m going to talk very specifically about costs of school, things that this degree has cost. This time, at least.

The most surprising cost, I think, was the cost of some of my friendships. Sometimes primarily because of me, sometimes primarily because of the other person. Sometimes because things just worked out badly for a while. Some are repairing, and will get back to friendship; perhaps not as close, at first. Some seem to be doomed, mostly the ones I feel aren’t my fault, because I get tired of making all the efforts, and just stop.

It has shocked me that this happened. Perhaps it shouldn’t have.

There was some cost to confidence, of course, but not so much; most of it had been long gone anyhow. I wasn’t worried I could do research, so much, and if I now feel I couldn’t sustain a dissertation, well, it only means I’ll probably also never write a novel. I am not sure if I have enough distance to see these effects, yet, because I have a nagging feeling there’s much more here, new from the past few years.

I lost two years to unhappiness, but I lost many more than that in high school and for a while beyond. It was of a different stripe, this one, somehow. Worse, better. I don’t know what to say for it.

I lost two years of seeing my grandparents. Despite my frustrations with them, they are my grandparents and I love them. Before I left, we had Friday night dinners weekly. Now, not so weekly. My grandfather’s older brother has Alzheimer’s, and his older sister is having trouble with her memory, though it might just be age. My grandmother’s family all — except her — died young. I do not think anything is imminent, but I can see that time is at a premium. I lost two years of my parents, my sisters, my cousins, too. I learned how important my family is to me (and also how rare that makes me: oh well).

I lost many illusions. (Graduate school as meritocracy is one, something I keep intending to talk about but suspect I never will, so now I have mentioned it.)

I learned a lot, too. I have said I don’t regret having gone, and I don’t. In part this is because I got the hell out quite quickly. In part it is because I have been lucky with things: I have found jobs that are reasonable and that will end up in my doing something I enjoy in a city I want to live in for a decent salary. The second, especially that, and the third are things I didn’t think were quite as important before. I learned a lot about myself.

It’s good to take stock of some of these things, and to determine what I am willing to do to change some of them, and what I have gained and what I have lost, to look at where I have been and see what that means for where I am going.

But it’s really not very fun.