If you have a good understanding of what grad school actually is, you know it’s not going to be college+, and you’re still excited? Go for it! Just go in with the attitude that this is the start of a career path (not school) with many branches along the way. Most people you’ll work with will act like your options are 1) aim for TT at an R1 or 2) cut your losses and go into industry. Those are both legit paths, but pay attention to what you’re loving and hating about the experience.

Maybe you absolutely love teaching or mentorship or grant-writing or data analysis or giving conference talks or science communication or managing a lab or any of the other billion things you have to be responsible for at some point. There are career paths between the extremes that can let do so the stuff you actually like doing, and they exist both in and outside of academia. If you go in letting yourself get excited about whatever the hell you actually get excited about, you can figure out what the path you actually want could look like and prioritize those things that don’t make you miserable.

• a PhD who voluntarily pursued an instructional faculty track at an R1 where I never again have to backseat the needs of my students and my love of pedagogy behind desperately looking for research funding because publish-or-perish even though o have at bare minimum 3 months a year to devote entirely to whatever research I am excited about in the moment…or play video games if I prefer

Don’t fight, guys. This is academia. You’re both wrong.

I mean, GPT 3.5 consistently quotes my dissertation and conference papers back to me when I ask it anything related to my (extremely niche, but still) research interests. It’s definitely had access to plenty of publications for a while without managing to make any sense of them.

Alternatively, and probably more likely, my papers are incoherent and it’s not GPT’s fault. If 8.0 gets tenure track maybe it will learn to ignore desperate ramblings of PhD students. Once 9.0 gets tenured though I assume it will only reference itself.

Please introduce me to the woman who is doing IVF without first learning about cycle tracking and timed intercourse.

The idea that someone undergoing IVF has not yet tried everything else first is extremely bizarre. It’s wildly expensive and extremely hard on your physical and mental health.

This makes me want to go back on Reddit just to see what r/infertility and r/IVF have to say.

(I say this as I am currently prepping for my 5th freeze-all IVF cycle to make embryos I can’t even put in my own uterus because a doctor did a thing that left me infertile following a miscarriage years ago. Nobody wants to go through this shit. We do it because it’s the next least-worst thing on the list of things to try.)

Seconding this plea to ignore anyone telling you to force or withhold food. The whole “they’ll eat it when they’re hungry enough” may apply to many picky eaters, but if someone (kid or adult) eats an extremely limited or unusual diet like you’re describing in the comments, there is a good chance it may be ARFID. It’s an eating/feeding disorder that often goes along with autism or sensory processing disorders, but can be separate. Critically, the “tried and true” parenting strategies for breaking picky eaters will exacerbate the problem. Of course the answer also isn’t “let them eat McDonald’s all day and stop worrying,” but there are a lot of strategies for supporting someone (especially kids) to expand their list of safe foods in a low-risk high-reward way.

Like the commenter above me said, everyone who has/had ”issues with food” is going to have an entirely different list of what they can and can’t eat and a different set of strategies that worked or backfired for them. The only general advice I have that I think applies across the board is: lower the pressure. If someone only eats 2 or 5 or 10 things, every interaction with food is already very high stakes and takes up a lot of brain space. You’re probably not going to be able to make specific foods less scary, but you can make the environment safer. Never make an unsafe food the only option, don’t let them see how worried you are, don’t (like my mom did) tell them “scientists found that if you eat more than one hot dog a month you get cancer” or “if you don’t eat vegetables you’ll die before you turn 20.” And maybe counterintuitively, don’t act overly surprised or excited when they are curious about a new food, aren’t afraid of something, like a food now that they insisted they didn’t like, etc. Just go with it as a win for you both. Let them see that what happens when they can eat more food is just…they can eat more food. No drama. (Exception if they are already excited and you are following their lead.)

Resources like NEDA (in the like above) can point you toward some places to start and connect you with other parents and professionals who can offer more contextualized and specific advice. You might also look at the r/ARFID subreddit. It’s mostly adults supporting each other but there’s a lot of wisdom for concerned caregivers and loved ones as well.

Unironically worth much more of my attention than the article. I need more elephants in jeans. Are there equivalent donkeys in jeans? If not, let’s call out the rampant media bias and do something about it (specifically making more images of animals wearing jeans).

I spent longer than I want to admit trying to make a pun with AI as “the elephant in the room” to talk to about to my students about which ways of using LLMs are unacceptable/acceptable/encouraged on the first day of class. I couldn’t do any better than AI-lephant. I even asked chat GPT for help. Very disappointing.

I thought it was the Shakers who were fully celibate, not the Quakers. I’m reading through the Quakers’ wiki page now and not seeing anything about views on sex/procreation. Any suggestions where to find more about that?

I’m not trying to challenge you, I’d just like to learn more if I’ve missed something here.

Finally playing Dave the Diver after getting recommendations from everyone I know since it came out. “Dive for fish and make sushi.” Seemed pleasant enough but I didn’t get why people talked about it in the same tone as like, Stardew Valley.

I get it now.

It may not be the original idiom, but it’s definitely something people say. If the core expressions are “(I) take the lead” and “(you) follow my lead,” that lends itself easily to a merge: you take my lead. It’s not as common as the originals but it’s definitely out there. It will stick around because it’s really easy to unambiguously infer what it means in context.

I kinda agree. Knitting is the go-to for this advice, which makes sense. It gets crazy expensive crazy fast. But starting out with shitty yarn and needles makes the whole thing miserable. Same with a lot of other crafting and baking. Using low quality materials results in an unsatisfying product, and low quality tools make for an unsatisfying learning process.

I generally recommend letting yourself buy something nice-but-not-luxury that you’re excited about, but keeping those initial investments really limited in scope. Buy one nice(ish) pair of needles and just enough nice(ish) yarn to make a specific project. You don’t want to go broke for something you end up hating, but you do want to be able to know whether you hate the actual hobby or you just hate doing that hobby badly.

The choice is “help people from systematically disadvantaged groups” or “don’t.” I’d argue that the “don’t” would be the easier choice.

Extend to gender, ethnicity, LGBTQ, whatever…the key is the “systematically.” We can’t assess relative (dis)advantage at an individual level, but we can recognize it at a systemic level and develop programs that counter it systemically.

I’d say X is more like “disproportionately and systematically disadvantaging people of color.”

If you’re in a one on one conversation with another person where the intention of both parties is for you to learn something from them, the idea that you should just sit and wait and hope is silly at best and actively detrimental at worst.

You do want to avoid interrupting at awkward moments so you don’t make them forget what they’re saying or irritate them with a question they are going to answer in the next two words. But it’s pretty simple to avoid those (or more importantly, to demonstrate to the other person that you are INTENDING to avoid them, even if you make mistakes). Three big things:

1. Pay attention to tone of voice, including speed and volume. People will usually slow down, soften their voice, and shift their pitch off neutral (raising or lowering) to sort of “open the floor” for constructive interruptions without outright stopping. That’s the ideal spot to jump in.
2. Be practical about the content of what’s being said. If you have a question about one thing but you see that your partner is clearly moving on to a totally new thing - interrupt them. Even if you do have to be pretty abrupt with it, this is still a “constructive interruption” because it helps both speakers stay on the same page and have an efficient interaction.
3. Backchannel your intentions. Someone else mentioned that backchanneling include minor interruptions — things like nodding, saying “oh wow,” “yeah totally” — that don’t actually take the floor away (the other person doesn’t have to stop talking to give you space). Another kind of backchanneling is using small soft vocal signals (“hmmm” “oh uh well…”) to give the other person the chance to stop and let you ask a question. You don’t force your way in; they can finish their thought but see that they shouldn’t move on yet. Aside from soft vocalizations, these kinds of cues also include laughter, facial expressions (puzzled, skeptical, surprised, etc), eye gaze (either suddenly looking away or suddenly looking right at the person), and gestures (tilting your head to one side, doing a “mouth shrug,”

I study conversational gestures and backchannel a for a living, so I’ll add that my personal favorite tool here is a modified shrug. Tilt your head a little, extend your upturned hand or pointed finger out toward them (but like, softly and not at or near their face, just in neutral space), maybe raise one shoulder a little optionally, and just hold it there. They will read it as a request to metaphorically pass the turn to you the same way they’d pass you the salt.

It’s more of a persistent thing than a series of examples, but a moment that comes to mind is earlier this year teaching a kind of broad social sciences class. I was trying to make a point about something or other and the psychology of capitalism and asked who had ever consciously chosen to stop studying or working to go to sleep or watch tv or otherwise be unproductive. Everybody raised their hands. Ok now who has felt guilty about doing that? No one. Not a single hand. I was astounded.

And in my millennial mind my first thought is of course “wtf are these kids doing at this elite college if they don’t hate themselves properly?” Second thought is “oh cool, these kids don’t hate themselves.”

But following up on what they thought that meant as far as the material we were talking about, it became a conversation about evolving pressures. For me, the concept of “self-care” in college was really the same as “laziness,” which is obviously not great. For them, “self-care” is as much a responsibility as homework, but not necessarily in a good way. There’s a social responsibility to be a certain kind of anti-capitalist while still succeeding in a capitalist system. I had a student say she felt more guilty about breaking her streak on her mindfulness app than getting a bad grade because she didn’t work hard enough.

But at the same time, they truly HAVE to get excellent grades. I might think grade inflation is a huge problem and that they should consider an A- to be a good grade, but the reality is that A- might be the reason they don’t get into law or med school. It’s not like that A- means they don’t deserve or can’t succeed on med school, but it might mean they’ll never get the chance. Do I stand on principle and grade like grades are supposed to mean something, or do I give them what they need to have the future they want?

What about using AI ethically and constructively? I was told I wasn’t going to have a calculator in my pocket by idiots. I’m not going to do that to a new generation. What does it feel like to have to pack extracurriculars to get a post-bac internship even more than they did to get into college? What does it mean to come of age in the era of BLM, COVID, and Trump instead of 9/11, don’t ask don’t tell, and the Great Recession?

It’s just not the same experience. I can’t be. That’s not a problem, but it’s a challenge.

Ironically, understanding the lived experiences of college students.

I’m a professor now, graduated from college in 2010. I actually work at the same school I went to, and I often still feel completely out of touch with what my students actually need and how they approach their education. I have to put real work into connecting with students to meet them where they’re at and create classes they will get something out of. Fortunately I really love that aspect of my job. Most professors don’t give a shit and just assume college is the same now as it was 10-20 years ago.

One of the biggest cliche revisionist histories I know of is “Jack of all trades, master of none; often much better than master of one.” It’s an interesting one because it’s been retconned twice.

You’ll hear people respond to first line by saying “um actually the second line of the poem totally changes the meaning.” Yes, it did change the meaning when it was added in the 21st century, 400-500 years later.

Then you’ll hear people one step closer to accuracy who correct “Jack of all trades” by reminding the speaker that it’s not a compliment because it ends with “master of none.” Except the master of none bit wasn’t used until the 18th century, and the second revision with the couplet may actually closer in meaning to the original!

The original, simple phrase “jack of all trades” was first used in that form in the 16th century, possibly as a reference to Shakespeare, and definitely as a phrase that was intentionally ambiguous about whether it should be interpreted as a compliment or insult.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_of_all_trades?wprov=sfti1#Origins

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Local news anchor once ended a segment saying something was “a phallus” instead of a “fallacy. Understandably but hilarious.