I've already done a Master's while working full-time (in order to be a competitive applicant for a Ph.D. program) and I will be going to a full-time, graduate-assistant-type Ph.D. program in about a month.
I'm going for the doctorate for three very important reasons:
1. I decided I want to spend my life working as a psychologist. That requires a doctorate in every jurisdiction in the States. There is a "professional degree" called the Psy.D. nowadays, but your options for work are limited to practice, or, if you are very lucky, sometimes teaching. The Ph.D. allows you to get hired to research, teach, OR practice. This leaves my future options fairly wide open.
2. I don't want to spend the rest of my life doing what other people tell me to do. In 2002, I had an epiphany. I was literally fetching coffee, for a research meeting on a laser device project (I work in a major engineering school), and I realized I was getting coffee for people who were no smarter than me --- only possessed of skills I don't have and don't want.
3. I want the experience of graduate school, more or less as goldsmith has outlined. Or, as a psychologist I know from a mailing list said, I want to (and if you are gonna be a grad student, you HAVE to) "learn to love the smell of the wax".
I am personally very much looking forward to my Ph.D. program -- seems to be full of very nice people doing very interesting and worthwhile work.
Love this thread BTW. Can't recall the last time I commented on a Slashdot thread.
I originally switched to AT&T from Cingular because
Cingular's coverage was spotty even in Los Angeles;
Outgoing phone calls got dropped about 40% of the time without so much as an error message;
Cingular's coverage did not extend north of about San Francisco;
The last straw was when I went to a wedding in Arcata and everyone else has AT&T phones, which worked perfectly.
Technically, as someone else mentioned, AT&T is relatively problem-free.
However, I recently got married, so I added my wife's line to my plan and got new GSM phones.
WHAT A FREAKIN' NIGHTMARE!
AT&T has separate "departments" for individual administrative operations. That is, they have:
a "Customer Information Department" which could change her name and address but couldn't move her account under mine and forwarded me to the...
... "Change of Financial Responsibility Department" which could move her account under mine but couldn't sell me a phone so they sent me to the...
... "Sales Department" which couldn't sell me a GSM phone because I hadn't upgraded my account to GSM and forwarded me to the...
... "3G Upgrade Department" which upgraded me to "3G" (sales talk for GSM) and sent me back to the...
... "Sales Department" which couldn't sell me a GSM phone because they were the "Wireless Sales Department", not the...
... "GSM Sales Department", which DID sell me a phone and to complete the process I was handed to the...
... "Customer Service Department", which could do NOTHING for me because they were actually the "Wireless Customer Service Department" and not the...
... "GSM Customer Service Department", where I at LONG FREAKIN' LAST completed what should have been ONE TRANSACTION WITH ONE CUSTOMER SERVICE REP.
I therefore heartily agree with the poster who urges Cingular to burn everything associated with AT&T Customer DisService.
...then could we put out satellites with massive solar cells and harvest the electricity directly through the tether, rather than inventing "beamed power"?
Probably not, if my dim understanding of electrical physics is any use...
Textpattern, by Dean Allen, is the One True Right and Only Blogware. You can even get in on the development process, since it's in gamma (a damned functional gamma) right now.
Most of these posts seem right on. I've worked at a university (deskmonkey, not IT) for two and a half years now and these are my rules:
1. Most tenured professors have inflated egos. This inflation varies from mild to delusional, and usually varies positively with seniority.
2. Non-tenured new hires usually haven't yet forgotten that they're not grad students, and are much humbler and easier to work with.
3. Most professors have no idea how much work goes into your job, and no idea how to plan anything ahead of time. I have had people ask me, in all innocence, to reserve rooms in, say, the faculty center on four hours' notice on a Friday (when no one teaches and everyone does lunch at the faculty center). I have had people ask me, in all innocence, to proofread and LaTeX typeset a 45-page mechanical engineering treatise "by next week, because it was due last month."
4. Long-term staff (id est, "lifers", people who are not just "working here while getting an advanced degree in something else" like I am) can be the most political, gossipy, backstabbing people I have ever encountered.
5. Union rules are so strict that most people can't just change jobs or start doing new duties without six reams of filled-out forms being vetted by the union. You also usually can't be slotted into a new job that has opened up in your department, rather, an entire hiring process, however illusory (i.e., they interview ten people and hire you anyway) must be undertaken.
6. Similarly, accountng rules are a bitch. Never mind that some people find ways to embezzle tens of thousands of dollars once in a while. You had better be able to explain to Accounts Payable why you're reimbursing a visitor from fucking Washington DC fifty cents for a can of Coke---food and drink are not authorized on that grant account, buster!
That said....
7. It is God damned impossible to be fired. You basically have to rape a small child in front of the Dean in order to get fired around here. Simple bone laziness, egregious stupidity or generally being a complete jerk won't do it.
8. In the engineering departments, at least, you can dress any way you please. No dress code. Jeans day every day, baby. In other depts., it may not be so.
>>I'm not sure what all the accents are on the alphabet, will I have to know to type them to access a simple website? Sorry, this doesn't make using the net easier.
>I'm sure it will make it easier if that is your native language!
Spoken like a true monolingual. Get this: just like English-native people can't spell "to loose something" or "definatly", people native to other languages can't spell either. My personal experience with Spanish was that I didn't really always know where to accent a word until I learned the explicit rules in high school, and I still get mixed up sometimes. And it gets much worse in languages with larger, more confusing character sets, like Armenian, Arabic, Japanese or Chinese (all of which I've studied, thank you, so yes I do know a little about it).
At least ASCII-only DNS keeps the problem-set down a bit.
In Los Angeles, most of the time, the even numbers are on the South or East side of the road, as appropriate, and the odd ones are, mutatis mutandis, on the North and West.
This can be remembered by using the handy mnemonic "SeE NoW".
Slashdot Mirror
You got it, goldsmith.
I've already done a Master's while working full-time (in order to be a competitive applicant for a Ph.D. program) and I will be going to a full-time, graduate-assistant-type Ph.D. program in about a month.
I'm going for the doctorate for three very important reasons:
1. I decided I want to spend my life working as a psychologist. That requires a doctorate in every jurisdiction in the States. There is a "professional degree" called the Psy.D. nowadays, but your options for work are limited to practice, or, if you are very lucky, sometimes teaching. The Ph.D. allows you to get hired to research, teach, OR practice. This leaves my future options fairly wide open.
2. I don't want to spend the rest of my life doing what other people tell me to do. In 2002, I had an epiphany. I was literally fetching coffee, for a research meeting on a laser device project (I work in a major engineering school), and I realized I was getting coffee for people who were no smarter than me --- only possessed of skills I don't have and don't want.
3. I want the experience of graduate school, more or less as goldsmith has outlined. Or, as a psychologist I know from a mailing list said, I want to (and if you are gonna be a grad student, you HAVE to) "learn to love the smell of the wax".
I am personally very much looking forward to my Ph.D. program -- seems to be full of very nice people doing very interesting and worthwhile work.
Love this thread BTW. Can't recall the last time I commented on a Slashdot thread.
- Cingular's coverage was spotty even in Los Angeles;
- Outgoing phone calls got dropped about 40% of the time without so much as an error message;
- Cingular's coverage did not extend north of about San Francisco;
- The last straw was when I went to a wedding in Arcata and everyone else has AT&T phones, which worked perfectly.
Technically, as someone else mentioned, AT&T is relatively problem-free. However, I recently got married, so I added my wife's line to my plan and got new GSM phones. WHAT A FREAKIN' NIGHTMARE! AT&T has separate "departments" for individual administrative operations. That is, they have:- a "Customer Information Department" which could change her name and address but couldn't move her account under mine and forwarded me to the...
- ... "Change of Financial Responsibility Department" which could move her account under mine but couldn't sell me a phone so they sent me to the...
- ... "Sales Department" which couldn't sell me a GSM phone because I hadn't upgraded my account to GSM and forwarded me to the...
- ... "3G Upgrade Department" which upgraded me to "3G" (sales talk for GSM) and sent me back to the
...
- ... "Sales Department" which couldn't sell me a GSM phone because they were the "Wireless Sales Department", not the...
- ... "GSM Sales Department", which DID sell me a phone and to complete the process I was handed to the...
- ... "Customer Service Department", which could do NOTHING for me because they were actually the "Wireless Customer Service Department" and not the...
- ... "GSM Customer Service Department", where I at LONG FREAKIN' LAST completed what should have been ONE TRANSACTION WITH ONE CUSTOMER SERVICE REP.
I therefore heartily agree with the poster who urges Cingular to burn everything associated with AT&T Customer DisService....then could we put out satellites with massive solar cells and harvest the electricity directly through the tether, rather than inventing "beamed power"? Probably not, if my dim understanding of electrical physics is any use...
Textpattern, by Dean Allen, is the One True Right and Only Blogware. You can even get in on the development process, since it's in gamma (a damned functional gamma) right now.
Most of these posts seem right on. I've worked at a university (deskmonkey, not IT) for two and a half years now and these are my rules:
....
1. Most tenured professors have inflated egos. This inflation varies from mild to delusional, and usually varies positively with seniority.
2. Non-tenured new hires usually haven't yet forgotten that they're not grad students, and are much humbler and easier to work with.
3. Most professors have no idea how much work goes into your job, and no idea how to plan anything ahead of time. I have had people ask me, in all innocence, to reserve rooms in, say, the faculty center on four hours' notice on a Friday (when no one teaches and everyone does lunch at the faculty center). I have had people ask me, in all innocence, to proofread and LaTeX typeset a 45-page mechanical engineering treatise "by next week, because it was due last month."
4. Long-term staff (id est, "lifers", people who are not just "working here while getting an advanced degree in something else" like I am) can be the most political, gossipy, backstabbing people I have ever encountered.
5. Union rules are so strict that most people can't just change jobs or start doing new duties without six reams of filled-out forms being vetted by the union. You also usually can't be slotted into a new job that has opened up in your department, rather, an entire hiring process, however illusory (i.e., they interview ten people and hire you anyway) must be undertaken.
6. Similarly, accountng rules are a bitch. Never mind that some people find ways to embezzle tens of thousands of dollars once in a while. You had better be able to explain to Accounts Payable why you're reimbursing a visitor from fucking Washington DC fifty cents for a can of Coke---food and drink are not authorized on that grant account, buster!
That said
7. It is God damned impossible to be fired. You basically have to rape a small child in front of the Dean in order to get fired around here. Simple bone laziness, egregious stupidity or generally being a complete jerk won't do it.
8. In the engineering departments, at least, you can dress any way you please. No dress code. Jeans day every day, baby. In other depts., it may not be so.
I asked one, am one. Don't see many fellow workmen on /. though ...
MOD PARENT DOWN, it's a photo of a guy sticking his bits into a fish's mouth, I shit you not. AHHHH GOD WHY DID I CLICK THAT LINK!!!
RTFWhite_paper before exploding, please. The paper clearly outlines how the ballot receipt CANNOT be used to show FOR WHOM you voted.
>>I'm not sure what all the accents are on the alphabet, will I have to know to type them to access a simple website? Sorry, this doesn't make using the net easier.
>I'm sure it will make it easier if that is your native language!
Spoken like a true monolingual. Get this: just like English-native people can't spell "to loose something" or "definatly", people native to other languages can't spell either. My personal experience with Spanish was that I didn't really always know where to accent a word until I learned the explicit rules in high school, and I still get mixed up sometimes. And it gets much worse in languages with larger, more confusing character sets, like Armenian, Arabic, Japanese or Chinese (all of which I've studied, thank you, so yes I do know a little about it).
At least ASCII-only DNS keeps the problem-set down a bit.
In Los Angeles, most of the time, the even numbers are on the South or East side of the road, as appropriate, and the odd ones are, mutatis mutandis, on the North and West. This can be remembered by using the handy mnemonic "SeE NoW".
Sounded like an interesting article... guess I'll have to read it later, or maybe tomorrow.
I work for UCLA's MAE (Mech & Aerospace Eng) Dept. Prof. Kim's a pretty cool guy and it's great to see his work featured on Slashdot! w00t!11!!
Want to explain how the kid whose father ran out is "living with his own choice"?