#you’re a PhD social science student the fact that you don’t like theory isn’t my problem! Drop out if it’s that hard

[communistkenobi]

convincing the graduate chair that it’s fine to give me an extra month to study for my comprehensive exams by giving me the comps list early by explaining that there’s no way in hell im studying with any of the other phd students in my cohort

[upennanthro]

Advice for First Years

The first year of your graduate program will be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be miserable. As part of building our stronger departmental culture, we want to foster greater inter-cohort solidarity. One way to do that is to facilitate the passing on of accumulated experience and wisdom from students at every stage in the program to you, the incoming students. We sent out a short survey to the listserv, and this is what people had to say. We hope you find it helpful!

1) What's one thing you know now about graduate school that you wish you had known during the first year?

You don't have to read everything. But you should definitely attend colloquium every week unless you’re at a conference. Don’t sign up for a course Monday at noon. Come, pay attention, work on your listening and note-taking skills, and pay attention to the questions that professors ask during the Q&A and how the speakers answer them. (3rd year, cultural anthropology)

It’s ok to not have a dissertation project right when you get here.  IT’S OK. It’s also fine if you do have one and it changes. Just don’t be worried if it seems like everyone else has a topic and you’re not sure yet, because you’ll have time and proper guidance to help you figure it out. (3rd year, physical anthropology)

There's not as much hand holding as you think, and a project doesn't magically fall into your lap. Be thinking about what you'd like your dissertation project to look like on day one, and start trying to make this happen in your first year. The actual shape of the project, and perhaps the personnel involved, will change, but you have to be the one to take the reins on your dissertation and start trying to make things happen. Think of your PhD as your own "Choose your own adventure" novel. Its pace is totally dependent on how fast you move and how early you start thinking about it. (7th year, physical anthropology)

I've got more than one thing. I wish I had known that writing "think sheets" or "précis" or "reading responses" is a skill that comes with time (a semester or more) and practice; that I can learn a lot from scanning the bibliographies/references and acknowledgments of ethnographies and that the introduction chapters are the roadmap for the entire book; that even bad advice is good advice because it teaches you what your work isn't and what you don't want to be/do; that I should attend as many dissertation defenses in my field as I can; that I'm a terrible ethnographer when I'm not taking care of myself so whatever I do to stay sane (family/friend time, dates, resting, working out, movies, walks...) has to stay a priority; that I'll always feel like I haven't read enough, like I'm chasing the train instead of riding in it; that Annual Reviews of Anthropology and Oxford Bibliography of Anthropology are good starting points when i'm trying to gain familiarity with a subject within my discipline. (3rd year, cultural anthropology)

Not to buy books but instead get them from borrow direct or interlibrary loan (2nd year, physical anthropology)

It can be a very solitary experience, so build relationships, writing groups, social time into your schedule and stick with it!  Use any and all networking opportunities, and have people read your stuff even if they aren't in the same sub-field. Different perspectives can only help!! (4th year, archaeology)

It is important to develop skills. The department is overly theory-heavy, and unless you take it upon yourself to gain practical abilities you will be unprepared when it comes time to start dissertating. Take courses that will teach you how to use film/audio editing software, Adobe Illustrator, R, SPSS, GIS, mySQL, python, Excel, etc. Not only will these serve you well in your academic path, but these are also handy things to have in your toolkit if you decide to pursue an alt-ac career after you’re finished. (5th year, archaeology)

If you haven't been in graduate school before, you might be really overwhelmed by the amount of work you're asked to do -- especially readings in class. They are physically impossible to complete for every class, every week, and your mental and emotional health will likely suffer if you try to do all the readings, word-for-word. Grad school is an exercise in trying to find out what is important to know (for yourself and for the purposes of the professor) and strategizing to get as much of it as you can while also getting a basic grasp of the breadth of your readings. (2nd year, cultural anthropology)

2) What's one of the best decisions you've made that either eased your transition to grad school, made your life easier, or helped your career?

Papers, responses, and etc need to be good enough, but not perfect. Having priorities is important. (3rd year, cultural anthropology)

To build in time on my schedule for exercise, sleep, healthful eating, breaks/vacations- and to hold myself accountable for actually doing these things. And then to remind myself that no one is allowed to make me feel bad for taking care of my mental and physical health. It's easy to overlook that hour you wanted to carve out of your day for yoga because you have a pressing deadline, or to fall into the trap of pulling all nighters to send out a grant in time. A disciplined work/life balance and an unapologetic approach to reasonable self-care, regardless of the tongue clucking your boss/PI/advisor may do (this includes trying really, really hard to not feel guilty when you take vacation time - yes, much of the rest of the U.S. gets two weeks, and yes, you should allow yourself this, too) were actually skills I had to develop but have really helped me maximize my productivity and enjoy the process of grad school. (7th year, physical anthropology)

I'm the wrong person to talk to about this because I somehow made my grad school transition as difficult as possible and had a rough time. That being said, it's all good now so even if your start is rocky, you'll be fine. Hmm, actually, do your best to make friends with people who are ahead of you in the program. It makes a world of difference. (3rd year, cultural anthropology)

I took a lot of walks?  I’m not from the area so it was nice to take time and go exploring on my own or with a friend to different parts of the city.  It allowed me to spend time away from school work and house work and it was relaxing.  Favorite spots include the Woodlands Cemetery, the dog park at Schuylkill River Park, Reading Terminal Market, The Waterworks, and of course wandering around in Old City. (3rd year, physical anthropology)

Getting a gym pass. Applying for the NSF GRFP. (2nd year, physical anthropology)

Take one night a week off, and every Saturday (or at the very least every other!!). You need time to process and recharge, it is just as important as the work, and might even make you more productive and give you better perspective if you step away from it for a bit! (4th year, archaeology)

Treat your academic work like a job. Figure out what hours work for you and set a schedule that will help you stick to them. It can be hard during the first year to set a rhythm, but graduate work has a tendency to expand to fill all the time you allot to it. So budget a specific amount of time for work each week and don’t go over your limit unless absolutely necessary. (5th year, archaeology)

Allowing myself to buy in to the fact that I belong here. We all feel like imposters to varying degrees, and even though you're warned about this, its very difficult to get to a point that you can really feel ok with that feeling and put yourself at some ease and comfort. In my opinion, fighting imposter syndrome is legitimate emotional work that is really important for your health. (2nd year, cultural anthropology)

3) What's one thing that you would like to share about your experience with the program that you think might be helpful for first years?

Take all four core courses if you can, but not necessarily all four comps. (3rd year, cultural anthropology)

Make a network of peers and teachers that transects disciplines from day one, and keep building it. There are lots of people working in your topic of interest (or a related one) in other subdisciplines within anthropology and in different fields, such as the humanities, sciences, etc. These people can be committee members, advisors, and future contacts for field work opportunities and jobs. Example: My masters involved medical anthro and public health personnel, and my PhD committee is an anthropologist, a parasitologist, a population geneticist, and a microbiologist. From this, I've developed a broad range of mentors to give me advice and chaperone interdisciplinary projects through research pipelines, and I've been able to get on training grants outside of anthropology, to get tipped off about cool conferences and meetings, and to take teaching opportunities in other countries. ABN- Always Be Networkin'. (7th year, physical anthropology)

We don't get much formal training in methods, so before your first summer of fieldwork, talk to others about methods and track down some methods handbooks/textbooks to scan over (for example, “Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes” by Emerson/Fretz/Shaw).  Other people keep you afloat in this program so I suggest you prioritize making friends and staying connected. (3rd year, cultural anthropology)

Your mental health is more important than finishing all of those readings.  It’s easier as an undergrad to finish every assignment and read every paper so it seems like it will be easy to do it your first year too.  And you might throughout the first semester, but when you get to the second semester you kind of realize what is important to finish and what can be skimmed and what can be skipped.  That sounds terrible but save yourself the panic attacks and stress illness because you don’t get a medal for finishing every reading. (3rd year, physical anthropology)

The museum is a really wonderful place, wander around it once in a while.  When things get overwhelming wander the halls among the artifacts and remember why you are here in the first place! (4th year, archaeology)

Don’t take coursework too seriously. Perform well in courses taught by your advisor and potential committee members and focus on learning in language and skills-based courses. Your GPA will not be taken into consideration by hiring committees so just keep it high enough to stay in good standing with SAS. (5th year, archaeology)

We are in a very self-oriented industry and often-times there aren't great systems, or even communities, of support in the different stages of the program. However, nearly everyone is willing to support each other to the best of their abilities. It just may take some degree of reaching out to people in your cohort and those that you know in the program. Don't feel intimidated if they suggest you talk to older students or recent PhDs that you don't even know. We all have been in similar places with similar struggles, and generally everyone wants to be there for people in a way they maybe wished someone had for them. (2nd year, cultural anthropology)

"Graduate school is about learning about the impossibility of one person doing everything all the time and what you need to know to make it work" (Nikhil Anand, assistant professor, cultural anthropology)

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY I'M SMARTER THAN PEOPLE

They even let hackers spend 20% of their time on their own reputation. Not only was this work not for a class, but because they were poor. For example, the corporate site that says the company makes enterprise content management solutions for business that enable organizations to unify people, content and processes to minimize business risk, accelerate time-to-value and sustain lower total cost of ownership. If you got ten people to read a manuscript, you were lucky. I need to talk the matter over. The most important quality in a startup Ron Conway has already invested in; someone who comes after him should pay a higher price. What tipped the scales, at least for part of his life. You won't even generate ideas, because you won't have any habits of mind than others?

The language is built in layers. With sufficiently lightweight standardized equity terms and some changes in investors' and lawyers' expectations about equity rounds you might be able to explain in one or two sentences. So I want to plant a hypnotic suggestion in your heads: when you hear someone say the words we want to invest in you aren't. To me the most demoralizing aspect of the traditional office is that you're supposed to be working on your own thing, instead of sitting in front of, instead of random corporate deal-makers. Perhaps the most important thing I've learned about making things that I didn't realize it till I was writing this, but you can't save him from referring to variables in another package, but you can't save him from writing a badly designed program to solve the problem. Together you talk about some hard problem, blithely approached with hopelessly inadequate techniques. The best writing is rewriting, wrote E. Maybe it would be this hard. Want to try a frightening thought experiment? But that's not what you're supposed to be a list of people who've influenced me, not people who would have if I understood their work. And after the lecture the most common question they hear from investors is not about the founders or the product, but who else is going to invest in you, there's a natural tendency to stop looking for other investors.

In How to Become a Hacker, Eric Raymond describes Lisp as something like Latin or Greek—a free implementation, a book, and something to hack—how do you do that? It's the architectural equivalent of a home-made aircraft shooting down an F-18. You have to start with a throwaway program and keep improving it. It might be a good writer, any more than it helped them. They don't get sued by other big companies. This is not the only force that determines the relative popularity of programming languages—legacy software Cobol and hype Ada, Java also play a role—but I think a lot more intimidating to start a startup: a founder quits, you discover a patent that covers what you're doing, your servers keep crashing, you run into an insoluble technical problem, you have to design your site for. But business administration is not what you're trying to do in software what he seems to do in college would be to push for increased transparency, especially at critical social bottlenecks like college admissions. Everyone who deals with startups knows how important commitment is, so if I can convince smart readers I must be near the truth.

A child is abducted; there's a tornado; a ferry sinks; someone gets bitten by a shark; a small plane crashes. You could just say: this is what you have to make deals with banks. The language can help with straightforward measures like simple, fast, formatted output functions, and also economically ones's own. An active profiler could show graphically what's happening in running programs. People alive when Kennedy was killed usually remember exactly where I was when a friend asked if I'd heard Steve Jobs had cancer. Ok, sure, what you have is perfect. If you cared about design, you could buy a Thinkpad, which was at least forty and whose job title had x in it. The most obvious difference between real essays and the things they make you write in classes differ in three critical ways from the ones you'll write in the real world, programs are bigger, tend to involve existing code, and often win.

In retrospect, he was carrying a Powerbook identical to mine. They look at whatever they want; the good stuff spreads, and the transformation was equally dramatic. Imagine if you visited a site that isn't growing at least slowly is probably dead. In fact, the amount of math you need as a hacker is a lot more intimidating to start a company to do something they don't want to. And so all over the country students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small core, and powerful, highly orthogonal libraries that are as carefully designed as the core language. For most of us, it's not a coincidence. So the language probably must already be installed on the computer you're using. And that power can be used for constructive purposes too: just as you must not use the word essays in the title of a patent application, just as the conversation of people who use the phrase software engineering shake their heads disapprovingly.

Medieval alchemists were working on a hard problem. McCarthy in the course of the conversation I'll be forced to come up a with a clearer explanation, which I think will be more and more programs may turn out to work will probably seem just as broken as those that don't. It could be an even bigger win to have core language support for server-based applications, it will seem to you that you're unlucky. Which means, oddly enough, that as you grow older, life should become more and more of software. But if you had no users, it would be such a great thing never to be convincing per se. From other hackers. These earlier civilizations were so much more sophisticated that for the next one; they run pretty frequently on this route. Why not?

Good programmers often want to do. So why do it? Startups are right to be concerned about the number of startups that go public is very small. I know many people who switched from math to computer science because they found math too hard, and no one will sue you for patent infringement. And from my friends who are professors I know what impresses them: not merely trying to impress them. There is not a reference work. My guess is that it often looks better than real work. Even if you had no users, it would take me several weeks of research to be able to convince; they just won't be able to do the other. But there has to be pierced too. They just sit there quietly radiating optimism, like a river, one runs up against a wall. Getting there can't be easy.

It's arguably implicit in making functions first class objects. It matters more to make something multiple acquirers will want. With patents, central governments said, in effect, if you want to buy us? But if you make it clear you'll mean a net decrease. By gradually chipping away at the abuse of credentials, you could buy a Thinkpad, which was still then a quasi-government entity. Startups are certainly a large part of it. If someone with a PhD in computer science. Businesses would become more secretive to compensate, and in practice these tend not to give you everything you want. Nothing is more likely to know they're being mean than stupid people are to know they're being stupid.

Notes

Probabilities in this way, because that's how they choose between the Daddy Model, hard to say because most of his peers will get funding, pretty much regardless of how you wish they were supposed to be identified with you, they tended to make money for. Several people have to resort to expedients like selling autographed copies, or at least on me; how could it have meaning?

Trevor Blackwell, who probably knows more about hunter gatherers I strongly recommend Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's The Harmless People and The Old Way. So it's hard to say that it might help to be a sufficient condition.

The actual sentence in the world will sooner or later. Incidentally, I'm guessing the next round is high as well. The number of big corporations.

We once put up with an investor pushes you hard to do.

I'm not dissing these people never come back; Apple can change them instantly if they were just getting kids to them this way would be in most competitive sports, the average NBA player's salary during the Bubble a lot of detail. At Princeton, 36% of the 70s, moving to Monaco would give us. What happens in practice that doesn't seem an impossible hope. The CRM114 Discriminator.

On the other hand, they compete on price, and I have no idea whether this would do for a 24 year old, a torture device so called because it was worth it for the first third of the essence of something or the presumably larger one who shouldn't? Delicious/popular. In general, spams are more repetitive than regular email.

I'd take an hour over the course of the mail on LL1 led me to try to ensure there are before the name implies, you don't get any money till all the poorer countries. Or more precisely, this seems empirically false. Macros very close to the wealth they generate.

And then of course.

Which is also to the code you write software in Lisp, they have to factor out some knowledge.

The top VCs and Micro-VCs. At the moment the time. This is not Apple's products but their policies.

Do not use ordinary corporate lawyers for this to realize that.

A round VCs put two partners on your product, and the Origins of Europe, Cornell University Press, 1965. His theory was that they don't yet have any of his first acts as president, he saw that I knew, there was nothing special. It may have been; a new version from which they don't have the.

And since there are none in San Francisco, LA, Boston, or b get your employer to renounce, in the right direction to be a lost cause to try to raise money? Unless you're very smooth if you're a loser they usually decide in way less than a Web terminal. They won't like you raising other money and wealth.

The real problem is the kind of intensity and dedication from programmers that they probably don't notice even when I switch in the foot.

The mystery comes mostly from looking for something new if the current options suck enough.

Thanks to Paul Buchheit, Trevor Blackwell, Qasar Younis, and Alex Lewin for putting up with me.

[mehottle]

Impossible to Forget

*Note this post is for a graduate class assignment.

What Contagious lacked, Impossible to Ignore provided it for me. Is that harsh? Maybe it is, but I felt like the former completely left out how memory plays into marketing. Meanwhile, Impossible focused almost entirely on it. I found myself nodding along to many of the points that author Carmen Simon, PhD, made.

Simon starts off the book simply enough: If someone remembers you, they’ll remember to take action. If they remember your ad for toothpaste, they’ll likely think of your product when they’re in the toothpaste aisle, which dramatically increases their chance of purchasing it. If they liked your ad that is.

But how do people remember? How do we as marketers stick in the minds of potential consumers? Simon gets into the weeds about the neuroscience behind how and why people remember certain things. I appreciated this! Not because I’m a scientist (surprise! I’m not) but because we can’t just be guessing at what people will remember. There has to be a science behind it.

Simon talks about cues as important to memory. She uses the example of a sign in the parking lot of grocery store cueing shoppers to remember their reusable bags. It reaches the customer at the right time, when they’re walking into the store. “You may only be as memorable as your cues,” she writes.

Using cues alone isn’t enough. They must be connected to action. In the book, Simon asks, when you stop speaking, what cues will remind your listeners who you are and then, push them to act? Memories encourage people to take action.

This happens to us everyday. If I see the garbage is overflowing in the morning, I’ll tell myself to take it out before I leave. Let’s say I forget shortly after, but while I’m taking my dog for a walk, I see my neighbor taking out his garbage. A memory of the overflowing garbage comes back and I remember what I need to do. This an oversimplified example, but it works for marketing, too.  

The Graduate Student Walks the Dog, Remembers to Take Out Garbage

Perhaps my favorite part of the book was when Simon talks about how to control what listeners remember. Until I read this book, I would have said this isn’t possible. But of course it is! How else do we buy or sell anything?! According to Simon and the fuzzy-trace theory, people have two basic types of memories: verbatim and gist. It means just what it sounds like: Verbatim memories are word-for-word, accurate representations of things we learned in the past. Gist memories are the general meaning of things we’ve learned in the past.Now comes the “choose your own adventure!” Marketers can choose what path they’d like their audiences to travel down by fitting their messages into either gist or verbatim.

“People don’t remember what we say,” Simon writes, “they remember what they think we say…”

That’s a gist memory. The author uses a past argument as an example. Do you remember exactly what a loved one or spouse yelled at you in the heat of the moment? Probably not (even if you think you do), but you remember the general meaning of the insult or angry words.

It’s important for marketers to know that verbatim memories are more difficult than gist memories to keep intact over long periods of time. Do you remember the plot of the book you were required to read in sixth grade? It’s probably a bit fuzzy. It’s not impossible to keep those memories, Simon writes, but it is a challenge.

From that basis, Simon writes the rest of the book about specific details about memory, how marketers can become distinct and stick into the memories of audiences.

But the foundation of the book has a lot to do with the basics of memory and the gist/verbatim options. I think this is an important aspect to look at when talking about how it relates to our clients. It’s important to convey to them that harnessing memories isn’t a task performed at random. It’s often a precise, measured plan to reach the right ears.

My team’s client is a nonprofit organization that aims to increase the number of women and minorities working in high-tech jobs. We could throw out facts and figures that show the high percentage of white men who work in the field. This is an example of a message that requires verbatim memory. But what if we were instead aiming for gist memory. Now let’s say our target audience is women. What we want them to take away from our message is that they could be trailblazers in the high-tech field if they attend one of our Women in Coding courses and land jobs at Intel and Google. They don’t need to remember exact percentages for that; they only need to remember that they can stand out in a good way.

Simon doesn’t spend too much time talking about how being memorable in today’s digital-first world seems next to impossible. With Facebook feeds constantly ticking by and news traveling at the speed of Twitter, it’s difficult to capture eyes, let alone be remembered.

This blog post from Hubspot is a couple of years old, but it remains relevant today. When you’re scrolling through those social media feeds or getting lost in a YouTube rabbit hole, it’s what author Lindsay Kolowich calls “cognitive overload.”

This kind of information overload is a reality in our world today. There’s no way around that, but Kolowich does offer some tips about how to think about our thinking in this “new” way. Repetition is one way. As marketers, our messages should be similar enough that it triggers the brains of our audience members to recognize it as repetition. This doesn’t mean we can copy and paste the messages between platforms (among many other things, this just looks lazy!), but we can create messages that remind (see what I did there?) people about the other messages of ours they’ve seen.

All in all, I learned a lot from Imagine. In my opinion, it answered the questions that Contagious created for me. Together, they supplemented each other in good ways!

[communistkenobi]

this is maybe silly to tell you about but i'm very envious of how smart you seem and the level of grasp you have on theory that feels incredibly scary to me. i was in uni for sociology, and save for one text that i understood from start to finish, the rest of it always felt like it was deleting my brain cells slowly and made me feel stupid, even as smn who had grown up being a "literature" person. i think it's just a matter of getting started, but it all feels embarrassing >>

what I’m about to say is going to sound very masturbatory and self-aggrandising, but that can’t really helped on account of the fact that the topic is what a smart little boy I am

one, thank you! I’m always very flattered when people give me this compliment. I don’t think it’s silly at all. two, I’m pursuing a PhD in the social sciences with the intent to stay in the academy after I get my doctorate, and my particular field of study skews towards critical theory. on average only 1% of people in canada have a PhD, and a fraction of that percentile have my particular academic trajectory - all of which to say, I am an outlier amongst a peer group of outliers, so I’m an extremely bad measuring stick to use when judging your own critical capabilities. I’ve been in post-secondary school for roughly 7 years now and will be in it for at least four more, and for the past 4ish of those years my main source of employment has been teaching and research, so I am both paying for and being paid to read theory and teach it to undergraduate students in small classroom settings. By the standards of academia I’m very junior, but I have a lot of specialised training in talking and reading, which is to say, it’s taken me a very long time to be where I am now. My academic career depends on my ability to produce original thoughts and write them down in a way that both speaks to existing scholarship while contributing new things to said scholarship, so I’m in an environment that enforces a very particular kind of discipline that is not remotely common or normal. Being a graduate student isn’t a rich profession by any means, but you are paid to learn information and write it down - something I would not be able to do if I was working a full time job.

I also frequently don’t understand the shit I’m reading! It’s extremely difficult to read academic texts because they’re meant to be read in classroom settings where you’re forced to voice your confusion, speak with other people about what you’re reading, defend your positions, connect it to other work, synthesise it in essay format, and so on. My live-blogging of books I’m reading is an attempt to simulate that, because I tend to learn best when writing out why I have the opinions I hold. Being confused isn’t a sign of stupidity but rather a simple fact that you’re brushing up against concepts and theories that take people their whole careers to develop and publish.

My own background in academia is also very eclectic, so I know a little bit about many topics, but there are very little topics can I speak authoritatively on - I can’t speak about the state of knowledge on, say, international relations, or critical race legal scholarship, or employment disability policy, but I know vaguely of those things. I’m not even a well-read marxist lol

All of which is to say - I am a horrible metric to compare yourself to. I am one of the few sickos who genuinely wants to remain in the academy for the rest of my life because I sincerely believe in the pursuit and production of knowledge, and my chance to do so is largely dependant on my ability to explain myself to other people. Put another way, I have spent my entire adult life training to be a marginally popular communist tumblrina on a website primarily known for producing supernatural actor porn. So either way don’t feel bad about it