#the one time my phd was useful

[prlssprfctn]

I know the fandom mostly agrees that Jason is that one always unemployed sibling in the family, but let me offer you a slightly enhanced concept - unemployed sibling Jason, who is the busiest sibling in the family.

No one can get hold of him. Like, ever. And it is not like he is lying, he is genuinely always has something else to do! Something random and unexpected, and, honestly, all his family can think is: what the hell?

Bruce, frowning: Remind me again, why the dinner in the circle of the family today doesn't suit your... schedule?

Jason, shrugging: I have a book club evening in the nursing home. We are discussing Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad tonight. Can't miss it. Also, Jennet-

Alfred, confused: Who is Jennet?

Jason: One of the old ladies in the nursing home, duh... Anyway, yeah, Jennet is having a birthday. She would be hella mad if her favourite grandson missed it, you know?

Bruce: ...Jason, you are not her-

Jason: (leaves)

Dick: Hey, wanna join me for tomorrow morning's training?

Jason, sighs: Sounds nice, but I have classes tomorrow.

Dick, confused: Classes? Since when you are enrolled in college?

Jason: Oh, no. I am a substitute teacher in one of the school's around.

Dick: WHAT-

Damian, calling Jason in the middle of the day: Can you pick me up from school? Others are busy, there is an emergency in the town.

Jason: Damn, sorry, kid, but I am not in the country right now. By the way, do you want to talk with your mother?

Damian: ...What that supposed to mean? Where are you?

Jason: I was planning to visit All-Caste, but first decided to meet up with Talia. I am kinda in Egypt right now, anyway.

Damian: ...

Tim, already used to Jason's constant busy status, sighing: I bet you won't agree if I call you on the lunch tomorrow?

Jason: Uh, no. I have plans. But if you tag along with me, we can get lunch together later.

Tim, surprised: ...Okay. What do you have tomorrow? Knitting club? A shift in library?

Jason: Nah, graduation ceremony.

Tim: Right, you are a substitute teacher.

Jason: No, no. My graduation ceremony. I am getting my PHD in literature.

Tim: SINCE FUCKING WHEN-

[madisondrinksoliveoil]

Y'all ever wonder why people are triangles instead of pentagons? Just something to think about.

[platypusisnotonfire]

well.

I'm 30.

[the-blossica-fan]

Actors AU:

Balloon Party, who's real name is Gertrude, was chosen for the role by sheer coincidence; she said that, one day, she had gotten a headache, and had to speak slowly to try and relax herself. Needless to say, Z heard it, and thought she would be an amazing shoe-in for the role.

In real life, she is an actual doctor, too; not world famous, but definitely well-known, especially for how soft spoken she is.

If you would have told her she'd find love on the set, she'd call it a pipe dream.

And then she met Lorelei by giving her a health check, and may or may not have been smitten immediately.

(I also imagine she has a PhD and many positive reviews. Lorelei, meanwhile, has $5 and a dream 😭)

Imagine she works in the same hospital as Tooth Fairy and is an acquaintance of Madam Z. After a long day of work and sleepless nights, a headache wore her down and she constantly held her head while talking slowly.

Z had an idea at that moment and got her an interview with the directors, she was cast as Balloon Party not long after. She has to admit she quite enjoys the character she plays as, a crazy and creepy doctor.

People often get surprised when she acts so nicely unlike her unsettling character, and are even more surprised to know she has a PhD.

Gertrude also made a couple health checks around the set, she's one of the few who can and it's better to make sure all actors are healthy and in good shape for their next acts. She frequently receives visits from Cristallio, Lucy or Rabies, so she always tries to keep a professional face around those who don't come as often, that's when Lorelei steps in.

For your information, it's not Balloon Party who fell first, but she did find some attraction to that blond head that wouldn't stop saying nonsense.

Lorelei felt a bit nervous as she complained of an upcoming cold and headache, and alongside Gertrude's soft, calming and understanding voice, she fell. And bad.

Must I add she was quite entranced, staring into Gertrude's eyes as she spoke whatever she was talking about? Yeah.

Even when she wasn't sick, she went to Gertrude to try and start a conversation under the pretense of "taking care of any future sickness", and soon enough, she didn't even need an excuse!

Gertrude did end up falling for the silly girl that was so obviously down bad that not even romantic obliviousness could cover it. Ted faced, oftentimes hinting at going out on dates but then chickened up and ran away without a warning, or bringing her emotional support emo along.

Either way, it ended up happening soon enough, it's not like Gertrude wanted to play hard to get or she didn't like Lorelei's personality and acts of service.

I can imagine Lorelei asking her out on dates and it ends up being then eating 2 hot dogs for 1$ and a soda in the middle of a park because she didn't have enough money for a restaurant. And if she took her to a restaurant, her emotional support emo had to give away some money for it to happen.

ONION: So, Miss Lorelei, is it true you're dating Miss Gertrude?

Lorelei: Surprisingly enough, we both are in a romantic relationship. Mama and papa like her a lot, however, I can't help but wonder why she would date someone like me. I can only invite her to eat a homemade sandwich.

Balloon Party: I'm not in love with her for money, I think she's quite cute and romantic. I don't mind eating something cheap if it means being by her side, and she has some funny reactions when I compliment her too.

Semmelweis: Yes, I am the emotional support emo. Yes, I am tired. And yes, I have enough money to pay for their dates as long as they let me sleep.

ONION: ...I just asked if you knew about the rumors

[goodplace-janet]

please answer this silly little poll of a me who was confused in a history lecture today

[dreadfutures]

the siren song of quinones/catechols is getting to me, I want to do chemistry again so badly that I almost entertained the thought of doing polymer synth 💀

[malapertmarquess]

Ooooooooooh I just listened to a podcast episone about the early history of pantomime, and it's making me get all excited about the idea I have for a PhD topic again

[mythvoiced]

OPEN STARTER | Patrick Finch

"I condone lying. I encourage it, even. I recommend it. I could hardly live without it."

[ladybonheur]

When you see academic multi-authored books (actually, hell, most academic books), please remember that there is an underpaid overworked PhD candidate that made everything uniform and corrected all citations. Right now, I am that PhD candidate.

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[tchaikovskym]

Whenever a life change I worked for and looked forward to is going to happen: oh no!

[1eeminho]

story time with sari 😀

[imbellarosa]

i thought about not writing anything bc I'm late to the discourse game this time round and bc I've been so unplugged for so long that I don't get anons asking me things anymore but then I was talking to @twopoppies and like actually - I have shit to say

the first thing i have to say is that the British economy is overwhelmingly failing the working class. Teachers, train workers, and the fire service have all voted to go on strike in the last month. and the reason that this is happening is twofold: the first is that the MPs are self-absorbed dicks. The second is that the UK pulled out of one of the largest single-market economies in the international community, which hit every sector of the economy bc new taxes tariffs trade agreements erc. So like - don't talk to a Brit about what their utilities are doing. The third reason that these towns are dying though is because of the practice of outsourcing labour to cheaper countries/cities/communities. This is why people began to blame immigrants for the decline of the working class. Which like - if a Brit wants to come and teach my kids and write my PhD, they can pry it from my cold dead hands.

That's a really roundabout way of explaining that if you don't live in a larger city, you're gonna have loads of poverty in the area. And that - for the most part - your distance from London is directly proportional to the poverty rate. I work in *small British coastal town* in a *large comprehensive school* (that's like a US public school), and my kids are about 13-16 years old. The 16-year-olds are doing their GCSEs (like GEDs) in the spring, and loads of them don't believe that they can do it. Out of the Y11s that I know, I know maybe one or two that have concrete plans to go to university. Most don't believe that they can succeed, and are unwilling to go anywhere far from home. A comparable region of the world would be Appalachia in the US. The school I teach at is right across the street from council estates, and some of the kids have never left the town - even though there's a 2 hr train that takes you into London. Loads of their lives are really tough. I obviously can't give specifics, but I've definitely had days I can't shake off at the end of them.

This is all to say that out of the hundreds of kids I know, I don't know a single one that's gonna win a Grammy in 15 years time. Or a Pulitzer, or an Oscar or a Tony or an Olivier or a BAFTA. and this is absolutely not because they're not capable of doing it - they 100% have the capacity to succeed and the talent to be amazing. We just don't have the resources to nurture that talent in a way that would make them competitive to the people in the first ring of the ladder to success. I have a kid who wants to be a detective, and another teacher (!) told me 'well that's just not realistic. kids like him don't get into the programs he'd need to get into to do that'. That's just the reality of life for them. To them, I'm the anomaly. I'm the one who made it out! I left a tough home and a rough couple of years to become a PhD student and a young woman with a stable job, a guy who agrees to watch my cat, and loads of good friends. And I'm DEFINITELY not winning any Grammys hahaha - but by their metric their TEACHERS are some of the most successful or educated people they know, and they don't see themselves as those people.

We do our best for these kids, but it 1000% makes sense that someone from a background like this would say that the kind of success and fame and resources it takes to be an international pop star doesn't happen to people like him. Because it's a million to one. For every Harry Styles, a million David Smiths (not a real kid) don't make it out. So maybe shut up, have some empathy and celebrate an unlikely success? Or like. Eat cake if that fails.

[a-commas-a-pause]

Tags from @penny-anna that I think might merit consideration

i think having worked a retail or food service job actually is more important to not being a loser than doing drugs or having sex. the poll that showed so much of this site has never worked one of those jobs was actually way more concerning to me than any of the celibacy sweep polls

[eravioli]

I just started grad school this fall after a few years away from school and man I did not realize how dire the AI/LLM situation is in universities now. In the past few weeks:

I chatted with a classmate about how it was going to be a tight timeline on a project for a programming class. He responded "Yeah, at least if we run short on time, we can just ask chatGPT to finish it for us"

One of my professors pulled up chatGPT on the screen to show us how it can sometimes do our homework problems for us and showed how she thanks it after asking it questions "in case it takes over some day."

I asked one of my TAs in a math class to explain how a piece of code he had written worked in an assignment. He looked at it for about 15 seconds then went "I don't know, ask chatGPT"

A student in my math group insisted he was right on an answer to a problem. When I asked where he got that info, he sent me a screenshot of Google gemini giving just blatantly wrong info. He still insisted he was right when I pointed this out and refused to click into any of the actual web pages.

A different student in my math class told me he pays $20 per month for the "computational" version of chatGPT, which he uses for all of his classes and PhD research. The computational version is worth it, he says, because it is wrong "less often". He uses chatGPT for all his homework and can't figure out why he's struggling on exams.

There's a lot more, but it's really making me feel crazy. Even if it was right 100% of the time, why are you paying thousands of dollars to go to school and learn if you're just going to plug everything into a computer whenever you're asked to think??

[chromodacry]

Honestly, I still don’t know how I stumbled into my current job. I knew I wanted to write in my free time, but for my day job I had no idea… I guess I did want to work for a publishing company, but not an academic publishing company (I was hoping to work for a fiction publisher but it’s basically impossible unless you live in London and have connections). The problem is, I’ve spent my whole life trying to escape academia because I cared way too much about it — and compared to academic success, earning money barely motivates me at all. I thought I was organised because I finished all my homework/coursework well in advance of the deadlines, but I now realise I was just rushing because I was so impatient to finish my education. I’m actually not organised at all; now that I have this job which can never be completed (because there’s always more work to be done), I manage my time so badly it takes ages to complete a basic task ;-;