#Alex’s adventures in academia

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The professor I’m teaching with this quarter is VERY pro-AI and spent probably a half hour talking about how much she loved it. Sounded like she was sponsored. This Political Analysis Seminar is Brought to You by Microsoft Copilot.

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Sometimes academia sucks. And sometimes it means you’re grading a paper and you realize you are going to have to report a student for plagiarizing the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. Which also sucks, but is also kinda funny.

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Anyone who buys into that bs conservative narrative that universities are hotbeds of radical leftism should have to do my job, which right now is grading for the Intro to Law class I’m teaching. Filled to the brim with students who have the most inane centrist-ass takes.

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It’s hating my advisor hours

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Just got back from an event in my department and one of the first year phd students told me she used chatgpt to analyze how to improve a paper she’s working on. It’s advice was insane and not grounded in our field of study but she’s so so so sure chatgpt couldn’t have gotten it wrong and then got really pissy when I told her it was not helpful advice.

This is a paper she needs her advisor needs to sign off on to remain in good standing in our program. Her advisor gave her different feedback, and instead of doing that, she’s doing what chatgpt said to do.

Anyway I think student’s inability to think critically about AI is going to have disastrous effects on higher education.

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You may think the hardest part about a phd is the coursework, or the research, or the teaching. But it’s actually all the fucking paperwork.

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Listen academia is mostly bullshit and being an academic can really suck but sometimes you can also get funding from campus research centers that will give you money to travel to your fave cities to do ‘research’ at.

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sorry advisor I simply can’t meet about my dissertation today. Yeah I have to post like 30 tumblr textposts in a row about the new ep of a niche horror podcast. Yeah they’re really doing numbers. Getting like, at least 5 notes each. Sorry. (Can we meet next Thursday? Surely this will not happen again.)

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My office at the university doesn’t have a window. Call that dark academia.

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“I can’t wait until the day I become the grad students’ favorite strange and enigmatic professor” - an actual thing I said to a group of grad students today.

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I have to say, as a political scientist, the way this election is just a perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with the American political and legal system would be really fascinating if it wasn’t also so horrifying.

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This episode has proven one thing for me- I NEED more statements in the form of academic work. Episode reading out a section of a dissertation, episode centered on reviewer comments for an article being rejected by a journal, episode detailing some extremely niche academic beef between rival scholars WHEN.

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If you’re ever listening to TMA and find yourself wondering ‘why is Jonathan Sims like that?’ The answer is simple: he's an academic.