#don't go to grad school! don't do it

[madseance]

Congratulations to me on getting yet another degree in a field I have no intention of working in

[essektheylyss]

just had to give a gentle nudge about research ethics on discord. with an Essek profile pic. I'm still laughing.

[froads]

[astriiformes]

My instructor for my German class copied me on a communication with my academic advisor about my attendance issues and I get it, I get that I've missed a lot of class and that instructors are frustrated by that, but I genuinely don't know what I'm supposed to do when the problem is that I've been physically unable to wake up most mornings for the last several weeks.

Like I've had similar issues before, but it's so much worse this semester (my class isn't until 10:10am, and I live a 30-40 minute train ride from campus, but that's still not that early). I specifically took this class--at this time too--because I thought it was late enough that it wouldn't be an issue, and now I'm probably going to have to end up in a meeting with her and my advisor where I bawl my eyes out about how I really am trying, and that I know it sounds like the worst excuse ever but I swear I'm not just being lazy or skipping class on purpose.

And it makes me terrified for the future, where I might have jobs where I can't set my own schedule, and especially because when your partner ended up suddenly and mysteriously sick with tired-all-the-time-to-the-point-of-being-mostly-bedbound disease, having your own fatigue issues is incredibly scary and traumatizing. We're already in such a precarious situation, we cannot afford my health going south, too.

I don't know. I'm scared and stressed about this specific scenario, but also about, like, life in general, and feeling pretty miserable.

[aguineapigcouldntdothis]

thinking of going to the extremely incompetent career center on campus bc im nearly certain theyll tell me my academic plans are too far fetched, and I know that will motivate me to actually reach my goals. when someone thinks that I can't do something then im more likely to do it bc I thrive on spite

[the-everqueen]

me [takes your face gently between my hands]: hob gadling would not be a history professor at any number of british universities because of how humanities academia works and even if he were, rose walker would not be his student or advisee.

[nero-neptune]

front/back of a bookmark i made for my program's bookmark design competition

[nobodysdaydreams]

Giving a complicated tragic childhood backstory to your favorite character is all fun and games, until you realize you need to account for how old all the other adult characters would have been at the time and realize that scenes that would work perfectly if one character was twenty three and the other was fourteen stop working when you need other characters who are played by adult actors clearly younger than they are to be in college at the same time so your story beats line up thematically.

[tazzy-zooming]

I've heard from friends who are doctors that when someone learns they're a doctor, they like to show them weird sores or rashes and ask them about it.

I think being a political scientist is similar. Except instead of a disgusting sore they show me their political opinions and want me to validate them.

[perachel-heretic]

What if I resurrected the perachel tragic romance godhood fic after abandoning it for two years???

[quatregats]

Okay so I think the goals for this summer, in light of poll result, will be Camp Nanowrimo for Hornblowerfic shooting for 30k words (unlikely to happen but we can dream—15k will be the reasonable goal and 30k the stretch) then editing in August and for Basque watching 2 episodes of Eskamak kentzen per week (which should be the whole series by the end of the summer) and adding all words I don't know to Anki, which I'll try to get into doing more often once I have my new laptop.

[measureformeasure]

me i hate academia i hate writing i hate the exploitative nature of grad schools i hate the prohibitive costs 2 minutes later after looking at grad school symposium paper topics me and the bestie

[tennessoui]

ko-fi fic uploads

hey guys, I'm going to start putting some of my new tumblr prompt fills and writing warm-ups (ficlets of 4k-6k length) up on my ko-fi!!

Monthly supporters will be able to go into the gallery tab on my ko-fi and click on an uploaded image. The title will be which tumblr-based au the ficlet fits into and how many words it is. The description beneath the image will be a quick summary of the au and a link to the google doc containing the ficlet. The "root" au post, aka the post that started the au on my blog, will be linked as well on that google doc.

This will not affect my wips and progress on them in any way! I feel like that's very important to state - I write these sorts of ficlets all the time because it helps get me in the writing mindset for writing ao3 fics. I will just be spending a little extra effort on them to put them up on ko-fi.

I will NOT be posting any ficlets on my ko-fi that you need to read to understand a fic on ao3 - that's some disney monster conglomerate kind of shit. I will also still be posting shorter ficlets (1k-3k) on tumblr as I write them, especially if I'm answering a prompt someone sent me here. Again, I think it'd be a bit of dick move to not do that

I'll try to vary which ficlets go up on ko-fi and every time I upload one, I'll make a post about which au it is as well as a link to the page in case anyone wants to, idk, unsubscribe for a month because they hate the hopeless in coruscant au, and then refollow next month because they enjoy the playmaker au etc etc

I'm definitely still trying to figure out what I want this to look like and what feels fair or reasonable, so hopefully this isn't a huge mess on my end!

All this being said:

I've posted the first ficlet/fic on ko-fi: it's for the Senator Menace AU, an au that's basically "What if phantom menace but reversed? how fucked up would anakin get over the youngling his father master died to protect?"

the first au post is here // my ko-fi is here

[fiddleturnips]

Backupsmore University

Okay, so. The following is not very well written and has been heavily edited in my actual draft - the chapter it was in has been broken up and spread between like three different chapters. However, I realized that the context for Why Fiddleford Is Like That is sort of important for my other snippets to make sense.

Content warning for depression, but this section does not contain graphic detail. Further content warning for the American Public School System in the Nineteen-Seventies. (Specifically: the school system's relative inability to absorb non-average children.)

"Ah. Right." Stanford sat back down. The broken mug scraped across the tiles and clattered as Fiddleford swept. "Well, we were in high school. It was close to graduation. We'd been fighting anyway. Big time for me, because it was around the Science Fair-"

"Scholarship season."

"Yes."

"Your family weren't that well off, am I rembering right? I seem to recall you were seeking a full ride and couldn't get it."

"I was going to go to Westmore. If I could afford it, I would have anyway. But Backupsmore was a lot more manageable."

Fiddleford laughed. "Ain't that the truth."

"Wait, you were full ride. And you were, what, seventeen Freshman year? What were you doing there?"

"They weren't that strict on school transcripts," Fiddleford said. "A lot more welcoming of science and engineering portfolios. And I needed full ride, I wasn't getting a dime after a bug came by and wiped out my school stock."

"Your… your what?"

"Oh, you wouldn't have this sort of thing. Some of us livestock breeders, when a kid's young, we'll start to set some animals aside for them. You invest in a couple of pigs, add to the herd when you can, teach the kid to care for 'em, and when it comes time for high school graduation you can get a sturdy few grand even if it's just a small herd, then if you invest it right and keep an eye on the price of pork, you can pay a kid through college with a bit to spare. Only mine all got sick and died out."

"That is fascinating and tragic. You never talked about this."

"Yeah, I never talked to the Yankee kids about the fact that I was going to a bum school because my papa couldn't afford a better one because my pigs died and I didn't have school transcripts 'cause I didn't go to school. How do you think that woulda gone over?"

Stanford did know about Fiddleford's school history. At this moment, he was significantly exaggerating. He had gone to school, and he had excelled at school - for about two thirds as long as any other kid, if you combined all of the months.

Pines and McGucket were close college friends, in a lot of the same classes and clubs, spending study hours together in the tucked-away rooms that let them get as loud and melodramatic as they wanted. At first, Fiddleford had joked that he'd done a lot of special programs for county fairs as a kid. Then, he'd joked that nobody taught him per se as he'd just up and swallowed a library one summer and they all figured that was probably that. Then he'd joked that he was a dropout, and when pressed on that he'd grudgingly admit that no, he was homeschooled.

Then eventually the two boys got close enough and he got tipsy enough for it all to come out. The whole story was that the older he got, the more he skipped grades and got shifted to advanced classes and eventually got stuck in the school's Special Education department because as it was they had no idea what the hell else to do with him, the more he'd get bored and start stealing books from older kids and building things out of school supplies and on one memorable occasion stuck a fork in the electrical outlet - he'd been found with third-degree burns on his hand and a paper beside him calculating the exact voltage available from the wall outlet in comparison to the shock a human being could survive - anyway, the more all of that happened, the earlier in the year his Ma and Pa would have the hard conversation that the trouble he could cause at home was nothing like the trouble he was already causing in the classroom.

By high school, his Ma had sat him down and said: Look. You need an education. Every single word of what they teach you in those there classrooms matters, even the stuff you think is dumb and silly. So you're gonna stay home this year, we're getting permission to let you do experiments in the local tech college's labs for Chemistry and such and the rest you're figuring out on your own. And at the end of the year, you are submitting reports about what you learned to every single teacher in the school, and we'll see if they find fault in your methods.

She'd meant for him to get through Freshman core curriculum. He'd gotten through that most of the electives. The next year, he did the rest of the core curriculum and they rented out some textbooks from the local tech college, plus a special weekly tutoring session with the Language Arts teacher because his critical thinking was a bit underdeveloped and another with the AP Maths guy to whip his self-correction into shape. The year after that, they had a sit-down with a representative of the County and a recruitment man from a university and the principal of the high school he'd dropped out of. He couldn't legally leave the public system until he was at the legal age, but they all agreed that he was doing just fine on his own until then.

He wasn't seventeen when he enrolled at Backupsmore. He was sixteen. And he'd already tested out of Freshman and Sophmore classes, and the only other one there who'd done that was Stanford. The two were friends because up to that point, neither one had ever had a peer.

Stanford Pines was a by-the-book scientist. He'd completed every year of school the way it was intended, on time, and with very high marks. He'd also completed science fair projects and extracurriculars. Once he reached university, he kept a full schedule, his days planned to the minute, with an exercise routine and designated journaling time. His accelerated schooling happened because he did things to the letter, bull-rushed through the political game, took every advantage he could get, and was so damn good at his job that nobody could find a reason to keep him from going at it.

Fiddleford McGucket was a free thinking engineer. He couldn't keep his head on straight enough to follow orders, but he was "such a delight to have in class" and "unfailingly diligent with his homework" and "not afraid to do the hard, boring work that needs doing for a project's success," so he kept getting special treatment anyway.

For Stanford Pines, his combined arrogance with his peers, aggressively growth-minded attitude, relentless self-paced work schedule, and unfailing results put him through twelve doctorates and a self-guided grant program.

For Fiddleford McGucket, the combined inexperience working with others, habit of taking on all the work that was available to him so he could prove he was worthwhile, commitment to doing everything perfectly right the first time no matter how loaded his schedule was, and desperate, desperate need to fit in for once left him plastered to the floor of a bathroom stall trying not to cry out loud while he psyched himself up to get back to the lab every spring and autumn night for a year.

Pines and McGucket had both set astronomical standards for themselves that no normal human could possibly hope to achieve. Difference was, Doctor Stanford Pines had somehow done it.

[anonymouspuzzler]

how did you go through college/grad school with ADHD, don't know how to combat it well.

genuinely, I dropped out because I had no idea i had it, had other compounding shit going on, and subsequently lost the ability to take care of myself! when I decided to go back it was after learning I most likely had some form of adhd, and I bolstered my support systems in many forms (lived with family instead of alone, went to therapy regularly, generally was older and a little more assured of myself, etc). and even with all that it's still a huge struggle!!

a lot of it comes down to "acknowledge and accept that you're never going to be able to just Become Neurotypical, some days will be hard, be willing to experiment and figure out things that do help you and Use Those Things whether or not they're 'normal' or you think you 'should' be doing them". ie. I struggle a lot with graduate-level reading, and after a lot of experimentation figured out what works best for me is having a TTS read the text out loud at the same time I'm reading it! It took me a long time to realize that because for some reason I got stuck on "needing" to just do one or the other!

[gentlethorns]

lol i got decisions back from all four of my grad school apps and none of them were acceptances. i got waitlisted by one and outright denied by the other three. fuck man