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nahaleitan · 1 month

Congratulations on getting your grad stuff sorted out!

nahaleitan · 1 month

I think the relationship between students and faculty is very different in lab-based disciplines than in non-lab disciplines. See my reply to youngnomoney above, but in a nutshell, in a lab-based discipline, you're one of a very few employees, essentially, of a lab head. If you are not productive, it really hurts the lab head, especially if they are early-career and your productivity affects their publication quality/frequency affects their shot at tenure. Thus, it behooves them to recruit the best fitting and most capable folks.

nahaleitan · 1 month

I guess I wasn't clear: the chair, in a well-organized department, doesn't set that policy on the fly. There is a recruitment system already in place. The absence of a system (that resulted in the chair's having to even send an e-mail other than "Forwarded your request to the department administrator/secretary, he or she will plug you in to our pre-made system") is what even provided the opportunity for such communication. In fact, the fact that all communication to OP came from the chair, with no contact with a dept admin-office person, indicates poor planning / weird structure. All of this, to me, says that this department is not on par with well-organized places. At the very least, it didn't meet OP's expectations. When you are spending 5+ years in school and have multiple admits, fit is everything. People who settle for poor fit because of prestige often seem to quit before completing their PhDs.

nahaleitan · 1 month

True--the chair's personal flaws are not the issue. But the lack of interest/willingness to provide such basics as introduction to current students definitely says something about the character of the department as a whole, not just the chair's misanthropy.

nahaleitan · 1 month

Well, we have a very different structure, probably. Faculty members each have a lab containing several graduate students and/or post-docs. You can think of these labs as small businesses that all rent suites in the same office building. Obviously, this analogy only goes so far: we communicate and collaborate a lot, and have many shared resources, across labs. But for incoming grad students, you are being admitted to work in a particular lab in most cases. You are an important part of that lab and are the basis for a good fraction of that lab's productivity for 5 or more years. Faculty who don't take the time to interview and recruit the best students are really screwing themselves.

It's also worth pointing out that there are (at least) two diverging models in science that (imperfectly) correlate with discipline. In some disciplines/departments, you are admitted to the dept in general, and at some point, you matriculate into a lab, often after having rotated through several other labs. In those places, the recruitment process is likely to be less like I described, because assessment of fit with a lab/mentor can happen over a year or two. In the other model, though, as I said, you are admitted to a lab from the get-go.

nahaleitan · 1 month

Declining was a good decision, but not because the chair insulted you. Declining was a good decision because the environment clearly does not meet your expectations and it won't be a good fit for you.

You've made a good decision. Now move on. Your job is to find the best-fit graduate program for you. Your job is not to play cop or correct someone's misbehavior.

nahaleitan · 1 month

I don't know your or the OP's field, but I'll point out that there's a wide range of expectations across fields here. I'm in a science field in the US. The expectation for graduate departments in my field is that departments will fly you out, put you up, set up a schedule of interviews with faculty, organize meetings with current students, etc. They are interviewing you, but also recruiting you, and the overall idea is that both you and they should get the most accurate and thorough picture of the other and determine if the quality of the fit is any good. I know that in some humanities fields, the expectation is that any visit is to be funded by the candidate. I don't know of ANY field that would actively discourage meetings with current faculty/students. To me, this would be a big red flag.

InMyElements · 1 month

Patterson House. Classy place, awesome drinks, great appetizers.

duhmark · 1 month

Didn't know there was a word for this. "Apatheists hold that if it were possible to prove that God exists, their behavior would not change. Similarly, there would be no change if someone proved that God does not exist." Sounds pretty OK to me.

duhmark · 1 month

No desire to get into my own beliefs when I'm not convinced of what they are precisely, or what they may be tomorrow--but you should know that you're not unusual at all. I've known quite a few Jews, ranging from those who identify as cultural Jews to those who attend Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox synagogues regularly, who either strongly disbelieve or simply lack a belief in a deity.

Those who say that participation/identification without (strong) belief is uncommon might suffer from the we-don't-talk-about-that-in-public syndrome common to many Jews in communal settings (though I'm sure it's not an exclusively Jewish thing). What I mean by this is that in my experience, it's not unusual for people's private beliefs and behaviors to differ from community standards, but for those same people to be unwilling to acknowledge this amongst the community. For instance, I've known plenty of folks who in Jewish communal settings would never acknowledge eating non-kosher food (for varying definitions of kashrut), violating strict observance of shabbat, etc., but routinely do so at home. Professed or implicitly stated belief in God absolutely can fall into this same category.

I have encountered people who, when they realize that people's public and private behaviors differ with regard to religious belief/practice, assail this as hypocrisy; I do not. Others find this to be disillusioning; I do not. I actually think that there is much value in upholding community standards even in the face of personal deviance from those standards (within reasonable limits--certainly this ends with deception that jeopardizes another person's beliefs and practices, e.g., allowing someone to believe that the food you are serving them must be kosher when it is in fact not). That is how a culture is transmitted and preserved over time, though of course this oversimplifies and our culture is not stagnant and has changed massively, especially in the last 100-150 years.

Given Jewish parents, there are lots of reasons to identify as a Jew and participate in Jewish communal life; belief is one of them but far from the only one of them. Your reasons are what they are, and they may change with time. That's OK.

EDIT: To be clear, I do not suggest that people here are afraid to voice their true beliefs--Reddit is pretty impersonal compared to discussion in person at synagogue or JCC or chavurah or whatever. Rather, I mean to suggest that people's impressions of what is/is not commonplace amongst the Jewish community can be skewed by a general reticence to discuss deviation from community standards.

random-internet-guy · 2 months

So no one else sees a fortune cookie?

jpr123 · 2 months

In terms of style, maybe try Carl Sagan's Contact?

foggy_mt · 2 months

That's pretty unusually high for a humanities field. Good for you, though, if you can do it!

foggy_mt · 2 months

Pay is definitely not the same. My wife is getting her PhD in a humanities field at a similar tier school to where I got my (science) PhD; my stipend a few years ago was 50% more than hers is now.

When she was admitted to grad school, the range of pay across schools was anywhere from "we will not ask you for tuition, and we will pay you for TAing, but there are fewer TAing spots than grad students" ie, zero guaranteed and possibly > zero, up to maybe 20-30% more than the stipend at the school she chose.

When I was doing my PhD, humanities students at my (private, highly ranked, theoretically rich) school were eligible for heating assistance and, in some departments, food stamps.

Bottom line: humanities programs in the US can and often do pay, but they seldom pay even close to what science or engineering programs pay.

rabidwolverine · 2 months

It's about 3/4 mile south, yes -- but the food there is way better than in Station North and it's only about a 10 - 15 minute walk.

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