#stem majors pay the most for college

[articroses]

I’ll be honest: I really don’t think it’s the end of the world if a college student bs their essay with chatGPT

[i-cant-sing]

Saya want know how Qasim look,are you have proposal?(≡・x・≡)

(pics below) Qasim, the brother, is older than reader by 5 years. He has chocolate brown hair, thick messy locks, and green eyes. He's gifted with eiditic/photographic memory which made him excel in school and he obviously had a high IQ as well. Doesnt mean reader thinks he's intelligent. Sure, Qasim is book smart, but he's not- street smart. Y/n has been the one to often make him realise that his friends were taking advantage of him by making him do their homework, or that they were laughing at him not with him because of his intellect. But reader chalks it up to his sweet nature, her goody-two-shoes of a brother who was hafidh (memorised the Quran) would always be the forgiving person. Its not that he was a pushover, he just... preferred to be the bigger person. Always. He'd chuckle and ruffle your hair "so what if I cleaned up their mess? it only took me 5 minutes and the job was done. Its okay, Y/n." He's always so selfless. You used to worry that he'd get hurt because he's too kind, you used to think he couldnt stand up for himself because he just didnt know when to- but no. Qasim was quite protective over you. When he saw you trying to tackle one of his so-called bullies, the boy towering over you (but you dont consider the height advantage, not when youre a raging kitten), Qasim stepped in and landed a single punch that knocked him down. (then big bro had to spend the rest of the day consoling u because you made him fight someone- and in ur head, that was the biggest sin u made him commit).

Qasim in Arabic means "the generous one" or "the one who shares", and being the older bro, he took his name quite literally. You were the younger sibling, the spoiled brat, the princess! But Qasim never had any problems with sharing anything with you, be it materialistic things or advice or even knowledge. You memorised Quran by his help (because u were competitive) and he had the extraordinary patience of a saint. You two would often participate in competitions at the local mosque just to get the cash prize and help your parents a bit (they never took ur guys money, encouraging u to either save it or spend it on something). Since both of your parents worked long hours, you two were left unsupervised for a long time and that only meant genius yet chaotic shenanigans, including prank calls to the pentagon hq.

Qasim grew up to get a lot of full ride scholarships from top colleges, and once he did his masters (a STEM major), he decided to start his own travel agency, surprising everyone because it seemed like something he wouldnt do? Everyone expected him to go into sciences, but he said he liked to travel and see the world, and Qasim told you that he enjoys running his own business, being your own business.

You supposed it made sense because he was a polyglot and he did enjoy learning new things and seeing new places, their history, etc. Due to his job, he would be gone for long months at a time, but he never returned empty handed. His arms full of souvenirs and sweets and BOOKS! Its not that he bought them for u, no. He bought those books for himself, but once he read them- he's already memorised it and he doesnt have anymore space in his home for more books, so he's always dropping them by your place (as kids, u made him memorise the phonebook before hiding the entire neighbourhoods phone books and had people pay to use your brother's memory for contacts, which was a good business until your father busted it down).

Qasim is the softest, kindest, most generous person. Even though he has a busy schedule due to work, he always made time for you. Whenever he came by, especially during your finals season, not only did he help you study, but he would also stock up your fridge and made sure to do some maintenance around your house. Fridge not working? Qasim has the tools, and if you werent so tied up with studying, you wouldve freaked out over him disassembling your fridge like lego. Sink clogged? No need for the plumber, Qasim knows the right potion of chemicals to unclog it. He's always been the one to prefer to do things himself, by his hand rather than relying on help.

what do u guys think???

[biibini]

Hii!! After mizu graduates college, what type of job do you think she'd have? Would it have to do with sports or maybe something way different? (I absolutely love your writing and headcanons !! 🩷🩷)

modern!mizu post-college life headcanons

tags: post-grad life, engineering mizu, stable work life, a woman in stem, moving in with reader, basketball with mizu, mizu join fencing club, peaceful post-grad life (the dream)

a/n: ngl the thought of post-college life is tripping me out,,, im a junior in college rn and the thought of it just kinda doesnt?? exist?? also ive heard too much info from my friends' rants ab their engineering degrees and switching majors from mechanic to electrical back to mechanical engineering,, theyre fucking nuts

modern!mizu would prob be in the engineering sector of jobs

wooo stem baby (i am a digital marketing major i should not be talking)

bc hello?? money???

also let’s use that mechanical engineering degree to good use

she didn’t leave home for nothing

with her technical skills from eiji

modern!mizu would probably be a CAD engineer

CAD aka computer aided design

technically speaking, it would allow her to work from home or hybrid

and she can easily transfer her mechanical and on-hand knowledge to a digital format

like she’s smart yall

she just got some troubles w procrastination

but dont we all?

(coping so hard)

this job would also allow her free time and flexible hours to do her job

and i feel like modern!mizu opts for a good work-life balance

if she wishes, she can take the day off snd just go out with u or go to the gym

the freedom of choice while staying comfortable at home?

sign her tf up

she can have her tea time, gym time, spending time w u time, and her self care time

the self care in question: enjoying the silence

and realistically, its a well paying job thatll keep her and u afloat while helping eiji financially if need be

modern!mizu hopes her work and smarts can help her provide for others and herself

its ab time she doesnt let herself depend on a man for money

yeah thats a fuck u to u, m*k*o

shes made the mistake once

shes not gonna make it again

just bc postgrad modern!mizu isnt in sports doesnt mean she’ll stop playing

she needs to get her exercise and movement some way some form

basketball with taigen

and always aim for the three-pointers

and is successful most of the time

and then proceed to aim for the half court shots

and fail most times

fencing with eiji whenever shes back home

she’ll def try to teach u

and its fun at first but

she wants to stretch her wings out

modern!mizu would prob join a fencing club

it would be a great for her to fully practice and spar

not just against her old man

or go soft w u

but also go against ppl her age

modern!mizu would move into a place w u

nothing grand but a small apartment where u could refresh and build the place to be ur own

ringo is a good friend

a true best friend she could trust

but it was time to move in w u

and not be wary of ringo hearing u when he comes home

modern!mizu would be more adventurous in hobbies

yeah she has basketball and fencing and her tea collection

but now she has a stable job

no need to worry about grades

and just to live life one step at a time

she would probably try out pottery with u

definitely practice her cooking with ringo's and ur help

all in all, a very patient life

(she deserves it)

[mycatsaidwhat]

things i’ve heard college students say pt. 29

-you may be into Sucky mpreg but some people believe the holocaust didn’t happen

-humans should have a mating season where we all congregate in a river once a year to find love like salmon 

-granted, there is a difference between being a momma’s boy and being Normon Bates 

-Only in a poli sci class would you get a picture of the live action winne the poo and Kim Jon un next to one another 

-“get ready for the met gala with me!!” influencer vlogs showing up on my suggested as if I don’t make $10.73 an hour 

-no way that dog had a blog, dogs can’t read 

-in god we bust

-every guys wants to be a golden retriever boyfriend until they wake up with no balls 

-graphic design majors are like the diet soda of the art world 

-if i could choose between having a successful career and lying down i would choose lying down 

-today’s graduation is sponsored by plan b

-going down on a woman and tying her fallopian tubes with my tongue like a cherry stem 

-most of the world’s problems would be solved if more billionaires disappeared in submarines 

-you come face to face with god at a 24 hour ihop

-she lemony on my snicket until there’s an unfortunate event

-took a shit in the gender neutral bathroom, call that a she/it

-the tornado dodged us cause someone told it that it had to pay a cover for every bar it destroyed

-can I have a cars 2-themed blowjob, please

-the best thing Taylor Swift has done recently is get some girls to consider that they may be the problem

-“I’M LITERALLY SO FERAL” no Ava you’re just drunk and white

[almightyellie]

baby, i'm yours

in which you and bradley are in the same major and you're completely unaware of how much he adores you.

pairing is frat!bradley bradshaw x fem!reader

word count is 5.5k

author says stem major rooster supremacy <3

you should watch out for drinking, college au, language, party settings, mention of puking

title song is baby i'm yours // arctic monkey

bradley has never been the type to pine.

he had never been one for coveting from a distance, and why would he? bradley had grown up fighting for what he wanted. he had grown with an admirable, if not appalling, amount of confidence. bradley bradshaw had walked with a swagger that simply couldn’t be learned, and for the most part, it had gotten him what he wanted. sure, every once in a while he had to fight a little harder to get the girl, but he always got them in the end. until you.

you aren’t his type, that’s for sure, but something about you is impossible to shake. he’s spent at least three semesters staring at you from opposite ends of lecture halls, and maybe he likes you because you’re not his type. you seem conscientious, dedicated, and entirely uninterested.

it hurts the ego, sure, but bradley isn’t one to give up so easily. after all, you’ve only spoken once and he really hadn’t put his best foot forward. he should have known better, really, because you might be the only one in a nine am lecture who seems genuinely eager to understand enzyme kinetics. the idea of a frat party wouldn’t have interested you, and the offhanded invitation in the campus bookstore was met with a predictably tight smile and a, “yeah, maybe. thanks for the invite.” it’s the most polite blow-off he’s ever received.

that was august. now, spinning into the end of october, he’s been so embarrassed by his complete failure to accurately gauge your interests that he hasn’t even bothered to try again. he’s losing his nerve; more importantly, jake is convinced that bradley’s losing his masculinity. not that bradley has ever given a second thought to what jake thinks; he’s pretty sure that he could count all of jake’s iq points on his fingers, so he rarely gives weight to his opinion. 

and yet, he can’t let it go. he can’t stop watching you from across the room, wondering what you would do if he sat next to you. wondering if you ever watched him, too. wondering if you realized how, with one measly conversation under your belt, you’ve entirely captivated bradley bradshaw.

the virtue of having such a large student group in your major is that group projects aren’t a concern. it was one of the things you had so looked forward to when you were working through your generals, the idea of doing your own work on your own time, without the opinions of anyone else. and it’s a little isolating, somehow, that you can sit in two lectures a day, five days a week, with a hundred people each, and not say a word to anyone but callie. 

next to you, she pays little attention to the lecture, doodling in her notebook and scrolling through her phone. where you had been tirelessly devoted to your academics, callie had found a way to succeed without even trying. you take notes out of necessity, but it seemed like she picked up the information just as well by only half-listening to the lecture. as you scribble notes down in your notebook, your best friend nudges your elbow and tilts her phone toward you to show you a text. 

nat: halloween party @ pike on friday

nat: bob said the door’s open to everyone

you frown, spinning your pencil between your fingers and shaking your head. callie groans quietly, leaning in to whisper. “come on, it won’t be that bad.”

and no, it probably wouldn’t be. you had never been to the parties they were always pushing, but they couldn’t be terrible if nat and callie were there; further, anywhere nat was, so was bob, who you entirely adored. it wasn’t that you had no interest in the parties; you, more than any of your friends, needed to let loose. but even after three years, you couldn’t stand the idea of having to market yourself to your peers; why would you meet new people when you had already found your family?

“pike is full of dorks and nerds,” callie continues. “it probably won’t even be that busy.”

you shrug, and callie grins. the text that she sends into the group chat rings in on your laptop.

cal: we’re there!

your heart leaps into your throat when nat pushes you forward gently. both callie and natasha had assured you that the party likely wouldn’t have been too crowded. bob is just as surprised as you, whispering to nat, “have you ever seen it this packed?”

the four of you can barely move through the living room and you look over bob’s shoulder, ignoring the unhappy way your stomach churns. from the way callie had talked about it, you hadn’t thought it would be like this. heat hits you like a wall every time you walk into a new room and you’re already overwhelmed, between the endless stream of conversations and the pounding music pumping through the walls. 

bob spots reuben in the kitchen, and, already drunk, he greets all of you eagerly. it’s overfamiliar but not entirely unwelcome. you’ll take any little bit of comfort you can get right now, and though you’ve only met reuben a few times, the hug he pulls you into is enough to calm you, even if just barely. 

“where is everyone?” bob asks over the music, clapping his friend on the back, and reuben blinks hard. 

“i think seresin and mickey are in the basement.”

a cheer rises through the crowd as someone pushes through the doorway into the kitchen and reuben’s attention is entirely lost. he’s vaguely familiar, somehow, with the kind of honey brunet hair that makes you wonder if it’s entirely natural and a smile that’s contagious. he drops two cases of beer, stacked on top of one another, onto the already crowded island, and callie leans into you and nat. 

“who is that?”

bob laughs and nat raises a brow. you’re glad that she asked because you know him, you think. a little more selfishly, something about him naturally draws you in; he has the same undeniable charisma that you think all frat boys must possess to a certain extent. it rarely works on you, and maybe it wouldn’t work if he turned it on you, but watching him greet everyone around him, passing out beers with compliments and laughter makes you a little giddy the same way all blooming attractions do, with a turn of the stomach at the end of the realization.

“that’s brad,” bob answers. you snort, because of course, his name was brad. “bradshaw!” 

brad spins his head in your direction with a wide grin, a smile that only grows when he catches sight of bob, brows raising at the sight of him surrounded by the three of you. “hey, bobby!”

bob’s cheeks flush and for a moment, you watch him for any sign of discomfort, but he only laughs and pushes all of you toward the island. 

“y’all want a drink?” brad asks, eyes lingering on yours, and without a second thought, you nod along with your friends. 

you listen as well as you can to the conversation between the two men as brad hands bob a beer and asks callie whether she’d prefer a beer or a seltzer. she preens, asking for a beer, and he hands her one back with a polite smile. you watch him ask nat the same question, wracking your brain to figure out where you had seen him. maybe you had served him at work. it wasn’t out of the question that you might have been in a gen ed class together in your first year, but you don’t think it’s either of those. when he trains his eyes on you, you're more confused than ever because you’re sure you would have remembered someone like this.

“and for you?” he asks, voice soft despite the oppressive noise around you.

“seltzer, please,” you respond quickly. he grins at you and you hate the nervous flip of your stomach, thrilled and terrified to have his attention, to be on the receiving end of that smile. 

news of the fresh cases has spread around the house and guests are crushing into the kitchen to get their hands on a new drink before they’re gone. at first, you hadn’t minded the crowd as much as you thought you would, but now you’re overwhelmed, so you pat callie’s hand and lean in close. “i think m’gonna step outside, okay?”

she pulls back, brow creased in worry, and says, “are you okay? do you want me to come?”

and you know she will, which you appreciate, but you also know that she just caught sight of the blond that has sauntered into the kitchen—exactly her type—and you don’t want her to miss her shot. “i’m okay! i’ll be right back.”

as you force your way through the crowd, cold can in hand, you wonder why you showed up in the first place. it’s not your scene, not even a little, and you had spent the last three years avoiding places exactly like this. foolishly, you hope that maybe the crowd will thin out the later it gets, but you know that’s not really how these kinds of things work. 

the door from the kitchen to the backyard opens inward, which is a struggle when the couple behind the door only glares at you for attempting to open it. frustrated, you open your mouth to ask them to move, but a large hand from behind you reaches for the doorknob, and the man’s face softens at the sight of whoever’s behind you. 

you glance over your shoulder and there’s brad, his chest brushing against your shoulder. he smiles genially at the couple, nodding at them. “hey, man, how are you?”

you don’t listen to the response because brad twists the doorknob for you, opening the door just enough for you to slip out. you aren’t sure he does it for you, exactly, but you’re grateful either way. the october night, especially compared to the sweaty, booming house, is a welcome and refreshing change, one that nearly forces you to take a deep breath. it’s considerably less crowded outside, and you lean against the vibrating siding of the house, glancing sideways when brad slips out of the door and closes it behind him.

for a moment, he looks across the backyard like he’s looking for something, but you interrupt him when you breathe out sharply, tugging your jacket closer. finally, he turns to look at you, and his face melts into the easiest smile you’ve ever seen. you’re not conscious of the way you smile back, pleased to see him pleased, and he leans against the wall beside you.

“hi.”

you look at him, half appalled and half intrigued, because brad is handsome. even if he wasn’t, he has the kind of inherent charm that makes up for physical deficiency, and you would think that someone so handsome might have a better way to flirt than saying ‘hi.’

it occurs to you suddenly that he’s flirting. he’s flirting with you. you feel a sudden warmth creeping from the pit of your stomach, rising to your skin and making you feel a little flushed. “hi.”

he holds out a hand in a formal handshake and you can’t help yourself. you chuckle a little, allowing him to take your hand. “i’m brad.”

you purse your lips and shake his hand. “...brad.”

he tilts his head knowingly, eyes mirthful. “yes?”

with a grin at him, you pull your hand back, rocking on your heels. “that’s just such a frat boy name.”

and he laughs, so loud and warm that suddenly it feels like august, pressing his hand to his abdomen. you watch him appreciatively, endeared to the way his cheeks flush, the way his shoulders shake. his eyes are still crinkled with delight when his laughter slows and he says, “then you can call me bradley.”

your grin shines stronger. “i like bradley.” you offer your name, and he sticks a hand into his pocket. he’s cute, undeniably, and every once in a while, someone will pass by and clap him on the shoulder, greeting him with a ‘hey, man!’ or an excited call of his name. for some reason, seeing how liked he is makes you like him even more. he greets everyone back—remembers their names and everything—and the smile on his face is so genuine that it takes you aback.

bradley is easier to talk to than you had expected, not that you had expected much. he briefly talks about his mother when you ask, answers a couple of questions about what he does outside of academics, but he seems more invested in asking you any questions than offering information. you’re right in the middle of a tangent about one of your classes when you ask, “what’s your major, again?”

he thumbs the tab of his can. “biochem,” he nods, and you grin.

“me, too!” you respond eagerly, and he laughs, seeming a little bashful.

“yeah, i know,” he responds easily. “we’re in a lot of classes together, i think.” he doesn’t think, he knows, but the last thing bradley wants to do now that you’re warming up to him is come off as some weirdo who spends all his time watching you instead of his lectures. your face brightens with recognition, and he smiles softly. “i also tried—and failed—to flirt with you in the bookstore at the beginning of the semester, but…” he trails off, rubbing the back of his neck uncomfortably. that was supposed to be the silent part, but part of him hopes that you might remember him, no matter how poorly he had done then. he thinks he’s doing pretty well now.

you blanch, covering your mouth with your hand, and bradley could kick himself. “oh, my god. bradley, i’m so sorry! i can’t believe i forgot about that,” you lament, and he laughs with a tinge of self-deprecation.

“i really think it’s better that you did,” he soothes, and then you giggle and all is restored. he’s back in good standing, his washout from the bookstore entirely balanced. he’s all too aware of the tiny step you take in his direction, one that he’s not sure you’ve even noticed yourself. it comforts him, lets him know that right now, you’re closer to the same page than you’ve ever been, and that alone makes his heart begin to pound.

“well, i still feel bad,” you admit, and he shrugs. 

“rejection is healthy for the ego,” he excuses.

it seems like it’s something he actually believes, which makes your chest sticky with unbridled affection. “you don’t seem like the kind of guy who experiences a lot of rejection.”

he flushes and you know you’re right, but it doesn’t annoy you. he’s nothing you would have assumed him to be; he isn’t arrogant or lewd, doesn’t push you to drink and hasn’t asked you to his room. the surprise is almost sweeter than the realization that bradley is the kind of guy you could like, silly name aside.

bradley can’t believe his luck; he hadn’t gotten you here, but someone had, and he’s thrilled. he’s grateful. he reaches for you, fingers hesitating, but he folds down the collar of your jean jacket, and he can’t contain himself when you smile at him. you’re vulnerable, open with him, and bradley can read the signs. he’s giddy, because you’re finally looking at him, laughing with him, and bradley thinks that this��you are better than any way he had ever imagined you. 

“bradley bradshaw,” you murmur, rolling your eyes playfully. “you aren’t entirely insufferable.”

he guffaws, fingers tightening around his empty beer can. he’s been out of his drink for nearly half an hour, but he can’t pull himself from you. “wow, i’m honored.”

you play it up, turning away from him to look out across the backyard. the two of you are so close that your shoulder brushes his chest, and warmth races through his body at the contact. a large hand settles in the dip of the small of your back, and you pretend that it doesn’t make you want to shiver. “you should be. i’m very hard to please.”

and bradley’s stomach flips, fingers tightening around his empty can once again. “i’m sure i could figure it out.”

a surprised laugh forces its way out of you and he snorts. “dude.”

he grins, tapping his empty can against yours. this is going well, better than he thought it would. “you want another drink?”

you look at him, a pleased smile pushing at your cheeks. “yes, please.”

he’ll give you a moment alone, in part because he really does need another drink, but mostly because if there ever were a time to work up the courage to ask you out, it would be right now. he grabs your can, flashing you a sweet smile before he slips inside. 

the second his back is turned, you can’t tamp down your smile, your ears burning. at this point, you don’t even care if he’s stringing you along. you like him. he makes you laugh, and he had been willing to admit that he had his foot in his mouth when he had approached you at the beginning of the semester. then, you had assumed the same of him that you had when you’d met again: that he was cocky, that he was a stereotypical frat boy. but now, he’s laughing at himself the same way you are, humbled and sweet.

the kitchen door opens, and you turn to greet him, but it’s nat. you smile warmly, leaning against the wall. “hey.”

“hey,” she breathes. “you’ve been out here the whole time?”

you shrug, sticking your hands in the pockets of your jacket. “yeah. you guys having fun?”

nat rolls her eyes with a huff. “yeah, about that. we gotta get callie home.”

worry washes over you, forcing out the lovesick warmth that had overtaken you and leaving you with a bitter chill. “what happened?”

she shakes her head, the toe of her boot rubbing out a cigarette butt someone has thrown on the back porch. “she got into a pissing contest with that guy she was flirting with,” nat grunts. “you know how she is. anyway, she’s in the backseat.”

and you shouldn’t be surprised, because yeah, you know callie. she can’t let a challenge go, and you’re amazed it hasn’t given her alcohol poisoning yet. taking care of her while drunk is like second nature after so many years of friendship, and you had figured that the night would end like this, anyway. but you hadn’t anticipated bradley. you want to take care of your best friend, but you don’t want to leave behind the lovely flush that bradley has given you.

nat notices your pause and frowns. “you okay?” you step to the side and peek into the window. bradley stands, pretty and flushed in the kitchen, his beer in one hand and a different flavor of your seltzer in another. god, you don’t want to leave him behind. you want to stay, soaking up his warmth, his attention, and you want to kiss him, and maybe you want to spend the night with him. you watch him laugh in the kitchen, goading one of the other party guests, his charisma radiating even through the window. everyone around him laughs, smiles up at him, falls into his encouragement to keep drinking, keep having fun, and you recognize the look on their faces. it’s the look that you’ve been wearing for the last hour talking to him.

you sigh and turn back to nat. “yeah, m’good. let’s get her home.”

your friend hesitates, but you smile and nod. bradley charms everyone around him; you’re sure that you’re no different. he has everyone falling at his feet. he makes people feel special; it’s the kind of guy he is, and you like that about him, but that’s all it is. 

you let nat drag you through the side yard and around the front to bob’s car, and you try not to let yourself think about bradley on the ride home.

bradley, still laughing at javy’s insistence on body shots, slips out the backdoor, can in each hand. the crowd pushes the door closed behind him, and his belly is still flipping when he turns to where you should be. where you were. he frowns, confused, and he hates the way his stomach swoops when he looks across the yard and can’t see you. tucking his beer in the crook of his elbow, he shoves his way back into the kitchen.

“reub!” he calls over the noise, and his friend beams at him. “where’s bob?”

reuben, drunk and thrilled, responds, “man, he just left!”

a sinking realization makes bradley wilt, his shoulders dropping, and bradley knows that you’re gone, too.

callie glares unhappily at the glass bob has set before her. “i’m literally going to puke.”

he gives her a look, unimpressed with her dramatics. “it goes down smoother than you’d think.”

“does it come up smooth, too?”

you don’t blame her, really. you had never tasted bob’s hangover cure, but it looks exactly like what you cleaned out of his backseat last night. no, you wouldn’t want any part of it, either, but he swore by it. nat drops a straw in the thick mixture, and callie groans but begins drinking it obediently.

“so,” nat starts, sitting across from you at the table. “how was your night?”

you feel your cheeks warm but you shrug casually, resting your chin on your water bottle. “fine. how was yours?”

“you disappeared,” she responds, ignoring your question, and you roll your eyes goodnaturedly.

“i did not ‘disappear.’ i was exactly where i said i was all night.”

nat narrows her eyes at you, and when you look at bob, you see his lips quirked in the tiniest smile. “brad followed you out,” he notes, and you stare back at him, trying to keep your face blank.

you don’t want to feel giddy about bradley, not when you know he was just being nice. the last thing you want to do is give bob any indication that bradley has gotten under your skin; you know bob. you love bob, but he’s observant, and though he would never tell a secret on purpose, you know better than anyone that sometimes the truth just slips out of him. “he did.”

callie perks up a little, straw still in her mouth when she asks, “you and brad?”

“no,” you insist. “we just talked for a few minutes.”

nat smirks, leaning onto her elbows. “did you like him?”

“he was nice.”

“that’s not what i asked,” she pushes, and you huff.

you want to hold it close to your chest. it’s embarrassing to admit that you had allowed bradley to make you feel so special, that he had wooed you without even trying. but the idea of lying to your best friends makes you sweat a little. natasha would find out anyway, and then you’d be in for it. “i mean…yeah, i guess.”

“that’s a yes,” bob celebrates, and you frown. 

your best friends share a pleased look and you harrumph. “what does it matter, anyway? he’s just some…random frat guy. probably would end up being an asshole, anyway.”

bob shakes his head, filling one of your mugs with coffee for himself. “nah, brad’s cool. he’s nice.”

you level a glare at bob. “regardless. the last thing i need right now is to develop feelings for some guy that everyone else is already in love with.” and bob doesn’t argue, doesn’t deny the fact that bradley has everyone falling at his feet. you shrug, taking a sip of your water. “he’s cool, i guess. but i don’t have time for that.”

callie wrinkles her nose in your direction, clearly a little annoyed. “but you like him.”

you purse your lips. “so?”

she sighs, holding her cup of sludge with both hands as she leans back into her seat. “tell him.” it’s such a callie thing to say. she had never second-guessed herself. she had never needed to. but you weren’t callie. you weren’t perfect, reliable callie. such confidence had never come to you the way it has to her. if you were callie, the kind of person that people were drawn to—the same way they were drawn to bradley—you might tell him. but you weren’t. you were just you.

you lean back into your chair, avoiding your friends’ eyes, and for a minute, you pretend that you are like callie, and it’s a comforting thought.

similarly, bradley and mickey look at each other across the kitchen island. “so…you didn’t kiss her.”

“no,” bradley says, tired.

“and you didn’t ask her out?”

“no.”

mickey looks at him, head tilted curiously. “but why?”

“because she left, you idiot,” javy rolls his eyes. “you aren’t even listening.”

“i am!” he insists, glaring at javy. “i just don’t understand. brad, you’re the clincher.” 

bradley has been running over the events of the night before until he can’t hold it in anymore. he had hoped his roommates would be helpful, but javy is disinterested, mickey is entirely unhelpful, and jake had shuffled away five minutes into the conversation to fall asleep on the couch. “i don’t know, man, i thought it was going great. she seemed like she was interested, you know? 

mickey shrugs. “whatever, dude. you said you have some classes together? just catch her on campus and ask her out.”

“mickey, did it ever occur to you that she left because she didn’t like me?” bradley stresses, and his roommate rolls his eyes. 

“bradley, have you ever considered that you only like this girl because she's the first one who doesn’t like you?”

bradley sits with this for a moment. he had an ego, that was for sure, and he had chased a lot of girls who didn’t want him just to change their minds. the thrill was always in the chase. at least, it had been, because the longer bradley thinks about it, the more he thinks that he had found just as much thrill watching you across lecture halls as he ever had chasing other girls. he had been just as eager to get you a drink and make you laugh as he had to take other girls to bed. everything is heightened with you. no, the thrill wasn’t in chasing you. this had gone on so much longer than that. long before he ever found out that you had no interest in him.

“no,” bradley decides. “no, man, it’s not like that. i really like her.”

mickey shrugs like it’s the easiest thing in the world. “okay, then tell her. what’s the worst that can happen?”

you avoid looking at bradley throughout class. right as it had begun, you had made the mistake of searching for him, and the second that you laid eyes on him, it felt like a burn. over the weekend, you had come to terms with the fact that yeah, you did like bradley. that didn’t mean you had to like it. you would put your head down, get through the semester, and pray that you didn’t have any classes together next semester. and that’s fine. it’s fine. 

your notes, like your thoughts, are scrambled. they barely make sense to you, and when callie glances in your direction, her face twists at the sight of your notebook. “dude, what the fuck?”

“stop,” you insist, trying to hide the way your shoulders shake in a laugh. “it’s functional.”

“bro, it’s incomprehensible.”

“fuck off,” you laugh, elbowing her. 

she giggles, pressing a hand to her chest. you’re grateful when your professor releases class early, because callie’s jeering is getting a little too close to heckling for your taste. she can’t control her volume, this you know, and usually it’s fine, but more than usual, you’re trying to fly under the radar today.

you both shrug on your coats, pack your bags, and slip from the lecture hall. you think you’re in the clear, that you’ve successfully avoided bradley, who exited on the opposite side of the lecture hall, not that you were looking. but you hear your name from only a few feet behind just as you and callie reach the external doors. it’s far enough away, crowded enough in the rush of your classmates that you might be able to pretend you didn’t hear it, but he calls you again and you know that the guilt will haunt you if you don’t at least say hi.

your best friend grins when you turn and offer bradley a tight smile. “hey, bradley.”

“hey,” he breathes, and you hate him because he’s so much cuter in daylight than he ever was under the porch light of the frat house. it makes you sick. “i’m glad i caught up to you. can we talk?”

your inner monologue screeches to a halt and starts shrieking, but you nod and turn to callie. “i’ll catch up?”

she smirks at the two of you. “i won’t hold my breath.”

“callie,” you hiss, but bradley laughs and you feel—despite your embarrassment—that her comment is hopeful, not teasing. 

she waves goodbye and heads on her way. you and bradley, standing against the late autumn chill, stand in silence for only a beat before he says, “i lost you at the party.”

your lips twist in a way that’s unbearably endearing to him and you hook your thumb over your shoulder. “callie got sick, we had to take her home.”

bradley grins, looking after her. “oh, that callie.” you look at him, half-suspicious, but you have an almost knowing smile growing on your face. “my roommate hasn’t stopped talking about her since friday.”

“jake?” you hazard a guess, and bradley nods. a contemplative sigh fills the space between you before you say, “yeah, trust me. we’ve heard a lot about him, too.”

you expect some banter, at least, about his roommate. from what callie has told you, you’re certain that bradley has some stories to share about him, or at least a funny quip, but he’s got a one track mind. “um…right. well, i would have liked to…say bye.”

for a long moment, the two of you look at one another in silence. you get the sense that bradley doesn’t spend a great deal of time being vulnerable like this, even if he’s just giving you the barest hint of what happens underneath, and you have to wonder: why is he sharing this with you? what is he doing? 

“no, yeah. you just looked like you were having fun inside, i didn’t think you’d really notice.” and god, you hate how pathetic that sounds, and you hate the way his shoulders deflate, and you hate the way you’re butchering this right now. “i just didn’t want to bother you, was all.” 

“you wouldn’t have bothered me,” he responds immediately. 

he’s so cute that looking at him hurts, and you feel that pressure build up in your chest, packed so tightly that you have to say something. “bradley—”

“i’m sorry,” he says, voice sweet and a little scratchy. he holds eye contact so firmly that it almost makes you shiver, both of you ignoring the other students around you. “i’m sorry if i was too pushy, or if i made you uncomfortable.”

“you didn’t,” you assure. “you weren’t. not at all.” he nods once.

bradley feels like the earth could swallow him right now and it could only help the situation. he’s embarrassed, but he tries not to show it. after mickey’s rare moment of mental clarity, bradley knows that now is the moment. he’d missed his chance before. fumbled his opportunity already. he didn’t want to do that again. “listen…i’ve been watching you across classrooms for like, four semesters. i think you’re really pretty,” he admits, voice steady despite the increasing flush on his cheeks. “and you’re funny and interesting and smart and i want to get to know you, because i really like you.” you blanch, mouth parted in the cutest little o he’s ever seen. “if you aren’t interested, i get it. we can just be friends.”

you pause, taking a moment to process his words when he cuts in again.

“or if you don’t want to be friends, you can totally tell me to fuck off and i will literally never bother you again,” he rambles, nodding decisively.

and it happens at the worst time, really. this is not the time to start giggling, but you can’t help yourself. you’re a little giddy and a little entertained, but mostly you’re caught up in him. caught up in the way this boy you haven’t stopped thinking about for the last three days has, apparently, spent the last two years admiring you. this sweet boy, who makes you laugh and makes you think, who makes you feel special and interesting and wanted. 

“bradley, you don’t get rejected a lot, do you?”

bradley’s lips pucker, trying to hide his nerves from you. whatever you had to say, he wanted to hear it. no matter what. “no, i don't.”

you take a step toward him, grateful for the heat that rolls off his body, and you smile at him softly. “well, best not to break your record, then.”

bradley bradshaw isn’t the type to pine. until he is. 

and it’s worth every second.

[ss-shitstorm]

Hey I know you’ve probably already been asked this but what type of chemistry do you use for breaking bread like biochem and where did you learn this or have any book recommendations to pick it up? Also ty in advance I love your writing!!💕💕

oh my fucking god. oh my god. buddy. buddy you have made my fucking LIFE ASKING THIS OH GOD

So like, most of the chemistry I've used so far has just been Genchem and O Chem(with a wee few modifications to make it believable as a Cybertronian discipline, like Transformium being able to hold 4 bonds like Carbon but preferentially forming bonds w metals and needing an EMP pulse to interact w more electronegative atoms) I may wind up needing to get into a bit of Inorganic chemistry, but that's probably fewer and further in between. If you want a better handle on the stuff I'm writing or if you just want to learn more in general, then I'd recommend giving yourself a lil crash course in Genchem and then delving into O chem a bit more extensively (protip : you need WAY less Genchem then you'd think to fully understand O chem. God I wish someone had told me this 5 years ago. If you search "Genchem for non majors", you'll probably learn enough that way.)

THAT SAID : here's a chaotic, not really in any order list of the books/youtube channels/etc that I've directly used/am using for this fic.

Books :

Caveman Chemistry, Kevin R Dunn - Alot of hands-on old timey historical chemistry lessons w detailed instructions on how to complete them.(YOU GET TO MAKE YOUR OWN ASPIRIN AND DRAIN CLEANER!) Delivered with a delightfully occult bend.

Back To basics,(Reader's Digest) - Survivalist homesteading bible. Not strictly chemistry but has alot of earthy hippy ways of generating energy( biofuels my beloved)

An Introduction to Fire Dynamics, Dougal Drysdale - Honestly this, and any other firefighting manuals are worth their weight in gold for figuring out how to not set yourself and your neighborhood on fire while playing with, well, fire. Trying to look this info up online is like playing russian roulette with intentional misinformation and your fbi guy.

(there's another book I have that's even more detailed but I can't find it right now or remember the name. I'll update this list when I can!)

Organic Chemistry, John Mcmurray 8th edition : generic but good college O chem textbook. You can search around and find free versions to download relatively easily.

The Organic Chem Lab Survival Manual, James W Zubrick - Also a very good way to learn how to not set yourself and your neighborhood on fire when playing with glassware/gases. Very in-depth instructions on setting up and using lab equipment without breaking anything or your brain. Has a fuckton of pictures. Author has a massive sense of humor and makes this heavy subject easy to read. Again, easy to download/find in archives

Unfortunately I do not have any recommendations for Genchem books. I mostly used free online courses like Khan Academy to learn what I did.(I would def. recommend them though)

Youtube Channels :

The Organic Chemistry Tutor : Dude puts everything from reaction mechanisms to retrosynth problems down in the simplest possible terms. Does not beat around the bush with euphemisms or stories, gets right to business. If you have trouble paying attention, or lose your mind when a professor goes off on a tangent, this man is your savior. I have crippling unmedicated ADHD and no STEM background whatesoever and this man still managed to teach me 2 separate ways to execute a Gabriel Synthesis

Nile Red : World's most inefficient and most powerful wizard. I am not entirely convinced he's human. Does shit like turning plastic gloves into drinkable grape soda or making sweeteners out of his own piss and somehow makes it explainable to trash goblins like me who only need the science for warlord pussy.

again, anon, holy shit thank you so much. Like you wouldn't believe the amount of damage you've just undone. i have been beating myself into a pulp and spiraling into anxiety about this fic an trying to do everything right and you've given me enough moxie to fuel me for at least the next 10 chapters. If you have any more questions or more specific questions, please do not hesitate to ask! I can't guarantee I can answer them, but damnit I'll try. Take care and happy learning you funky lil moonbean.

[dragoneyes618]

The major lesson that reviewer Christine Rosen extracts from Rob Henderson’s new memoir, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, is: “The people who control a great deal of our cultural and political conversations are a rarified elite with little understanding of how most people live their lives.” (I have not yet read Troubled, though I’m eager to do so. What follows draws primarily on Rosen’s review in the Free Beacon and on Henderson’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.)

To comprehend the gap between those elites and the vast majority of Americans, consider a recent Rasmussen survey of what the authors call “elites” — more than one post-graduate degree, an annual income of $150,000 — and a subset of those “elites,” who attended an Ivy League school, or another elite private school, such as Stanford or University of Chicago, whom Rasmussen dubs “super-elites.”

Three-quarters of the elites and nearly 90 percent of the super elites describe their personal incomes as on the upswing, while almost none describe their incomes as on the decline. For all Americans, however, nearly twice as many view their income as worsening as view their financial situation as improving — 40 percent to 20 percent.

Despite having eventually made it to Yale as an undergraduate in his mid-twenties and later earning a PhD in psychology at Cambridge University, Henderson most certainly did not stem from the elite class from which so many of his classmates came. Students at Yale from families in the upper 1 percent of wealth are more numerous than those from the bottom 60 percent.

One of Henderson’s Yale classmates, who had attended Phillips Exeter Academy, America’s top prep school, once lectured Henderson on his white privilege — even though he is actually half Asian and half Hispanic. Yet it would take a certain obliviousness to label Henderson a child of privilege. One of his earliest memories is of his drug-addict mother being pulled away from him in handcuffs and hauled off to jail, when he was three. He never knew his father.

After that, he was shuttled between various foster homes, none of them stable, until he joined the US Air Force after high school. The discipline of the military helped him overcome some of the chaos that had characterized his life until then. But many of the old demons remained, including his penchant for self-medicating with alcohol, and he ended up in a detox program, where a talented therapist helped him work through some of those demons.

One of the central messages of Henderson’s memoir is that a non-stable childhood family life is not just bad because it hurts your chances of getting into an elite college or attaining a high-paying job later in life, but also because those raised in such an environment experience “pain that etches itself into their bodies and brains and propels them to do things in the pursuit of relief that often inflict even more harm.”

Given their difference in backgrounds, Henderson found many of the social rituals of his classmates incomprehensible. One example was when the Yale campus erupted in hysteria over an email from Erika Christakis to the students of Silliman residential college, of which she served as co-master with her husband Nicholas, suggesting that they were old enough to work out themselves which Halloween costumes to wear, without asking the administration to issue an elaborate set of rules to avoid “microaggressions” or “cultural appropriation” — e.g., a white student wearing a sombrero. After the childhood and teenage years he experienced, a fellow student in a sombrero did not seem like such a big deal to Henderson.

Erika was eventually force to resign her position in Silliman and on the Yale faculty, much to Henderson’s disappointment, as he had been eager to take her course on early childhood development. Meanwhile, the black undergraduate who confronted Nicholas Christakis in the Silliman courtyard, in an expletive-laden tirade, in front of a group of students cheering her on, was given an award for extracurricular excellence at the next Yale graduation.

Henderson offers an invaluable term to describe the opinions expressed so fiercely and with no tolerance of opposing views by his fellow undergrads: “luxury beliefs.” Luxury beliefs, as Henderson defines them, “confer status on the upper class at little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.” The conspicuous displays of wealth and leisure activities that broadcast elite status in Thorstein Veblen’s time have been replaced by opinions and beliefs that give proof of one’s elite education. After all, Henderson notes ironically, how many non-Ivy-League-educated Americans can easily toss off terms like “cisgender” or “heteronormative”?

Mantras such as “defund the police” are luxury beliefs because their impact on those living in gated communities or the most affluent neighborhoods is likely to be negligible. Henderson comments about the policies implemented to combat white privilege, “It won’t be Yale graduates who are harmed. Poor white people will bear the brunt.”

He recounts the story of a refugee from the North Korean police state, attending Columbia University, who raised concerns about the anti-free speech movement on campus, only to be taunted with “Go back to Pyongyang” on a social media site for Ivy League students. Normally, nothing will earn faster exile to social media purgatory than telling an immigrant, “Go back to where you came from,” but this particular refugee was deemed deserving of insult, writes Henderson, because she “undermined these people’s view of themselves as morally righteous.”

Incidentally, I would rank as near the top of “luxury beliefs” the familiar chants about Israeli genocide and apartheid. They cost their proponents nothing, yet effectively broadcast one’s moral righteousness and humanity, not to mention elite education, especially when terms like settler-colonialism and intersectionality are thrown into the mix.

Henderson is primarily concerned with the way that bad ideas — e.g., dismissal of matrimony and monogamy as passé, decriminalization of drugs — filter downstream in the culture, where they wreak havoc. As Charles Murray thoroughly documents in Breaking Apart, rates of marriage, children living in two-parent homes, and attendance at religious services have remained more or less constant in the most affluent quintile of the population, while plummeting in the lower quintiles. But on elite campuses, marriage is more likely to be portrayed as a prison for women, just as the same students for whom the words “capitalist oppression” roll trippingly off their tongues can be found the same day lining up for interviews with Goldman Sachs.

But the danger posed by the holders of luxury beliefs lies not only in their pernicious cultural influence. Holders of those views are quite comfortable with the use of coercion to advance their beliefs. Four-fifths of the super elites, interviewed in the Rasmussen poll cited above, would ban gas-powered cars. Just under 90 percent support strict rationing of meat, gas, and electricity, and 70 percent would ban all nonessential air travel.

The impact of these restrictions on the most affluent would likely be relatively small. They can afford electric cars, and would buy carbon offsets to circumvent some of the most onerous rationing or purchase them on the black market. And dollars to donuts that their air travel would be deemed necessary. The impact of such policies on the less affluent doesn’t figure into their calculations.

Elite campuses have been focal points for the limitations on free speech, and over half of the super elites educated on those campuses describe Americans as possessing too much freedom. That goes with a general contempt for markets, which allocate equal weight to the choices of the unenlightened and the enlightened.

That concern with “too much” freedom goes together with a remarkable trust in government among 70 percent of the elites and 90 percent of the super elites. Government is beneficent, in their eyes, because it can force people to do what the enlightened have determined is good. The elites know that their hands will be on the levers of coercion, particularly administrative agencies. (I would wager that the majority of those lower-level staffers staging mini-rebellions in the White House and the State Department over American support for Israel’s war on Hamas are holders of elite credentials.) Ronald Reagan’s quip, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,’ ” does not resonate with the elites.

Sixty years before Rob Henderson first stepped onto the Yale campus, another man already in his mid-twenties entered Harvard as an undergraduate. Like Henderson, Thomas Sowell came from a deprived background and served in the military before entering college. He was born in the Jim-Crow-era South, in a home without electricity, and served in the Marines during the Korean War, after dropping out of high school.

The 1969 black student riots at Cornell, where Sowell was an economics professor, and subsequent pressure at UCLA to lower his standards for students, soured Sowell on academia, which he left for a position as senior fellow at the Hoover Institution almost half a century ago.

Over 50 years and almost 40 books, most still in print and many of them standard texts in economics, and ten volumes of collected columns, Sowell has leveled a sustained critique at the dominant intellectual doctrines of our day, in particular those of his fellow black intellectuals, whom he views as having spectacularly failed the black masses by advocating for policies that may serve their interests but not those of the large majority of American blacks. (Only about one-third of his writing concerns issues of race, and he has penned classic works in intellectual, social, and economic history.) Jason Riley’s intellectual biography of Sowell is appropriately titled Maverick.

In a short new work, Social Justice Fallacies, which I would commend to every college student and social justice warrior, Sowell fleshes out many of Henderson’s observations, including the detachment of elite theorists from the lives of those whom they purport to advocate, and their sometimes subtle, sometimes not, contempt for those whom they view as their inferiors.

The second chapter compares the Progressive movement of the early decades of the 20th century to present-day progressives. At first glance, it would appear that little connects the two groups, apart from their position on the political left of their day. A strong streak of racial determinism characterized the early progressives, and many of their leading lights fretted about the disastrous impact of an influx of people of inferior races to America. By contrast, today’s progressives start from the premise that there are no differences between races and that all differential outcomes are a result of systemic racism.

In the earlier period, Professor Edward Ross, the chairman of the American Sociological Society, warned that America was headed toward “race suicide” by virtue of being inundated by people of “inferior types.” American universities and colleges taught hundreds of courses in eugenics, defined as the reduction or prevention of the survival of people considered genetically inferior. The most famous economist of the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes, was founder of the Eugenics Society at Cambridge.

Irving Fisher of Yale, the leading monetary economist of the period, advocated for the isolation or sterilization of those inferior types. Or as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, “Three generations of idiots are enough.” Sowell remarks upon how casually Fisher spoke of imprisonment of those who had committed no crime and the denial of normal life to all regarded as inferior. Not by accident did Hitler yemach shemo term a work on eugenics by Madison Grant, a leading conservationist and advocate for national parks and the protection of endangered species, his Bible.

At first glance, today’s progressives could not seem further removed from their namesakes. They are the opposite of racial determinists. In the modern progressive creed, all differences in outcomes between people of different races can have one and only one explanation: discrimination by the majority group.

Despite the opposite views on race, Sowell finds important continuities between the progressive movement of the early 20th century and that of today. Today’s progressives share, according to Sowell, their predecessors’ aversion to confronting empirical evidence that challenges their fixed verities, and a similar inclination to respond to empirical challenges with ad hominem insults — racist being the most powerful — rather than with counter-arguments and evidence.

And they are similarly inclined to use government power to coerce the less enlightened to behave in accord with their “expert” opinions, and too frequently oblivious to or unconcerned with the impact of their policy prescriptions on those constituting the “lower orders,” in their minds.

Woodrow Wilson, perhaps the leading figure of the Progressive era, served as president of Princeton before being elected president. Like many of his fellow progressives, he was an unabashed racist who insisted that black employees in government offices be physically segregated.

But what joins him to present-day progressives is his enormous confidence in government by experts. He presided over a massive expansion of the federal government and the creation of many of the largest administrative agencies, run by “experts.” He viewed the Constitution as outmoded for a modern age. But not to worry, government agencies headed by experts would usher in a “new freedom,” albeit not quite the freedom of a constitution limiting the power of government and enshrining individual rights.

Today, DEI bureaucracies on almost every campus seek to enforce right-thinking and enter into every aspect of university governance, including faculty hiring. Those mushrooming bureaucracies account for a large part in the explosion in higher education costs.

Sowell takes aim at the racial theories of the early progressives and contemporary ones alike. He seeks to empirically refute the claim that each race has a different “ceiling” for intelligence. (If anecdotes were data, his own genius would serve as refutation.) He met with and debated Professor Albert Jensen, one of the leading modern proponents of that view.

Sowell argues that environment, not inherent ceilings, underlies much of the difference in IQ between races. For instance, those raised in the Hebrides Isles and the hill country of Kentucky, though of pure Anglo-Saxon stock, have IQs comparable to American blacks. And like American blacks, their IQs tend to decline from childhood to adulthood. Social isolation appears to be the key. Sowell cites another study that blacks raised by white adoptive parents had IQs six points above the national average.

As an amusing example of the fallibility of IQ tests as measures of inherent capabilities, Sowell quotes Carl Brigham, who developed the SAT test. Brigham claimed on the basis of army mental tests administered in World War I that the myth that Jews are on average highly intelligent had been refuted. At least he had the good grace to admit by 1930, as Jews excelled on standardized tests, that his earlier conclusions had been without merit, and had failed to take into account that most immigrant children were raised in non-English-speaking homes.

Sowell is equally effective skewering the present-day progressive belief that all differences in outcomes are explained as products of racial discrimination. He chafes at the resultant cult of victimization that stands in the way of examination of cultural behavioral factors that prevent black advancement.

He insists that behaviors count and explain a great deal of the differences in income levels between different racial groups. For instance, black married couples have experienced poverty rates of less than 10 percent for decades, which is less than the national poverty rate for all families. And black married couples have higher income levels than white single-parent families. The problem is that black marriage rates overall are lower.

It is often said that the high illegitimacy rate in the black community is attributable to the “legacy of slavery.” But for nearly a century after slavery, the rates were relatively low. In 1940, they were one-quarter of what they are today. Sowell suggests that the rapid expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s explains much of that rise, as births to single mothers have also risen rapidly in Sweden, the welfare paradise, where there is no legacy of slavery.

Evidence cited to show discrimination against black children by “white supremacists” — e.g., discipline rates two and a half times those of white students — proves the opposite, Sowell suggests. For white students are themselves twice as likely to be disciplined as Asian students. Perhaps, then, disruptive behavior, rather than discrimination, explains differential rates of discipline. To get rid of school discipline in the name of equity leads to schools in which it is impossible to learn, and ends up harming black students, he argues. Attacks on discriminatory school discipline is thus another one of those “luxury beliefs,” like defunding the police.

One of the major causes of the burst housing bubble of 2007, which Sowell predicted, was government pressure on lenders to greatly reduce credit requirements for mortgages. The regulators’ theory was that blacks were being discriminated against in the mortgage market, as evidenced by the higher rate of rejection for black mortgage applicants. The only problem with the discrimination hypothesis, Sowell shows, was that black-owned banks rejected black mortgage applicants at even higher rates.

The hypothesis that different income levels are exclusively a function of discrimination founders on the fact that other minority groups — e.g., Asians — have, on average, incomes well above the medium national income, and dark-skinned Asian Indians earn on average $39,000 more per annum than full-time, year-round white workers.

The victimization narrative, in Sowell’s eyes, is not only unhelpful but damaging to blacks, as it shifts the focus from one of encouraging the types of behaviors that are associated with success. In the immediate wake of slavery, and for nearly a century afterwards, almost all graduates of all-black Dunbar High in Washington, D.C., went on to college. Black and Hispanic kids in New York City charter schools are six times as likely to pass city math proficiency exams as their counterparts in the regular public schools. Why? Sowell wants to know.

Focusing on the behaviors that foster success rather than wallowing in a narrative of discrimination — which he personally experienced in his younger years and does not deny still exists today — is for Sowell the key to black advancement. And that requires more empirical study and less airy theorizing.

Many of the panaceas that derive from au courant theories have been conclusively refuted on the ground. Black political power in most of America’s largest cities, for instance, has done little to change the lives of the vast majority of black citizens. And affirmative action has, in Sowell’s view, reinforced stereotypes of black inferiority, among whites and, even worse, among blacks themselves, while doing little to help inner city blacks.

Without a clear-eyed attention to empirical evidence and an openness to debate based on facts and logic, in Sowell’s terminology, we are forever consigned to the realm of “luxury beliefs.”

[juceynightmare]

dating 101 (18+) part 3 - cody rhodes x reader

my masterlist

dating 101 (18+) masterlist

pairing(s): cody rhodes x reader, roman reigns x reader

warning(s): swearing, sexual harassment, protective!cody

genre(s): college!au, slow burn, fluff

|| previous part || next part ||

the rest of the day was filled with walking, stopping to talk about a building, more walking, stopping by the dining commons to eat, more walking, talking to a few people y/n had met that had created their own sub-group amongst the group, and even more walking. did she mention how much walking they had to do? the group was currently sitting down at a table for dinner at one of the many dining commons on campus, and y/n was seated between two people who were definitely not cody, but that was because cody was part of his own sub-group already.

on one side of her sat a girl she met named sasha, a fellow woman in stem who was majoring in biomedical engineering, and on the other side of her sat a computer science major named dolph. y/n had wanted to get to know sasha, she was part of the same sub-group as y/n and they had similar majors. however, most of her time talking and socializing amongst the group was stolen by dolph.

dolph was nice, she determined. she didn’t know it was possible to meet someone who was more into his own looks than cody, but dolph had proven her wrong. beside the man’s self-indulgent personality, he had been complimenting y/n and actually listened to her rambling. they had sat beside each other at every meal of the day and were always at the back of the group talking amongst themselves unless someone else addressed them.

y/n had finished her dinner quickly, not having grabbed as much food as she wasn’t feeling too particularly hungry. she laughed at dolph’s exaggerated telling of his high school days and how rambunctious he was.

“see, i don’t know why you expected a different outcome.” y/n scolded playfully, nudging dolph with her elbow. “if you’re going to decide to do donuts in the school parking lot, why don’t you do it, oh i don’t know, not during school hours maybe?” she teased, flashing dolph a wide smile.

that was the first time y/n had initiated any physical contact with dolph, and although she meant it in a teasing manner, dolph seemed to have taken it as the ok to be more touchy with y/n. he slung his arm across her shoulders, letting it hang there as he argued, “where’s the fun in doing it when others aren’t there to witness?”

dolph may not have noticed it, but cody sure had noticed the way y/n had tensed up under dolph’s arm. he shoveled the last bite of his food into his mouth, nodding at eve’s words as she spoke beside him, although he wasn’t paying much attention. cody knew that you weren’t exactly the touchy type, especially when others touched you, which was why he and ted had always made it a point to only lay a hand on you if absolutely needed. knowing this, he made a note to keep an eye on dolph. the braindead hunk couldn’t even notice how much you had tensed up.

hunter came by around the table, and announced to his group, “alright looks like everyone’s done eating. as you all know, after this is the football game but it isn’t a mandatory event so you’re free to head back to your dorms if you’d like. if you’re coming to the game, follow me! if not, then it was great having you all around and welcome to the university!”

everyone immediately scooted their chairs out and stood up, picking up their dishes so they could drop it off at the dish return. y/n was one of the first to stand up, letting dolph’s arm fall off her shoulders as she light out a breath that she didn’t know she was holding him.

it’s ok. she reminded herself. dolph doesn’t know that i don’t like being touched. maybe he’s also one of the touchy ones like how the boys are.

as she reached for her plate, it was quickly scooped up by dolph who smiled down at her. “don’t worry, i got it. don’t forget your bag though.” dolph reminded her, nodding to y/n’s tote bag that hung off the side of the chair.

y/n thanked him as she grabbed her bag and slung it over her shoulders. “are you going to the game?” dolph asked her, walking alongside her as they followed the group to drop off their dishes.

“no, i’m going to head back to the dorm and go watch some videos maybe.” y/n told him, already searching around the mass of people in front of them for her tall brunette manwhore of a friend.

“mind if i join you?” dolph asked, dropping off their dishes.

she thought about it for a moment. would it be a bad idea to have dolph come over? ah, who cares? she’s had ted over to her room without cody being there and vice versa, what made dolph any different.

“i don’t mind at all, besides, i think my friend is going to the game to score.” she laughed, nodding towards cody.

eve was practically hanging off of cody’s arm, feeling up on his bicep as they talked with their already forming friend group.

“but let me go double check first, come with me.” she told dolph, motioning dolph to follow her as she made her way over to the group. she tapped cody’s shoulder, smiling when he turned to greet her.

“oh hey y/n! you going to the game? you can tag along with us!” he told her, turning towards the group. he opened his mouth, about to introduce y/n to them, in case they forgot her introduction from this morning, when he was cut off.

“oh actually, dolph and i are gonna head back to the dorm. i can trust your smart self to make it back safe right?” she asked, not noticing the way cody had immediately began to size up dolph.

“oh! i’ll bring him back it’s okay.” eve piped up, squeezing cody’s arm as she stared up at the man.

y/n smiled politely, trying not to say anything about the way eve was trying way too hard to get cody’s attention. she knew, ted knew, and cody knew, that if you truly wanted to get into cody’s bed, it wasn’t all too much of a challenge.

“alright, we’ll see you! come on dolph! have fun codes!” y/n called out, waving goodbye to the group before turning on her heel and making her way out of the building. she knew dolph would be able to catch up to her - the perks of having long legs.

“so, what building are you in?” dolph asked, walking beside her with his hands in his pockets.

“celadon.” she answered, turning to look at him when she heard him gasp.

“no way. i’m right beside you. i’m in viridian.” dolph smiled.

“looks like i’ll be seeing a lot of you around, huh?” she mused as they walked up to the door of her building. she swiped her id card which served as the key, and dolph opened the door for her.

“you just met me and you think you can get rid of me so soon?” he teased, stepping off to the side to let her walk in first.

dolph followed behind y/n as she lead the way to her dorm room, and once they arrived, dolph couldn’t hide his excitement.

“i didn’t know you were in a single room. and no neighbors either?” he questioned, walking into the room and noting how y/n had kept the door wide open.

“nope! i heard enough terrible roommate stories to scare me away for a lifetime, so i decided i wanted my own room. i got real lucky with the no neighbors though.” y/n laughed. she pulled out her chair for dolph to sit in, “please sit! welcome to my humble abode.”

dolph sat down in the chair, leaning back on it and turning to face y/n as she sat up on her bed. he scooted closer to her, positioning himself to be right in front of her.

“so, do you always keep the door open when you invite guys over?” dolph questioned, his voice lowering to a sultry tone.

of course, with y/n’s inexperience, she hadn’t thought too much about the change in tone. it didn’t change too much from how he was speaking to her earlier.

“well, i’ve only ever had cody or ted over. cody’s the guy from our orientation group and ted’s his roommate. but yeah, it’s usually wide open throughout the day. i only close it if it’s quiet hours and we’re still in here, if i’m going to sleep, or if i’m just not in the room at all.” she answered, tensing up once dolph’s hand had found its resting place on her knee.

“and do you always wear outfits like this? you’re absolutely breathtaking.” dolph whispered, his eyes lingering over y/n’s form.

oh. this was not where y/n had expected this to go. but maybe she was reading the situation wrong.

dolph stood up, resting his hands on y/n’s waist and leaning down to bring his face near hers.

okay, no she was reading the situation completely correct. y/n placed her hands on dolph’s chest and slightly pushed him as a warning.

“please don’t.” she whispered, her voice shaking with something like fear.

“then why’d you invite me in here, baby. i’ve been chatting you up the whole day, you invite me back to your room, and you expect me to not make a move?” dolph questioned, pulling y/n in closer to him which caused her to yelp.

“dolph, no. i don’t want to do this with you.” y/n let out another yelp when dolph began to lean in, turning her head so he kissed her cheek instead. “dolph no, stop!” she squeezed her eyes shut and attempted to push him away as he continued to pull her in closer.

suddenly, dolph disappeared. his touch was removed from her and she could finally breathe.

“hey asshole, she told you to stop.”

she opened her eyes at cody’s voice, turning to see cody holding dolph close to him by the collar of dolph’s shirt. dolph had his hands raised up defensively, clearly not wanting to start a fight with cody.

“my bad bro. i didn’t hear her.” dolph defended as cody began to drag him out of the room. although, it didn’t seem like dolph made little effort to struggle against him.

“even if you didn’t hear her, you still could see how she’s physically reacting. now get lost. if i see you near her, i’ll beat your face in.” cody threatened, shoving dolph down to the ground of the hallway.

cody slammed the door shut in dolph’s face, glaring at him until his vision was cut by the door. although he knew that the doors could only be opened with a key, cody turned the deadbolt of the door for good measure.

“cody i-“

cody turned to look at y/n, and that was when y/n had made a note to never get on cody’s bad side. the man looked furious, his face quite literally a dark shade of red from anger.

“are you okay?” he asked, walking over to y/n. “he didn’t get any farther right? i got here in time?” cody continued to question, looking over y/n’s figure before quickly turning his head to face the wall. “your, your skirt. he flipped it up.” he told her.

y/n’s face turned beet red as she quickly flipped down her skirt to cover herself up. she squeezed her legs tight together and cleared her throat. “you can look now. and i’m okay… thank you.” she said softly, looking up at cody as he met her gaze.

she could tell her answer wasn’t good enough for him, so she gave him a reassuring smile.

it did seem like her smile reassured cody enough, the man visibly relaxing and sitting himself down on y/n’s chair. he looked at her and sighed, bringing his hand up to pinch his nose bridge right between his eyes.

“what happened to that girl?” y/n questioned, realizing that it hadn’t been too long since her and dolph arrived at the dorms. “or those cheerleaders you were planning in flirting with?”

cody sighed again, bringing his hand down. he leaned back in her chair and stared up at the ceiling. “i got the ick.” he answered, to which y/n’s eyes widened in shock.

“you. cody rhodes. infamous manwhore. man who’s already fucked like 3 different girls since arriving in the dorms. man who allegedly has 4 baby mommas from high school. got the ick.” y/n let out, smiling sheepishly when cody’s head suddenly shot up to glare at her for her high school comments.

“first off, i already told you i never got a girl pregnant or even had a pregnancy scare, they’re just making rumors about me because they wish they got to sleep with me. and second!” cody began, pointing an accusing finger at y/n who had began to giggle like a little schoolgirl. he paused before bringing his hand down and leaning back into his seat. “yes, i got the ick.”

“well? what’d she do?” y/n asked, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. to say she was invested was an understatement.

cody groaned, rubbing his face with his hands. “she was a bad kisser. like, i don’t know how to describe it. you know how like when you have your first makeout session or sometimes even first kiss it’s typically really bad and messy? somehow this was worse than that.” he complained.

y/n paused at his words. when she didn’t say anything for a while, cody met her gaze. he couldn’t decipher what emotions were running through y/n’s mind.

“i… don’t know.” she admitted softly, her face turning red in embarrassment. y/n quickly turned her face away from cody so he couldn’t see how bad her blush was becoming.

“you don’t know what?” cody asked, confusion dripping down his chin as well as spilling out on to his face.

“i never kissed anyone.” she admitted, bringing her hand up to rub the back of her neck.

at this, cody’s eyes widened in bewilderment.

“what? like ever?” he questioned loudly, watching as y/n nodded her head in confirmation. cody could suddenly feel himself get angry once again. “well thank god i fucking came back. imagine if that shithead had been your first kiss. you probably would never want to kiss anyone after that. he can’t even tell when you’re uncomfortable so how would he know how to kiss?” he scoffed, crossing his arms and rolling his eyes in frustration.

she didn’t say anything in reply, lost in her thoughts. cody didn’t say anything either, letting his anger lull over although he kept picturing the scenario that he had walked in on. and to think that dolph guy thought he could pull a fast one on y/n. the silence that filled the room was tense for two different reasons: one of them was overthinking and the other was trying not to go on a manhunt.

“is… is it bad if i don’t know how to kiss though? like if i were to start dating someone in college, do you think they’d mind that i’ve never kissed anyone though?” y/n questioned, turning to look at cody.

“depends.” cody answered with a shrug, uncrossing his arms. “it genuinely depends on the person. me though? i’d prefer having someone that has experience, you know. i already went through the whole learning from someone and teaching another.”

y/n hummed in response, thinking over cody’s answer. looks like she’ll just have to hope that whoever she ends up liking, they won’t mind teaching her a thing or two.

she shuddered at the thought that dolph was almost her first kiss, and suddenly became hyper aware of all the places he had put his hands on her. y/n wiped away at her cheek where he had kissed her, and then moved on to wipe at her hips.

“what are you doing?” cody questioned as he watched his friend suddenly go feral with wiping away at her body.

“i was thinking about the fact that dolph was almost my first kiss and now i’m like hyperaware of all the places he’s touched and - it feels so wrong.” she complained, her wiping becoming more frantic as she began to process more of what had almost happened if cody hadn’t stepped in.

suddenly, she felt cody grab her hands to stop her. she looked up at him with wide eyes, not even catching that he had stood up from his seat and that he had even moved over to her.

“c’mere y/n.” cody whispered, guiding y/n to wrap her arms around his waist before wrapping his own arms around her. y/n felt cody hug her gently, and she tensed up in his arms. it wasn’t long before she melted in his embrace, relaxing against him and pressing her face into his chest.

“you’re very warm… and smell good.” she mumbled against his chest. she felt him laugh, causing her to smile against him. y/n pulled her face out of his chest so she could look up at him with a wide smile.

“is this better than his touch?” he questioned as he looked down at her.

she nodded her head tightening her arms around his waist as she pressed the side of her face against his chest. she shut her eyes and breathed out,

“that shouldn’t even be a question.”

|| next part ||

[fieldbears]

Hi! Thank you for doing this AMA! How did you get started in on your career path? I feel like I keep hearing either "know somebody who has faith in your ability to write technical documents" or "write technical documents for fun" both of which I'm not certain how to start.

Great question! In grade school, my friends and I were little nerds who wrote and traded stories with one another. We were giving honest feedback, learning, writing more, rinse and repeat. A couple of summers, we took writing workshop classes. We learned the general style of workshop critiquing. Being able to deliver and receive criticism is a valuable life and career skill.

Fast forward, I went to college, majored in English with an informal focus on modern literature, and took more creative writing classes! Having been in a workshop environment as a kid REALLY helped prepare me for the ones in college. Not everyone in those classes knew how to receive even very gentle criticism. Learning how to re-calibrate for them was its own learning experience. Another skill!

Fast forward again and I'm in the job market. I thankfully had a friend whose company was hiring, and that started my personal ball rolling. I got in through a friend, yes, but my career advances have been because I'm incredible. :)

But don't get it twisted. Most of the stuff in my background was completely unnecessary to getting an entry-level position. They helped me keep the job, and get more jobs, and get promotions, but nobody is expecting all that workshop experience. If you have average or higher people skills, you can teach yourself how to gently deliver the news that someone is functionally illiterate and you need to fix their work.

What you should have: a 4-year degree majoring in English, a relevant STEM field, or Communications, in that order. You should be ready to clean up a "test" document as part of your interview. You should probably pay close attention to the job description you're applying for, because 'technical documentation' is a really broad field and you need to be able to prove you're ready for whatever flavor they're asking for. Are you writing instructions (how to operate a device)? Processes (how to onboard an employee)? How much of your job will be interviews with SMEs (Subject Matter Experts)? Are you writing a new document at all or updating something that's outdated or untested? You can do some light testing of software, right?

If the interviewers are smart, they will ask you your plan when you're asked to make a new document. Have an answer ready. The information I always want first is: who is this for? Let's say it's an internal guide for some software your company uses. Is everyone on the project an engineer who's very familiar with computers? Or, is it a more generic office, where a 64-year old named Eustace will need very clear instructions on where the start button is? That information is a starting point for figuring out what your document should be.

So tl;dr: 1) Have a relevant degree. 2) Know the specifics of the position. 3) Be ready to walk interviewers through the steps you'd start taking to make a requested document.

Hope this helps <3

[rjzimmerman]

As a native of Gary, Indiana, and a former "summer employee" at U.S. Steel (to pay for my college education), I'm obviously invested in what happens to the Gary Works of U.S. Steel. This story answers several of my questions, and puts me on the "no" side of this proposal. Excerpt from this story from Grist:

U.S. Steel, once the world’s largest company of any kind, can take substantial credit for the growth of American industrial power in the 20th century. But in recent decades, it’s been shuttering mills and shedding workers. Now, the iconic Pittsburgh-based manufacturer is set to be acquired by a Japanese steelmaker, Nippon Steel — if the federal government allows the deal to proceed.

Earlier this month, reports emerged that the Biden administration is preparing to block the nearly $15 billion merger on the grounds that it presents a threat to America’s national security interests. The United Steelworkers union opposes it, fearing future layoffs and weaker labor protections under new ownership. So do both major candidates for president, who are vying for votes in the Rust Belt. Supporters of the deal, like the Washington Post editorial board and the nonpartisan think tank The Atlantic Council, have cast the politicians’ opposition as election-season pandering, and argued that the national security rationale on which Biden may block it is flimsy. But one area, in which the question of whether the merger goes through could be particularly consequential, has gone largely unremarked upon in the conversation: what it means for the climate.

Some environmentalists say the deal could slow the crucial progress that the steel industry must make in order to decarbonize. Their argument stems from the fact that both U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel have been slow, compared to industry peers, to adopt the most impactful decarbonization technologies, even with federal funding available in the U.S. to do so.

The most common process by which primary steel is produced is massively carbon-intensive. The reasons for this lie in chemistry. Steel is made from iron, but the form in which iron ore occurs in the Earth’s crust is mostly iron oxide (similar to rust). In order to get usable iron from it, one needs to remove the oxygen. For centuries, iron-makers have accomplished this by using coke, a fuel made from coal, which is heated alongside iron ore in a blast furnace at such high temperatures that the iron melts into a liquid while the oxygen bonds with the carbon in the coke and produces carbon dioxide.

Blast furnaces are responsible for the lion’s share of carbon emissions from steelmaking, and the inextricability of carbon emissions from the ironmaking process is a large part of the reason why, overall, steelmaking is responsible for 7 percent of global carbon emissions, and a quarter of industrial carbon emissions. These percentages will likely grow as other sectors of the economy are decarbonized. In the U.S., demand for steel is also expected to grow dramatically over the next decade to provide the raw material of the industrial growth sparked by the Inflation Reduction Act and the planned buildout of clean energy infrastructure and transmission lines. For these reasons, the task of decarbonizing steel is as urgent as it is difficult and expensive.

Fortunately, there is a solution on offer that has recently become viable due to new technological advances — and one that the Biden administration has sought to heavily subsidize: replacing blast furnaces with a process called direct reduction, and using hydrogen as a reducing agent in place of carbon, ultimately discharging water rather than carbon dioxide. “The chemistry is sound, it’s being built, it’s been piloted and demonstrated,” said Yong Kwon, a senior advisor with the Sierra Club’s Industrial Transformation Campaign. “The question is now: Will industries adopt it?”

There are eight operating steel mills in the United States that make “primary” steel (newly created steel, rather than the generally lower-quality “secondary” steel produced from scrap metal). Three are owned by U.S. Steel. Cleveland-Cliffs, the owner of the other five, has also made an offer to buy U.S. Steel and has been much more proactive in making the shift to greener production. “The Department of Energy has made available a great deal of money to do partnerships with industry to demonstrate the value of decarbonized projects,” said Todd Tucker, director of the industrial policy and trade program at the Roosevelt Institute. Both Cleveland-Cliffs and U.S. Steel have availed themselves of such funding to embark on decarbonization programs. U.S. Steel has partnered with the Department of Energy on carbon capture projects at several of their steel mills, and funded research and development of hydrogen-based ironmaking technology. The company also plans to install a carbon capture program at a blast furnace at its steel mill in Gary, Indiana, which it says will turn up to 50,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually into limestone — a tiny fraction of that facility’s overall emissions. But critics note that U.S. Steel has yet to take a step as ambitious as its rival by actually replacing one of its blast furnaces with direct reduction of iron.

The stakes of the potential U.S. Steel-Nippon Steel merger are perhaps best illustrated in the city of Gary, Indiana, which was built in 1906 by U.S. Steel to house workers at its Gary Works steel mill. That mill is home to the country’s largest and most carbon-emitting blast furnace — and it’s nearing the end of its lifespan. This situation hypothetically presents the furnace’s owner with an ideal opportunity to switch to a cleaner technology, with federal funding on the table to do so. But in August, Nippon Steel announced its prospective plans for Gary Works, which include a $300 million investment in relining the furnace to extend its lifespan for another 20 years. With this announcement, Kwon said, “Not only have they back in Japan not pursued solutions that we feel are responsible; they’ve now explicitly come out and said that they’re not going to pursue the solution that is on the table for reducing the climate change and public health harms that are currently produced by the iron-making process.”

[loving-family-poll]

i fear we are departing from incest but i love to hear myself talk so i shall tell you about my sister's complex about me. first we have to establish some things: my sister is older than me (the oldest of us all, i'm second oldest, just mentioning it bc me not being the youngest feels important here), my sister has an inferiority complex that stems from me being the successful one (probably will come up later but i was a very smart kid and ended up skipping so many grades that i started college at 15), and that my sister has always had bad anxiety and is very very sensitive to rejection

so. let's start from the beginning. our father left us young, didn't pay child support, was generally an asshole, but most importantly he would visit for one reason: me. i was the favorite because, as i mentioned, i was a smart kid and he is very success-oriented so naturally he took to me (and off-topic but this happens so often. like very very success driven people have been weirdly into me since i was a little kid. weird shit but i've used it to my advantage cough cough getting a kid flunked and almost expelled) so anyway our father visits us just for me, even tells me about all the women he was cheating on my mom with before they got divorced. and my sister? my sister has bad anxiety, she's sensitive to being left out. and more than that she has very very strong rejection sensitivity. so how do you think it'd feel to be the oldest child and yet be ignored by our father (this did not affect my other siblings they were too young). so this puts me above her in her mind

she fails a lot in school and this wrecks her confidence, especially since i've always been greatly successful in school. she's pushed aside by her father for me, she's pushed away by her teachers for me (to the point that i would have a teacher for a short time before i'd test out and they'd still call her my name no matter how long she had them). she also has very poor social skills so she was never liked by her peers while i was funny and i was smart and i was such a goody-two-shoes brat but teachers adored me to the point that i could get away with anything i wanted (yes i was pulling shit i think i had a habit of attacking one of my teachers and everyone was cool with it) and she'd be scolded for any little issues because she wasn't as liked + she was more frustrating (she had untreated adhd for a hot minute). keep in mind that most of this was happening while we were both under 10/11

so. you'd think that she would have some deep-seated resentment against me. and you would be correct! now idk what you know about psychology and chances are it's bs anyway (<-psych major that does not trust the field in the slightest) but there's this nifty little concept called reaction formation. it's freudian so. take that as you will. but basically it's just when a strong emotion switches from one to another. for example: hate to love, love to hate… resentment to adoration?

so that's my theory for the basis of this. she has an inferiority complex and a sensitivity to rejection and i was everything she wasn't and for whatever reason her kid brain said hey, why not love my sister instead. and honestly this wasn't that like. prevalent until we teenagers, because i became very neurotic and anxious and developed some disorders you know how it is. and now we see something new in my sister: she likes to take care of people. if i couldn't do something she would do it for me, if someone was pushing my boundaries she would enforce them. i basically spent all of middleschool hiding away in our home (i was homeschooled atp) with only her for company since i'd hide in our room. so she;s taken on the role of being my protector. probably because if she would never be better than me, at least she could be the one protecting me. it made her important. it made her necessary. it made her feel needed. and that is when i catch on. i encouraged her a bit, started praising her, thanking her for any little thing she did, calling for her anytime i needed help because she just loves to feel needed so badly. and yeah maybe that was manipulative and maybe it was wrong but i was also like. 14 or 15 when i started doing this

anyway so she has this whole complex about needing to protect me so that she can feel needed and it's all fueled by her inferiority complex that honestly drives so much of what she does. i find it highly amusing.

so yeah. she's basically a dog to me. tell her she's good and give her a treat and she'll do what you want. and if she does something that makes me upset she folds so fucking quickly it's wild. it's that fear of rejection. she could never stand for me of all people to drop her

and to the person who wanted us in the tournament together sorry but we are just weird about each other in a not-so-incesty way but the vibes are kinda there

The way I was glued to this ask reading SO intently. What you two have going on is so much weirder than if you'd just fucked (complimentary)

[sexhaver]

How do u feel about ai? I feel like im “wrong” for being really fascinated by it (ik its a broad subject but its all so cool). Should i study ai and data science in college or will i be contributing to some like evil force idk

to the extent that AI is an "evil force" (pretty strong language imo), it's entirely due to how it's wielded by assholes for capitalist ends and not anything inherent to the technology itself*. that being said, like any other STEM field these days, the majority of your employment opportunities (and almost all of the high-paying ones) will probably involve using it for those "evil" ends because that's where the money is. this is endemic to STEM, unfortunately. my alma mater's career fair has reserved table spots for the Army, the Navy, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, etc. i could be making six figures right now if i hadn't turned down an offer from Lincoln Labs in 2019 to make missile guidance systems because i figured my conscience and ability to live with myself/sleep at night was worth more than that.

sorry, that kind of got away from me for a bit there. basically just study what you want because trying to force yourself into a sub-field of STEM that you hate will make you suicidal, but keep a finger on the pulse of the field because "the coolest/most useful thing to do with a given technology" and "the most profitable thing to do with a given technology" are so far apart it's actually insane i mean neurodivergent

[post-academic]

The Hamilton Project has published an illuminating interactive infographic that allows detailed exploration of the career distributions of various major graduates. In fact, researchers have found that in a diverse array of fields, a large majority of graduates do not end up working in the most common occupation in their specific major. Given that students’ post-college career paths are so difficult to predict based on their academic concentrations, it could be argued that looking at earnings by occupation or career track is perhaps more indicative than college major alone.

In addition, The New York Times also finds that any earnings advantage that STEM majors hold over humanities majors fades by age 40. There are two major reasons that contribute to this - first is that technical skills become obsolete quicker as younger graduates enter the workforce. In a recent working paper, Harvard economist David Deming calculated the change in required skills for different jobs over time. He found that “help-wanted ads for jobs like software developer and engineer were more likely to ask for skills that didn’t exist a decade earlier. And the jobs of 10 years ago often required skills that have since become obsolete.” This higher skill turnover in STEM fields is correlated with the relatively slower earnings growth of STEM graduates between graduation and age 40. Let us take the example of the closing gap between computer science majors and history majors. Deming reports that “male computer science or engineering majors roughly doubled their starting salaries by age 40, to an average of $124,458”, which is compared to social science and history majors, “who earned $131,154 – an average that is lifted, in part, by high-paying jobs in management, business and law.”

The second reason for this closing gap is that a liberal arts education fosters soft skills that don’t tend to expire, such as critical thinking, people skills, and problem-solving skills. While much more difficult to quantify and while they do not create immediate pathways to high-paying first jobs, “they have long-run value in a wide variety of careers,” especially in managerial and leadership positions. Liberal arts and humanities majors are also more likely to enter careers where midcareer salaries are the highest - including in upper management and business occupations, as well as careers that require advanced degrees such as law.

[celestie0]

what do you think about grad school and maybe getting a masters or phd? like for you😭 i’m curious what more do you feel about academia

hiii bb!! ouu yeah i think with the way things are in job market rn, at least for a science degree, having a masters is a MUST and phd too if you want to teach or go into research...just an undergraduate degree for any STEM job i have noticed doesn't suffice unless you're like a comp sci major or have hella connections or something lmfaooo (or if you're a trust fund baby)

i'm actually going to med school so my four years of undergrad were spent working towards that goal, and not really with thoughts of phd or masters, but i did think about doing a masters during my gap year (which would've been this past year) since my school offered a few one years masters programs that i was interested in. it was gonna be a sort of back up plan for me in case i didn't get in anywhere, but ultimately i just had faith in my application n didn't want to spend money on a year of masters tuition haha

but it's hard for me to say for other fields, such as humanities, on what i think of the necessities of masters/phd programs...i'd imagine it's the same though, you'd probably need to pursue a lot of higher education to be qualified to teach or publish etc. in premed, you've got options of going to nursing school, PA school, med school, so i guess there are ways to pivot that don't involve masters programs if you still wanted to be a healthcare provider

i did watch an interesting video recently about the whole trap of the phd/masters pipeline, where students get a degree and think they'll be able to land a decent job post grad from wishful thinking, spend lots of time unsuccessful in the job market, then scramble to apply to grad school, and then even if they feel as though the phd program they're in isn't really giving them what they want from it, they don't want to quit because at that point it'll feel like sunken cost, and it damages their mental health and motivation and is basically this recurring loop where the system forces students to continuously stay in school and do excessive amount of research/work for criminally low compensation, just to become overqualified candidates for barely minimally paying jobs. ofc all in the name to benefit the insanely rich and wealthy. honestly most grad students i meet are stressed and so incredibly jaded, i can't imagine that it's easy on them at all. a lot of universities hardly pay them any sort of livable wage for the work that they do

as for academia in general, i think it's worth it to become educated, as it can open doors. obviously there are different paths for all people, some people choose not to go to school, some people go to trade school, others go to school much later in life. i remember i worked w this one doctor who was a mechanic for thirty years and he went back to school to get his undergrad degree and then went to med school, all while he was in his 50s, and now he's a practicing physician! i thought that was really incredible and inspiring. school is something that's there for you whenever you want it, need it, or feel ready for it. i think it's worthy to invest in your education, but you have to go into it knowing that you're going to make the most of it. in that, pursue higher education if you have a plan of why you're there and what you're going to do when you're there, and not just for the sake of earning a degree or putting off working because you'd rather just stay a student. the reason why someone from harvard might work at the same job as someone who went to community college is ultimately because the person who went to CC might've made more of their experience n harnessed connections/skills n probably had a much more clear idea of what they wanted to do with the education they were earning compared to someone who might've been coasting through a reputable school because once they got in, that was all they cared about (lol i sound bitter saying this, no hate to big name schools, but it's such a common misconception that just because you get a degree from like an ivy league, you'll be set for life. and same applies vice versa. some of the smartest ppl i know are people who did CC for two years and then transferred to a four year university. they saved hella money and got the same degree in the end, with the same exact if not better job opportunities. similarly, i've worked at clinics/hospitals where some of the doctors went to UCLA and others went to caribbean med school, but they all ended up at the same place in the end)

GOD THIS BECAME SO LONG i swear whenever i answer asks on my computer it becomes an essay loool but yea these are just my general opinions about college, higher education, and academia in general? i hope this answers and that i didn't misinterpret the question hahah but thank u for the ask bb!!

[fuck-customers]

I hate explaining the basics of apps and web access to people under 40. I hate explaining it period but especially to the ones who should understand it better than anyone. And it’s always the dumbest of the dumb asking for help. I don’t care how much of a snotty bitch I come off as, part of my depression stems from having to take calls from the most stupid, trashiest, rudest, most bottom of the barrel members of society. I’m sick of the monotony of this job, I’m sick of explaining the difference between withdrawing and borrowing money, I’m sick of what I do to provide for my household.

Meanwhile there are people my age and younger doing non-phone work that pays the same or more. What they do just looks more intellectually interesting on paper, and I’m shallow and want that. I don’t mean to just dump all of my feelings here, because I know it deviates from what’s typically posted here, but it’s been culminating. From thinking I wasted time in college by choosing a not-as-easily lucrative major, to thinking I made the mistake of putting myself in debt to go to school, to thinking I should have made different career choices, I’m fucking unhappy, and my job reminds me every day of how I failed in some areas and am not as successful as my peers (some of whom don’t have degrees). It’s exhausting too trying to get out of a phone role, but your company denied you those opportunities repeatedly, regardless of how qualified you are. I shouldn’t have suicidal ideations because of work. I’m actually the most stable I’ve ever been, and I shouldn’t have thoughts of how nice it would be to be dead because in death I don’t have to worry about being a failure, being behind, not making and saving as much money as I want to and just having to feel all of these things as a 20-something year old. My partner and my cats are my only reasons for doing this.

TLDR: my work sucks and exacerbates my already deteriorating mental health.

Posted by admin Rodney.

[mechatronophilia]

I want to go to college and study mechanical engineering, but I'm slow and don't understand math, and my mom thinks I should do art or writing . . . :// I just wanna be a smart stem major guy. What do you think?

a noble goal. youve got options

engineering is rough, i'll be honest. the only degree path that's more math-intensive, aside from applied mathematics, is probably astrophysics. if you pursue this you'll have to very quickly identify, troubleshoot, and patch any issues you have with math. this is sub-optimal but workable. it's taken me a couple years of introspection and medication to identify the ways my disabilities affect my ability to do school, and it's very possible and very difficult. (the people in my family who struggle the most with written math are also the most mechanically apt.)

if that feels daunting (and it is for me as well, and i believe in you), think about what specifically you want to do in stem. what are you passionate about, what impact do you want to have on the world? what technical things are you best at and/or most interested in? what are you absolute dogshit at? what tools feel best in your hand?

stem is big and there's a lot of ways of fitting into it. when i went to tech school for IT I didn't have to do any math, and there are plenty of trades that pay just as well and are just as sexy, for lack of a better word, if underrated. look into the career fields you're thinking of going into after college and see if they all require mechanical engineering degrees, and see if there's another, more comfortable way of being part of that field. i really recommend vocational school and community college in general. lots of programs, low tuition.

and remember: nothing has to be permanent. if you're not dead yet, you can always pivot to something else. our culture says otherwise, but if you weren't interested in taking what you're given and rebuilding it better, you wouldn't be here. :)