#American scholarship

[mknglobal]

Cơ hội học bổng tại Mỹ rất đa dạng, từ học bổng chính phủ Fulbright đến các chương trình từ Gates Foundation. Nhưng làm sao để tăng khả năng đạt học bổng?

Tại bài viết của chúng tôi, bạn sẽ tìm thấy:

Cách xác định loại học bổng phù hợp.

Bước chuẩn bị hồ sơ, từ GPA, bài luận đến thư giới thiệu.

Những lưu ý quan trọng khi nộp hồ sơ.

[celorangeine]

God bless america

[philosophybits]

The scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar

[burglar200]

ok bye im never posting again

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Poor people pay higher time tax

Doubtless you’ve heard that “we all get the same 24 hours in the day.” Of course it’s not true: rich people and poor people experience very different demands on their time. The richer you are, the more your time is your own — not only are many systems arranged with your convenience in mind, but you also command the social power to do something about systems that abuse your time.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/10/my-time/#like-water-down-the-drain

For example: if you live in most American cities, public transit is slow, infrequent and overcrowded. Without a car, you lose hours every day to a commute spent standing on a lurching bus. And while a private car can substantially shorted that commute, people who can afford taxis or Ubers get even more time every day.

There’s a thick anthropological literature on the ways that cash-poverty translates into #TimePoverty. In David Graeber’s must-read essay “The Utopia of Rules,” he nails the way that capitalist societies generate Soviet-style bureaucracies, especially for poor people. Means-testing for benefits means that poor people spend endless hours filling in forms, waiting on hold, and lining up to see caseworkers to prove that they are among the “deserving poor” — not “mooches” who are defrauding the system:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy/

The social privilege gradient is also a time gradient: if you can afford a plane ticket, you can travel quickly across the country rather than losing days to the Greyhound or a road-trip. But if you’re even richer, you can pay for TSA Precheck and cut your airport security time from an hour to minutes. Go further up the privilege gradient and you’ll acquire airline status, shaving another hour off the check-in process.

This qualitative account of time poverty is well-developed, but it’s lacked a good, detailed quantitative counterpart, and our society often discounts qualitative work as mere anecdote and insists on having every story converted to numbers before it is taken seriously.

In “Examining inequality in the time cost of waiting,” published this month in Nature Human Behavior, public affairs researchers Steve Holt (SUNY) and Katie Vinopal (Ohio State) analyze data from the American Time Use Survey (AUTS) to produce a detailed, vibrant quantitative backstop to the qualitative narrative about time poverty:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01524-w

(The paper is paywalled, but the authors made a mostly final preprint available)

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/jbk3x/download

The AUTS “collects retrospective time diary data from a nationally representative subsample drawn from respondents to the Census Bureau’s Community Population Survey (CPS) each year.” These time-diary entries are sliced up in 15-minute chunks.

Here’s what they found: first, there are categories of basic services where high-income people avoid waiting altogether, and where low-income people experience substantial waits. A person from a low-income household “an hour more waiting for the same set of services than people from high-income household.” That’s 73 hours/year.

Some of that gap (5%) is attributable to proximity. Richer people don’t have to go as far to access the same services as poorer people. Travel itself accounts for 2% more — poorer people wait longer for buses and have otherwise worse travel options.

A larger determinant of the gap (25%) is working flexibility. Poor people work jobs where they have less freedom to take time off to receive services, so they are forced to take appointments during peak hours.

Specific categories show more stark difference. If a poor person and a wealthy person go to the doctor’s on the same day, the poor person waits 46.28m to receive care, while the wealthy person waits 28.75m. The underlying dynamic here isn’t hard to understand. Medical practices that serve rich people have more staff.

The same dynamic plays out in grocery stores: poor people wait an average of 24m waiting every time they go shopping. For rich people, it’s 15m. Poor people don’t just wait in longer lines — they also have to wait for understaffed stores to unlock the cases that basic necessities are locked behind (poor people also travel longer to get to the grocery store — and they travel by slower means).

A member of a poor household with a chronic condition that requires two clinic visits per month loses an additional five hours/year to waiting rooms when compared to a wealthy person. As the authors point out, this also translates to delayed care, missed appointments, and exacerbated health conditions. Time poverty leads to health poverty.

All of this is worse for people of color: “Low-income White and Black Americans are both more likely to wait when seeking services than their wealthier same-race peer” but “wealthier White people face an average wait time of 28 minutes while wealthier Black people face a 54 minute average wait time…wealthier Black people do not receive the same time-saving attention from service providers that wealthier non-Black people receive” (there’s a smaller gap for Latino people, and no observed gap for Asian Americans.)

The gender gap is more complicated: “Low-income women are 3 percentage points more likely than low-income men and high-income women are 6 percentage points more likely than high-income men to use common services” — it gets even worse for low-income mothers, who take on the time-burdens associated with their kids’ need to access services.

Surprisingly, men actually end up waiting longer than women to access services: “low-income men spend about 6 more minutes than low-income women waiting for service…high-income men spend about 12 more minutes waiting for services than high-income women.”

Given the important role that scheduling flexibility plays in the time gap, the authors propose that interventions like subsidized day-care and afterschool programming could help parents access services at off-peak hours. They also echo Graeber’s call for reduced paperwork burdens for receiving benefits and accessing public services.

They recommend changes to labor law to protect the right of low-waged workers to receive services during off-peak hours, in the manner of their high-earning peers (they reference research that shows that this also improves worker productivity and is thus a benefit to employers as well as workers).

Finally, they come to the obvious point: making people less cash-poor will alleviate their time-poverty. Higher minimum wages, larger earned income tax credits, investments in low-income neighborhoods and better public transit will all give poor people more time and more money with which to command better services.

This week (Feb 13–17), I’ll be in Australia, touring my book Chokepoint Capitalism with my co-author, Rebecca Giblin. We’re doing a remote event for NZ on Feb 13. Next are Melbourne (Feb 14), Sydney (Feb 15) and Canberra (Feb 16/17). More tickets just released for Sydney!

[Image ID: A waiting room, draped with cobwebs. A skeleton sits in one of the chairs. A digital display board reads 'Now serving 53332.' An ogrish, top-hatted figure standing at a podium, yanking a dollar-sign shaped lever looms into the frame from the right. He holds a clock aloft disdainfully, pinched between the thumb and fingers of one white-gloved hand.]

[ghostlyheart]

as we approach the start of a new semester i'm sending all the compassion and empathy in the world to students who struggle with procrastination and what I affectionately like to call the Shame Monster that goes along with it. it sucks to always be treading water and feeling like a fraud to yourself and others, especially when it's something you truly care about. if you're always thinking "why can everyone else be responsible and organized but not me," your brain is overgeneralizing. you're not the only person to experience being overwhelmed and stuck. and even IF everyone else balanced their life perfectly, that wouldn't make you a bad person for struggling. if you care about something but keep avoiding it and don't understand why, there is probably more going than you realize. if your physical and mental health are being neglected, then you're never going to be able to accomplish what you want to do because you don't have any gas in the tank. it took me crashing and failing last semester for me to finally admit to myself that i was suffering from some SERIOUS burnout. i had this whole plan for research i was going to do over the summer and all these opportunities i wanted to take advantage of that i couldn't do because i was neglecting to take care of myself. the worst thing my anxious brain told me could ever happen did happen and i'm still alive. i hope that doesn't happen to you, but know you can recover and come back better. also: it's okay to stop wanting what you thought you wanted, or to take a different path than the one you were "supposed" to. don't do things because you think other people expect you to, or because you think it's too late to change your mind. that isn't sustainable. your college experience is for YOU, not for other people. you can do this!

[bionic-vapour-boy]

as much as i love participating in FIRST and FRC i can't help but feel so dissapointed at how,,, usamerican it is. like its this super cool competition marketed as this "wow were giving kids steam tools to become the better versions of themselves!!" but then you look a little into it and theyre sponsored by the cia and the us department of defense and boeing and bae systems and so on, litteral groups who profit from mass death and you start to see it isnt really for making future scientists who will fix the world or something its just to make more american military complex workers. why waste your precious engineering skills doing something useless like helping others when you can help us make bigger and worse bombs! but #womeninstem so its okay guys

[milkbreadtoast]

(random) ngl before i started learning korean i felt like the worst failure of a korean but now i feel like the best failure of a korean (/j) HAHA

like im struggling to speak but least im speaking..!! I feel like I've restored an essential piece of myself that was missing...

[apollos-olives]

theres a race section on american transcripts????

for my education transcript personally, as far as i know, yes :(

[daincrediblegg]

my talents are wasted on being a student I should be doing video essays

[mearpsdyke]

i've been studying for 8 hours for a month-ish and i think i know why so many scholars are insane

[celorangeine]

Christy and dawgs 😛

[finn-m-corvex]

The FAFSA has been delayed to the 31st of December and I think it might be quicker to overcome my misery by just bursting into flames.

And the due date hasn't been extended by the colleges so guess whose spending his birthday doing tax forms and hoping to God the IRS doesn't incarcerate me.

[bidisaster-peanut-romano]

BESTIES. i need someone's opinion

basically lola's name has aalways made me wonder bc. it's really not a really american name as far as i know, but it isn't really... a fully italian one. but, her last name is unequivocally italian, and i don't mean it like "i've looked up the diffusion of it in the world" but like, one of the most ancient and imprtant pizza places of naples is called lombardi's.

now, one option we might consider is that her parents chose the name simply because they liked the sound of it, and. fair. i mean, i like to give reasons to everything but it might be the case.

another possibility is that she's got some hispanic heritage to her, and it does work. but, especially since i'm just an european white person, and it would bring her i fear a bit too close to the latin/a seductres/s stereotype, which i really think it would be not great (also considering she's still a high school student). so. might be, but idk

a third option i was considering takes upon what i was saying, that being- lola isn't really a fully italian names, but it can be used as a shortening for a number of names + as my brother made me notice, there are instances of characters in verist novellas (namely one by verga i cannot for my life remember the name of) of characters that are called lola

so the hypothesis i was getting to is that her full name might be eleonora but like, she prefers being called lola for short. now i really like that idea smh, and the pros are: a.all the factors i mentioned before, b.i like it, c.there are people named eleonora that are sometimes shortened into lola, so it makes sense in that way

but there are cons too, such as that really everyone calls her lola. now if that was just the students it would work, but i can think of galloway too calling her lola. but also, galloway changes from jimmy to james basing on the moment, so. idk idk idk

[africanamericanreports]

The Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF) and NIKE are proud to offer financial assistance to outstanding students attending Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Ninety-five (95) scholars will be selected to receive a scholarship of up to $10,000 for the 2024-2025 academic school year (which can only be applied to verifiable costs associated with average tuition and usual fees).

[mr-independent]

you know, its not brought up in fics often but ted is extremely well read. he doesnt brag about it, but hes read everything from f scott fitzgerald's b sides to ayn rand's doorstoppers to the sixteen book Ender series, etc etc etc. Ted reads about as much as we see Beard reading (which. in my head is a trait that was passed on, a new focus to sharpen the mind and keep him out of trouble and his mind off drugs, something Ted offered up as a coping mechanism for when his own dad died, a way to have fun and adventure and escape without ending up in jail like Ted himself had a handful of times before, scaring the bejeezus out of his ma.)

this turned into a mini fic and i lost my train of thought but point is, Ted reads So Much and more people need to pick up on this in fics please and thank you.