Findings While in the Office: News Article

I was taking a break at work this afternoon, and I stumbled across this gem: Grad School Not Worth It on yahoo's featured news. It's really enlightening as to the hows and whys of why graduate degrees don't always help you out. I know, I know, not much of an update here. Sorry.  It's been busy with work, wedding planning, and breaking a toe.

Again...friends suck

So once again...my nasty friend decided to rear her ugly head. Out of nowhere, she texted me the other day asking if I could export her to the UK. She's obsessed with London, so it didn't really seem too wild of a thing for her to say. I told her I would if I could, but I only work with imports...seeing as...you know...to do my job, I really only can work with imports, else I'd have to be in another country, and then technically I'd still be doing imports. Then she told me I should switch jobs so I should work with exports. Still, not terrible. Pissing me off a little because I don't even work for the company that does the exports, but, okay. I'm still being sociable.

Then she goes on to say I need to get a wedding website up 'cause she wants to know all the details of it. I've been trying to avoid talking about my wedding with her because...she believes she's the maid of honor and in actuality she's not even invited. It doesn't seem polite to discuss it with her because of that. I said it's been busy with work and hard to put stuff together because my fiance and I live in two different states. Thanks military! But it's still working out fine, we have more than enough time after he finishes his enlistment, as well as the few times he'll be on leave. I'm just a paranoid person. Anyway, then she goes on to give me a lecture that since I *knew* he was going to be away, I was stupid for getting engaged and setting a date for when I did. 

How am I supposed to deal with people like this? It doesn't make any sort of sense. I've never been rude to her, treated her like family. I've stopped talking to her in the past few years because of the way she's begun treating my fiance as well, and I just can't take it anymore. Somehow she doesn't realize that I'm ignoring her. What do I do?

Bats and Vampires

So as I was driving to work this morning, I had my ipod playing on the radio in the car like I do every day. However, today a song I hadn't heard in a while came on. It's called the Batty Rap...which makes me sound like a major nerd, but whatever...it's from a movie called Fern Gully. Definitely still one of my absolute favorite animated movies. Anyway, long story short, it's about a machine cutting down trees that's being controlled by an evil ooze like guy named Hexxus to destroy a place in the rainforest called Fern Gully where the fairies live. There's a character in the movie, voiced by Robin Williams, named Batty (hence...Batty Rap...). He's been a laboratory test animal, so he's quite a bit messed up in the head. I was listening to the song, and it's the full version that's not in the movie (it gets a little bit too dark for kids after where the movie cuts it off), and I heard this gem, "I don't care what you think, you're a graduate student, just do it!" Apparently the graduate world hasn't changed all that much since the movie came out...in 1992.

If you'd like to hear the song for yourself, here's a link to it: The Batty Rap  The part I'm specifically talking about is at about 1:28.

And as a random side note....Happy 165th birthday to Bram Stoker! I read Dracula when I was about eight years old and we definitely need a revival in real vampires...not this cheesy Twilight-crap that's still freaking going on.

Really Done with Graduate Institution

So I sort of lied when I said I was completely done with everything related to my graduate institution. Only sort of. I was done with all of my ties to the school.  I'd paid them back, withdrawn, etc etc. And today, I paid off the last of my rent from August and September. So now I am definitely officially rid of the whole ordeal. No credit card loans, nothing owed. Nada.

Brighter side of life: went this weekend to do a drive-by of a wedding venue for the first time. It looks really awesome from the outside...now just have to wait till fiance comes home so we can go see the inside.

On Graduate School Indoctrination

I know I've mentioned it a few times, as well as have read on other blogs the comparison between graduate school and cults. While playing around on the internet this morning, I stumbled across this link which is about LDS Mormon indoctrination, and lists with explanations steps of indoctrination into dangerous cults.  I was intrigued by how fitting most of those steps could be applied to becoming a graduate student.  So I felt like going through and detailing how it might fit with the graduate student experience. Again, I didn't come up with these stages/steps myself (the link to them and how they apply to Mormon indoctrination is above), but the explanations in relationship to grad school came from my brain.

1) The goal: Yes, while there can be a tangible goal coming from being a graduate student (like a masters or a PhD...), much of the time you end up just searching for answers.  And in most cases, it's really just theory on top of theory. With sciences like geology, physics, chemistry...you can test and test and test your hypotheses to your heart's content, and even if the data supports your hypothesis, it's still just a theory. While you can be 99% sure that your theory is definitely the absolutely correct one, you'll always have that minute bit of uncertainty, there's no way to actually prove that it's true. For example, geologist are completely confident in their theory of how the Earth is laid out (crust, mantle, core...physical states of them, etc), but even the professor of geology 101 at my graduate institution liked to remind everybody that even though they're sure that's right, there's no physical proof. It's not an awesome math theorem where you can lay everything out in a proof and say "Yes, this is absolutely 100% true" (sorry....undergraduate degree in pure mathematics...).

2) A charismatic leader: Your advisor. Obviously. Else no one would cough up monstrous amounts of money to haul their lives across the country/world to work with them.

3) A sacred doctrine: This one's a little bit sketchy...but for most academic disciplines there's a book the professor/advisor/other grad student always suggests, says you absolutely have to buy, not rent, etc etc. At grad school it was my advisor's book on trace fossils. In undergrad, it was my number theory book.

Weirdness

Well it's been an odd week. For starters, I've only been at my job for three and a half weeks now, and on Monday, they fired the other person who does my job and trained me. Needless to say, I was more than a little freaked out. First I felt like I stole her job...like they'd hired me to fire her. Which I've never experienced before cause well...they don't bring in new students to replace you in academia.  And that felt super wrong. I'm still not quite sure of the reason why they fired her, they gave a bunch of excuses saying it was their failure, she wasn't doing the work correctly, etc etc. So I'm just trying to deal with it and get over it for now. 

Second...navy issues haha. I don't really know if I can talk about it, so we'll just stick with once again, the Navy is trying to give me a heart attack. 

Finally, while I know that New York/New Jersey got hit really bad, mine and the fiance's apartment in Virginia also got hit by Sandy. From what I've seen picture wise, it doesn't look too bad near our apartment. Granted we live across the street from Chesapeake Bay...so there's a fair amount of water sitting on the streets (at least in pictures...I'm not there to be seeing it first hand). And because of the heart-attack-enducing-Navy-issue...he's not there either. So hopefully he'll hear from our landlord and the apartment's all good. Sigh.

Entering the Working World...

Well, long time no write. Sorry about that. I’ve gotten wrapped up in the real working world and just haven’t found the time until now. Now being at 1 o’clock in the afternoon at my desk where I have absolutely no work to do.

I got a full-time office job within two weeks of escaping my graduate institution by the way.  I file paperwork to clear cargo through customs. It’s not too bad, my kind of job in the sense that I don’t have to talk to anybody. It’s quite nice. Also, eventually my one boss here in this city (have another one in another state as well…) keeps telling me once we get a new computer program, there’s less work involved, and he wants me to do cost analysis for him. Yay calculus!

Anywho…today has been so boring. Nothing’s happening. I had one file that I didn’t get to last night (which took 15 minutes), and one sitting on my desk in front of me that’s almost completely done, but I’m waiting on a question I asked my supervisor (she’s out of town for two days). Basically…I just need to know which number to use, because the paper is contradictory. So once she tells me that, it’ll take another 10 minutes and I’ll be done with this one is well.