#grad school blogging

[whoiskt]

Grad School Q4 - Week 9

Finals Hell. 🙃 Pretty much as bad as the first quarter where I felt like I was dying. Fall quarter amiright?

I am a part of a zine! My Hannibal piece is in here:

Look at that..........I do stuff.................yippee!!

Working on so much at the same time right now I'm so sad. As of this moment I need to finish 4 more illustrations for one class, 3 for another, and then 6 pages of thumbnails for the last one.

I have like 2 days left to get it done. 🙃

Horizontal version of the other piece I posted this week:

Anyways, just gotta finish up and everything will be okie dokie. Then I get to try to make enough money to afford next quarter.

[deadhamlets]

baaaaaa im already writing my antony and cleopatra gender paper for one conference but bg has a lil conference with no theme shpuld i submit for the anorexia incest molestation connection paper ive been dreaming of....

[raraeavesmoriendi]

we are less than a month into 2024, and I’ve already had two cis male academics not be able to acknowledge that they were wrong, or that their perspective was not the right one from which to consider a problem, in the same week. on two different platforms, no less.

neither of them were straight, either, which was doubly disappointing!!! but just goes to show, ig

so. academia is still consistent, in case anyone was wondering ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

[fiercestpurpose]

things to do today:

find books and email guy

grade papers for class

finish presentation for tomorrow

[peri-helia]

Saw my PHD supervisor, who has been flat out ignoring me for about four months on campus ‘oh we should have a meeting in early Feb’

[girlwwx]

first lor writer down 🎉🙏

[raraeavesmoriendi]

As someone else who works in an English department: another reason people shouldn’t use GenAI to write their papers is it denies you the practice and the chance to develop your own writing skills.

(Like, this is implicit in OP’s post to be clear, I just wanted to state this directly.)

Listen. Humanities classes but especially English have been devalued for decades now due to budgets being slashed by state legislatures and the economy causing undue pressure on students to find a major that they think will have a direct career path and thus an immediate return on investment. I get that. I’ve talked to multiple students in my time where they tell me “oh I would love to be an English major but my folks tell me there’s no money in that” (and as someone who is applying to be an English professor, like. They’re not wrong, to a degree, at least on the education side.)

But you need to know how to communicate - how to write - no matter what field you go into. You need to know what works well and what doesn’t, how to best explain yourself and the information you’re working with so you can get people who don’t know your subject as well as you up to speed as quickly as possible. This is how people have collaborated across disciplines and it will continue to be. It’s a key skill that you can’t just hand off to an animatronic parrot, because sure, that thing can know what certain kinds of papers and essays look like, but it doesn’t actually discern meaning. It’s just playing madlibs.

Also, as I like to stress in my own classes - writing is a human thing. It’s one way we talk to one another, but it’s also one of the ways that historically sticks around the longest. It’s how we can still know what many people who came before us were thinking and feeling during the events they lived through, and it will probably be how the people who come after us know how we were doing during *gestures widely* All This.

To cut yourself off from that tradition by refusing to develop the skills to read and write deeply is to cut yourself off from such a huge part of history, from people just like you who lived all throughout the previous eras. It’s like turning your back on your entire family tree.

“Damn, it’s not that serious, I just don’t want to write my English paper” - okay, but when will you decide it is serious enough to warrant your involvement?

Sure, writing can feel like a chore! I’m not saying it doesn’t! I’m the first person to admit that!

But if you don’t sit down and practice, or at least make your best effort you can give at the time, it’s never going to not feel like a chore because you don’t develop that skillset.

English is one of those subjects where you get from it as much as you put in. Sure, you can use GenAI, use cliffsnotes or wikipedia, and half-ass your way through the whole semester because you somehow think the work is beneath you, or not as important as your other subjects.

But what would happen if you actually sat down and did the work? What if you read? What if you wrote? What could you gain, coming out on the other side with experience and understanding of something you’d never read or written before?

I have had plenty of students who are working their way through school and could still find the time to write their papers themselves, or read/watch the books/films I assigned them, so I know it’s not that. Likewise with students who might have had disabilities or other other things that make reading and writing difficult.

It’s about deciding the work isn’t beneath you, and that this discipline is worth engaging in.

An important message to college students: Why you shouldn't use ChatGPT or other "AI" to write papers.

Here's the thing: Unlike plagiarism, where I can always find the exact source a student used, it's difficult to impossible to prove that a student used ChatGPT to write their paper. Which means I have to grade it as though the student wrote it.

So if your professor can't prove it, why shouldn't you use it?

Well, first off, it doesn't write good papers. Grading them as if the student did write it themself, so far I've given GPT-enhanced papers two Ds and an F.

If you're unlucky enough to get a professor like me, they've designed their assignments to be hard to plagiarize, which means they'll also be hard to get "AI" to write well. To get a good paper out of ChatGPT for my class, you'd have to write a prompt that's so long, with so many specifics, that you might as well just write the paper yourself.

ChatGPT absolutely loves to make broad, vague statements about, for example, what topics a book covers. Sadly for my students, I ask for specific examples from the book, and it's not so good at that. Nor is it good at explaining exactly why that example is connected to a concept from class. To get a good paper out of it, you'd have to have already identified the concepts you want to discuss and the relevant examples, and quite honestly if you can do that it'll be easier to write your own paper than to coax ChatGPT to write a decent paper.

The second reason you shouldn't do it?

IT WILL PUT YOUR PROFESSOR IN A REALLY FUCKING BAD MOOD. WHEN I'M IN A BAD MOOD I AM NOT GOING TO BE GENEROUS WITH MY GRADING.

I can't prove it's written by ChatGPT, but I can tell. It does not write like a college freshman. It writes like a professional copywriter churning out articles for a content farm. And much like a large language model, the more papers written by it I see, the better I get at identifying it, because it turns out there are certain phrases it really, really likes using.

Once I think you're using ChatGPT I will be extremely annoyed while I grade your paper. I will grade it as if you wrote it, but I will not grade it generously. I will not give you the benefit of the doubt if I'm not sure whether you understood a concept or not. I will not squint and try to understand how you thought two things are connected that I do not think are connected.

Moreover, I will continue to not feel generous when calculating your final grade for the class. Usually, if someone has been coming to class regularly all semester, turned things in on time, etc, then I might be willing to give them a tiny bit of help - round a 79.3% up to a B-, say. If you get a 79.3%, you will get your C+ and you'd better be thankful for it, because if you try to complain or claim you weren't using AI, I'll be letting the college's academic disciplinary committee decide what grade you should get.

Eventually my school will probably write actual guidelines for me to follow when I suspect use of AI, but for now, it's the wild west and it is in your best interest to avoid a showdown with me.

[mirielvairenen]

Daily chemical safety lesson: do not shoot yourself in the eye with isopropyl alcohol/ rubbing alcohol. While it likely won’t harm you, it hurts like the dickens.

Sublesson a): there is a reason you are supposed to wear safety glasses in the lab

Sublesson b): the eyewash station is very easy to use. It is not easy to clean up

[o-wild-west-wind]

no nut this nanowrimo that i’m celebrating no. that’s enough thanks! no-vember let’s just drink broth and go to bed 👉

[crocwork-clockodile]

I've registered for my courses for my PhD, and I'm so excited about it! It feels like it's finally for real happening. I got into almost all the courses I wanted, but there was one I wanted to register for in the folklore department that was full. I did talk to the professor about registering for it (before I knew it was full) and he said it should be fine but we'll have to fill out a form to get me in lol. Either way, I'm really happy and excited to get started

[whoiskt]

Grad School Q4 - Weeks 7/8

Hitting you with another double whammy because I was in L.A. last Friday and couldn't post. Lightbox Expo went well but I did get sick during it which made it difficult and exhausting. I'm better now though!

Week 7 was mainly getting this style-matching down. As you can see the rendering did the heavy-lifting for that haha

I guess my professor liked how I used a 3D asset for the background (right is the screencap of google sketchup and left is the touched up version) because for our final he assigned me to do more of this kind of work. FOR STAR WARS RIP but whatever I'm coping, and at least this kind of stuff is easy. Like, oh, you want me to use a 3D model instead of painstakingly drawing my own background? Say less.

(Also met the 3D character designer for BES so that was cool! It was interesting to hear about the process of 2D to 3D)

I made a zine! Also had to do an accompanying workshop on networking which came in handy for the expo! Networking goals met!!!

I left some Lloyds each day on the drawing wall.

Anyways, now it's time for finals hell again. 🥲

[maxstudyblr]

Still settling into being back at uni and narrowing down my dissertation topic.

[raraeavesmoriendi]

I have a splitting headache and I don’t know that my shoulders will ever unknot (and not in the werewolf way)

but after an eleven-hour marathon that I really, really don’t recommend ever bc my stupid brain is full of bees

I sent in my first chapter draft!! whoohoo!!! now I just have to wait for three out of four well-intentioned academics to see if it makes any fucking sense!!!

oh my fucking god I’m so tired :’D

[fiercestpurpose]

literally any time i get feedback on an assignment i expect it to be terrible, despite experience repeatedly proving that i am, yknow, good at what i do. so here's the one sentence long piece of feedback i've been avoiding all morning:

"I enjoyed this a great deal--some very nice phrasing, and the comparison is apt."

[peri-helia]

I gotta stop going on tumblr during meetings bc I am on camera and have to stop smiling at my screen

[outsassing-nero]

17.10.24// really busy, but will make time to visit cute vegan cafes!!

listening to: snow man, one