Ask a doctoral student anything!

Sitting in the back allows you to get out quickly and get to work to pay for it all...

 

As a child college was one of those things I always wanted to do, but my parents kept telling me it wasn’t going to happen.

Around 10 or so I got hooked on electronics, usually in conjunction with my erector set. It started with little motors and lights and grew to include transistors, resisters and capacitors. Mostly I learned from books I picked up at Radio Shack and the library.

An uncle of mine had spent 4 years in the Air Force and then went to 4 years of college on the GI Bill. He lived down in Texas and I rarely saw him. He had done work for TI on their first LED digital watch and had done design work on the TRS-80 computer. We went to visit when I was a teenager. My uncle had a spare bedroom that was filled with electronic equipment, especially computer circuitry. It was one of those life changing events.

My first computer was one I designed and built myself. It used a hexadecimal keypad and seven segment LED readouts, and had a bank of eight 128 byte memory chips, for a grand total of 1k of memory. The operating system, if you want to call it that, ran off of a UV erasable ROM. I would write out the machine code on steno pads and then program the ROM using switches, flipping them as needed as I stepped through the memory. If I made a mistake, I had to set the ROM out in the sun, so the light would erase the memory, and start over again. The first program I wrote did little more than scan and decode the keypad and display the result on a seven segment LED display. Surprisingly it mostly worked as planned which greatly encouraged me.

I went to college to become a physicist, and majored in Physics. Yet, my career has repeatedly taken me back to microprocessor based product design. I’m quasi retired, but I’ve gotten a bug lately. With a microprocessor, a few stepper motors and the proper mechanical connections, one can do most anything. Too bad Radio Shack is no longer around to get parts through.

 

I used to think you are just another liberal with your thumb up your arse, but now I must admit you impressed me. Even though we have opposing political views, I always respect people who have some real grey matter in their skulls. I like intelligent people and will pay more attention to what you have to say! I hope we will have great time debating each other in the future!

 

My boy went to Brown and to get into Warren Alpert, you need college course work in All 4, AP classes don't even satisfy requirements for your BS at Brown, they just used to fill prerequisites for more advanced work. His major was Bio/Eng. I am actually shocked that there are students at John Hopkins that did not take science courses in college.

 

I disagree, and I have a politics degree from a world top 100 university.

Honestly, if a lay person who is interested in politics read two books a week on the subject it would take about a year for them to have a very solid grasp of the subject.

A lot of political science degrees is just a way around reading all the source material.

 

I like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise and while it is clear that you reside on the other side of the aisle to myself I respect anyone who can defend their positions with intelligent responses.

Hopefully we can enjoy some fruitful debates in the future.

Take care
DT

 

When I was still just coding for a living a friend lent me two paperback Pop Psy books, Games People Play by Berne and I'm Ok, You're Ok by Harris. I subsequently read Transactional Analysis by Stewart and Joines.

Between those three books I gained enough of a basic understanding of human interactions to see the motivations behind what people are saying. This applies just as much to politics as everything else in life. Since my primary interests lay elsewhere I have only maintained a cursory interest in the subject. I do recall reading a book on the study of Trends in the 1990's and added that to my knowledge base. Proving to be useful nowadays as we encounter Climate Change events on an evermore frequent basis.

 

Most people would be surprised how much knowledge they could pick up by reading non fiction half an hour a night.

 

you prefer book work over good paying honest labor work?

what about saving for your own steel mill business, or purchasing a food truck and selling different variations of mac and cheese at a local college campus

both would have been more lucrative options than academic debt, imo.

 

Or a lawyer,

A doctorate in polisci would go a long way to getting you accepted at one of the more prestigious Universities, and a degree from one of them is about the only way you can avoid being a Public Defender for the rest of your life

 

There is a glut of lawyers in America.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...ls-hunkering-down-enrollment-slips/430213001/

https://www.thoughtco.com/are-there-too-many-lawyers-4026025

Going deep into debt in order to join a profession where work is becoming harder to find is not a smart move IMO.

 

There's been a glut of lawyers for the last several decades, but the ones who went to the best schools always have work.

 

I never took out a loan. I had a full scholarship first year but when I went a different direction with my major it went away. Good point about small scholarships. I heard a story a while back about a kid who applied for scholarships all summer instead of getting a job and ended up with more money than needed.

 

When I started a scholarship was like a hundred bucks..

 

To be more informative on the work angle, the work I did to pay for my education was all in my area of interest educationally and professionally. It was enjoyable and a unique learning experience in and of itself.

On the small scholarship anecdote I mentioned I believe that’s what the person did, write a couple essays a day all summer.

It seems from reading this thread any level of education is attainable for those who have a real desire to learn. The financial obstacles can be overcome.

 

Have you given any lectures yet? Handed out and corrected any assignments? If yes, what is your conception of the reading comprehension and writing skills of contemporary students? And do they give you the impression of being intellectually fit for academia at occasions such as seminars and lectures or are some of them just flatout stupid?

I feel many young people today go for a degree only to earn a certificate and not to actually learn. Many are there because they couldn't get a job with their high school degree and others are there because of policies such as Affirmative Action.

If you have not yet given any lectures or corrected papers, you can answer the question by drawing from your own experiences as an under-grad, grad and doctorate student.

 

This is 2019, you can find that support elsewhere.

 

Back when I was in college, late seventies, early eighties. At my college they had stopped requiring a writing class. I think the actual rule was that a writing class was not required unless more than one professor raised concerns. Nonetheless, it seems to me that professors were always complaining about poor writing skills of students.