So in case I haven't done the subject to death, a little more on whether MAPSS is a good idea for a history scholar, this time directly related to those intending to go on to the Ph.D. because if you're not, well, it shouldn't really matter if MAPSS is good for "history" so much as "preparing me for real-life applications of the social sciences or whatever else my path will be next."
I know, it's probably ridiculous to take advice from someone NOT interested in getting a Ph.D., but hear me out anyway because I have applied for four Ph.D. programs in my past and resolved to never apply for another Ph.D. program in my future.
The way to get into a Ph.D. program is to have a viable, original, well-considered research plan. In a nutshell, a Ph.D. application is NOT about saying "Let me come be a perpetual student because I love learning and I'm scared of the real world!" It's not even about saying "I love history and can't imagine my life about it, and I'm interested in the University of Lower Slobbovia because I love the history of textile production and you have one of the world's best departments on textiles!"
Instead, your Ph.D. application should say "In my work at the University of Lower Slobbovia, I will examine how the technological revolution in Lower Slobbovian municipalities affected the crash of the textile industry, with a focus on the introduction of the mobile phone to washcloth factory workers."
And it's much, much better if you can say "During my year at the University of Chicago, I was able to conduct a preliminary exploration of rebellions in washcloth factories, which will inform my further work at the University of Lower Slobbovia," especially if you can include an excerpt from your related thesis as your writing sample.
Because the thing about Ph.D. programs is that they want specifics. They want you to know exactly what you're going to study, why, and msot of all, why it's important. If you applied to the UChicago History department and found yourself placed in MAPSS instead, chances are good that you have a lot of potential as a scholar, but not a clear vision of what comes next.
If you're hoping to go on, get your doctorate, and became a world-famous professor, then you need to spend your MAPSS year developing the project pitch that is going to have universities throwing money at you and begging for your presence. That's a lot easier if you take four classes in your subject area and have a creepily close relationship with your thesis advisor, who spends her lunch hour twice a month helping you fine-tune your goals and giving you mountains of suggested reading material.
But it's not at all impossible to turn out a bangin' thesis on a topic that interests you without such close supervision (although I really recommend getting your advisor, preceptor, or favorite professor to sit down and have a talk with you about turning it into a viable proposal for Ph.D. research.)
The important takeaway here is that MAPSS is going to look good when you apply for Ph.D. programs. It just is. But for best results and offers of funding from your most unattainable schools, you need to put MAPSS to work right from the beginning, use your year to strategize about what comes next, and make your future school an offer they can't refuse.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Is MAPSS good for history? Part I
Apparently some people have arrived at my blog by searching for the answer to that question. If you were debating whether or not to attend MAPSS, it's too late for this post to affect your decision this year, but you have my best wishes whatever your path, and hopefully this can be of some help in the future.
So okay, those of you familiar with English-language axioms will probably know that the pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. Such is the case regarding MAPSS, but I'll give it my best - hah! - perspective.
The short form answer is that if you are looking at MAPSS as a bridge to a Ph.D. program in history, YES. It will almost certainly make your application look better by virtue of having a graduate degree from the University of Chicago, which is a big flippin' deal, and MAPSS also has a lot of resources and support for those of you going forward with Ph.D. applications to make the process easier and, 90% of the time, a guarantee of funding at a top program.
In that respect, yes, MAPSS is definitely good for history [programs.] But as for your ability to get a head start on research that interests you and really develop your skills as a historian... that's kind of a crap shoot, if I'm being honest.
What you have to remember is that this is a one-year program. In my case, that "one year" will have taken eight and a half months from the first day of class (1 October) to graduation (15 June.) At most, you will be taking 9 classes in MAPSS. One to two of them, the required "Perspectives in the Social Sciences" and a methods course, will already not be related to your area of interest. (You might be able to find a methods course that is related to your area of interest, as there are supposedly dozens of eligible courses. I didn't.) That leaves a maximum of seven (eight if you're REALLY lucky) classes that will be related to the kind of research you want to do. And that's not a lot.
Time moves fast on the quarter system even if you're here for more than a year, but in a year-long program, your education is highly dependent on which professors are currently teaching, and which classes they may be offering. And it's never that many.
UChicago's strength in history is in Asia. That's not a big secret. It's something they're proud of and it's something they are amazing in. But I personally am not an Asia scholar. I took one course in Japanese history as an undergrad to fulfill a geographical distribution requirement, and it was the only history course in which I received less than a full A. My area of interest is postwar America, and unfortunately for me, those classes really weren't abundant this year.
I'm told this happens every year. Some years are great for the things you want to study: postwar America, early modern France, imperialism and the alliance system in the First World War. (Okay, that one's probably done to death, but bear with me. I'm an Americanist.) And some years f-ing suck. I'm told that in years past, all the European history professors have gone on leave en masse, leaving a MAPSS cohort pretty disappointed. And I'm sure it's true for other disciplines too.
I have a friend in the program whose specialty is Southeast Asia. His year has been a dream come true. A professor he had early on introduced him to a Bigwig who subsequently became his thesis advisor, while the original professor served as a secondary advisor of sorts. My friend has been able to take a class with the Bigwig, network, and pursue his research interests on his way to his Ph.D.
Another friend studying early modern France hasn't found classes that are DIRECTLY what she wants to study, but they are near enough that she has been engaged and interested. During the winter quarter (Jan-Mar) she was able to take a seminar with her thesis advisor, and by the end of it, she had written 25+ pages that were essentially the rough draft of her thesis, as her grade for that class as well. (I was happy for her, even as I was eaten alive by jealousy.)
In contrast, I only took one class that could accurately be considered "postwar America." (Part of this may be due to the fact that I do not intend to go on to the Ph.D., and took only professional courses this quarter, outside the social sciences. But the first two quarters, I was only able to take one class remotely resembling my subject area.)
My "postwar America" class was actually a Chicago Studies class, first and foremost, and not even taught by an Americanist. Don't get me wrong, it was still my favorite class of the quarter. But in addition to not really being America-focused (it was a diaspora class) it involved populations and issues that I had never studied before, and will never study again. Interesting, informative, important, fun... but not at all related to my research.
And that's where the lack of available professors really hit home. It wasn't an entirely new experience for me: my undergrad thesis advisor agreed to supervise my research out of pity, I think, as his focus was two hundred years earlier and a continent away. But while my undergrad advisor was fairly knowledgeable anyway and extremely involved, I didn't have that experience this time around.
Given the dearth of professors in the history department, I looked in the English department too. As it turned out, the two professors in that department most suited to my research were ALSO on leave. The third-most-relevant professor remarked wistfully "If only [Scholar] were here this year" when we met; [Scholar] is spending the year as a visiting professor elsewhere. Then, this professor kindly told me that she had already over-committed in supervising MAPH students, our companions in the humanities who have a considerably earlier deadline to find an advisor. So I went with an unrelated history professor after all.
The result was that my preceptor and advisor really knew nothing about the subject, my research was entirely self-directed, and I don't feel that MAPSS was responsible in any way for the final product. I feel like everything successful about my thesis came from my undergrad advisor. For me, MAPSS was great for getting a degree, great for figuring out I was getting the wrong degree for me (professional school, here I come!) and not great for history.
But that's not the typical experience, as illustrated by my two friends above. Like most graduate programs and other exercises in proving adulthood, MAPSS is pretty much going to be what you make of it. If I had been knocking on my advisor's door asking for help twice a week, I probably would have gotten it. The fact that I wasn't was my own stubborn choice.
So okay, those of you familiar with English-language axioms will probably know that the pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. Such is the case regarding MAPSS, but I'll give it my best - hah! - perspective.
The short form answer is that if you are looking at MAPSS as a bridge to a Ph.D. program in history, YES. It will almost certainly make your application look better by virtue of having a graduate degree from the University of Chicago, which is a big flippin' deal, and MAPSS also has a lot of resources and support for those of you going forward with Ph.D. applications to make the process easier and, 90% of the time, a guarantee of funding at a top program.
In that respect, yes, MAPSS is definitely good for history [programs.] But as for your ability to get a head start on research that interests you and really develop your skills as a historian... that's kind of a crap shoot, if I'm being honest.
What you have to remember is that this is a one-year program. In my case, that "one year" will have taken eight and a half months from the first day of class (1 October) to graduation (15 June.) At most, you will be taking 9 classes in MAPSS. One to two of them, the required "Perspectives in the Social Sciences" and a methods course, will already not be related to your area of interest. (You might be able to find a methods course that is related to your area of interest, as there are supposedly dozens of eligible courses. I didn't.) That leaves a maximum of seven (eight if you're REALLY lucky) classes that will be related to the kind of research you want to do. And that's not a lot.
Time moves fast on the quarter system even if you're here for more than a year, but in a year-long program, your education is highly dependent on which professors are currently teaching, and which classes they may be offering. And it's never that many.
UChicago's strength in history is in Asia. That's not a big secret. It's something they're proud of and it's something they are amazing in. But I personally am not an Asia scholar. I took one course in Japanese history as an undergrad to fulfill a geographical distribution requirement, and it was the only history course in which I received less than a full A. My area of interest is postwar America, and unfortunately for me, those classes really weren't abundant this year.
I'm told this happens every year. Some years are great for the things you want to study: postwar America, early modern France, imperialism and the alliance system in the First World War. (Okay, that one's probably done to death, but bear with me. I'm an Americanist.) And some years f-ing suck. I'm told that in years past, all the European history professors have gone on leave en masse, leaving a MAPSS cohort pretty disappointed. And I'm sure it's true for other disciplines too.
I have a friend in the program whose specialty is Southeast Asia. His year has been a dream come true. A professor he had early on introduced him to a Bigwig who subsequently became his thesis advisor, while the original professor served as a secondary advisor of sorts. My friend has been able to take a class with the Bigwig, network, and pursue his research interests on his way to his Ph.D.
Another friend studying early modern France hasn't found classes that are DIRECTLY what she wants to study, but they are near enough that she has been engaged and interested. During the winter quarter (Jan-Mar) she was able to take a seminar with her thesis advisor, and by the end of it, she had written 25+ pages that were essentially the rough draft of her thesis, as her grade for that class as well. (I was happy for her, even as I was eaten alive by jealousy.)
In contrast, I only took one class that could accurately be considered "postwar America." (Part of this may be due to the fact that I do not intend to go on to the Ph.D., and took only professional courses this quarter, outside the social sciences. But the first two quarters, I was only able to take one class remotely resembling my subject area.)
My "postwar America" class was actually a Chicago Studies class, first and foremost, and not even taught by an Americanist. Don't get me wrong, it was still my favorite class of the quarter. But in addition to not really being America-focused (it was a diaspora class) it involved populations and issues that I had never studied before, and will never study again. Interesting, informative, important, fun... but not at all related to my research.
And that's where the lack of available professors really hit home. It wasn't an entirely new experience for me: my undergrad thesis advisor agreed to supervise my research out of pity, I think, as his focus was two hundred years earlier and a continent away. But while my undergrad advisor was fairly knowledgeable anyway and extremely involved, I didn't have that experience this time around.
Given the dearth of professors in the history department, I looked in the English department too. As it turned out, the two professors in that department most suited to my research were ALSO on leave. The third-most-relevant professor remarked wistfully "If only [Scholar] were here this year" when we met; [Scholar] is spending the year as a visiting professor elsewhere. Then, this professor kindly told me that she had already over-committed in supervising MAPH students, our companions in the humanities who have a considerably earlier deadline to find an advisor. So I went with an unrelated history professor after all.
The result was that my preceptor and advisor really knew nothing about the subject, my research was entirely self-directed, and I don't feel that MAPSS was responsible in any way for the final product. I feel like everything successful about my thesis came from my undergrad advisor. For me, MAPSS was great for getting a degree, great for figuring out I was getting the wrong degree for me (professional school, here I come!) and not great for history.
But that's not the typical experience, as illustrated by my two friends above. Like most graduate programs and other exercises in proving adulthood, MAPSS is pretty much going to be what you make of it. If I had been knocking on my advisor's door asking for help twice a week, I probably would have gotten it. The fact that I wasn't was my own stubborn choice.
Monday, May 20, 2013
Chicago and Safety
My mother was very concerned about me moving to Chicago because of its reputation as a rather violent place. This reputation is not entirely unfounded, but I'd like to share a few thoughts.
1) If you want real violence, go to someplace with the most violent crime per capita. Chicago is actually not in the top 10 worst cities for this in the USA, although shortly after I sent in my MAPSS acceptance last year I listened to a piece on NPR about how there had been more violent deaths in Chicago than in Afghanistan in 2012. Remember, Chicago is a really freakin' big city. And I think I've been much more secure in Chicago than I would have been in, say, Memphis or New Orleans. Again, I live pretty darn close to President Obama's house. Campus police are a notable presence in Hyde Park. I've never felt as unsafe here as I did on campus as an undergraduate at my alma mater, in a much smaller city. In fact, emails reporting crimes in the area also go out a lot less frequently here than at my alma mater. Go figure.
2) This doesn't mean Chicago is all fun and daisies. There's a lot of crime. A few weeks ago, a friend was walking - on campus, in broad daylight - and had her cell phone out. Someone ran by, grabbed it, and was able to jump into a waiting car at the end of the block before she could react. Slick. She was out an expensive phone. Another friend was mugged here over the summer - when I asked what happened, she shrugged and said "Some idiot kid held a gun on me and my friends." She did the right thing, the smart thing, and no one was hurt. But that happened. The area is more dangerous during the summer, and not just if you're walking alone at night.
3) I could tell you to use your common sense here, and I think there's a lot to be said for the common sense argument. For not doing stupid things. There are neighborhoods where I have never gone, and never plan to go. I am not usually playing with my phone while out and about - and incidentally, being distracted makes you a better target for more than just a snatch 'n grab. But I also think there's a WHOLE lot to be said for not victim blaming. I would rather live in a world where I didn't have to worry about that kind of crap. And I don't think it's productive to live your life in fear.
4) Tonight I walked to buy ice cream after dark. I was wearing a sheer, sleeveless dress, flats, and not much else. And absolutely nothing happened to me. I bought some popsicles, and I carried them home, with my little purse and my skimpy dress, and had no incidents. Was it the smartest thing to do? No. But if any of you are familiar with the Series of Unfortunate Events, you know that living your life in fear is not a good idea, especially if you live on LakeLachrymose Michigan. Of all the people I've met in Chicago, I know two who have dealt with crimes, only one of them a potentially dangerous crime. And if I'm being honest, I walk by myself after dark a lot. And either people take one look at me and mistake me for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or it's really not as dangerous as your mom and NPR want you to think it is, especially in Hyde Park.
So I've done my blogging duty for the night, I think. I'd still like to make posts on Perspectives as a course, the futures of MAPSS kids (including yours truly) and "whether MAPSS is right for you," but those can doubtless come as I finish up papers in the next couple of weeks.
1) If you want real violence, go to someplace with the most violent crime per capita. Chicago is actually not in the top 10 worst cities for this in the USA, although shortly after I sent in my MAPSS acceptance last year I listened to a piece on NPR about how there had been more violent deaths in Chicago than in Afghanistan in 2012. Remember, Chicago is a really freakin' big city. And I think I've been much more secure in Chicago than I would have been in, say, Memphis or New Orleans. Again, I live pretty darn close to President Obama's house. Campus police are a notable presence in Hyde Park. I've never felt as unsafe here as I did on campus as an undergraduate at my alma mater, in a much smaller city. In fact, emails reporting crimes in the area also go out a lot less frequently here than at my alma mater. Go figure.
2) This doesn't mean Chicago is all fun and daisies. There's a lot of crime. A few weeks ago, a friend was walking - on campus, in broad daylight - and had her cell phone out. Someone ran by, grabbed it, and was able to jump into a waiting car at the end of the block before she could react. Slick. She was out an expensive phone. Another friend was mugged here over the summer - when I asked what happened, she shrugged and said "Some idiot kid held a gun on me and my friends." She did the right thing, the smart thing, and no one was hurt. But that happened. The area is more dangerous during the summer, and not just if you're walking alone at night.
3) I could tell you to use your common sense here, and I think there's a lot to be said for the common sense argument. For not doing stupid things. There are neighborhoods where I have never gone, and never plan to go. I am not usually playing with my phone while out and about - and incidentally, being distracted makes you a better target for more than just a snatch 'n grab. But I also think there's a WHOLE lot to be said for not victim blaming. I would rather live in a world where I didn't have to worry about that kind of crap. And I don't think it's productive to live your life in fear.
4) Tonight I walked to buy ice cream after dark. I was wearing a sheer, sleeveless dress, flats, and not much else. And absolutely nothing happened to me. I bought some popsicles, and I carried them home, with my little purse and my skimpy dress, and had no incidents. Was it the smartest thing to do? No. But if any of you are familiar with the Series of Unfortunate Events, you know that living your life in fear is not a good idea, especially if you live on Lake
So I've done my blogging duty for the night, I think. I'd still like to make posts on Perspectives as a course, the futures of MAPSS kids (including yours truly) and "whether MAPSS is right for you," but those can doubtless come as I finish up papers in the next couple of weeks.
MAPSS and Math
So I wanted to do a post on Math Camp, and I think it's important, so I'm going to go ahead and do that now.
Math Camp, for any of you who have been living under a rock/running away from anything with the word "math" in it, is a two-week intensive math review the UofC offers for incoming social sciences students in the summer. It's offered pass/fail only, and believe me when I tell you, they want everyone to pass.
When I was touring campus last April during Campus Days, my tour guide mentioned that he hadn't done Math Camp, but kind of wished he had, because a lot of the students who did Math Camp seemed to form friendships and study groups from that alone, and they lasted throughout the year, and it was a good way to meet people.
The university will tell you that Math Camp is suitable for people with all levels of math education. It is pass/fail. Group work is encouraged. To me, it sounded like EVERYONE should take Math Camp!
Two days later, I decided that not everyone should take Math Camp.
I'm coming from a slightly unusual place. My high school diploma was not American; as such, I never took calculus or even pre-Calculus, but had taken matrix algebra, which is apparently rare for Americans. In college, I went with the easiest math courses available to me because I really don't enjoy math, at all. When I got here, I had still never encountered any calculus.
The Math Camp wasn't about teaching, pure and simple. It was about review. The teacher gave out massive packets with mysterious symbols, which he then read aloud using names I had never heard. That was pretty much the extent of it. Although I thought I was following along okay during the first day of classes, the first homework assignment revealed to me that I did not really know what I was doing.
Math Camp wasn't about grading any more than teaching. It was pass/fail, and on a participatory basis. Essentially, if it appeared you had attempted the homework and made a good faith effort, you got credit. Your answers might be marked as wrong, but I have serious doubts as to whether the correct solution would have been noted on the returned sheet.
The first homework assignment was postponed and due on the third day rather than the second; from the beginning, the class didn't go as quickly as it was supposed to go, due to students struggling to understand what was going on.
I made a good faith attempt to teach myself calculus. Or rather, I tried, really hard. I joined two different study groups, which were highly encouraged - apparently the idea was that your peers could help you understand the concepts that were completely over your head in class, or at least give you the correct answers.
I think the moment I knew I would drop out of math camp came when I had joined the second study group of the second day. One particular problem on the homework assignment was apparently asking for some sort of proof, but it gave no directions, and no one could find anything relevant in the handout from class. Like most of my fellow students, I had compensated by plugging in numbers for the letters, and solving for x until I had reached the entirely satisfactory and utterly wrong solution of 2=2.
The second study group, which was rather larger than my first one, also had no idea what the correct answer to the problem was. After some time of ignoring it in favor of working on other problems, we saw another Math Camper from a different study group pass. We hailed him and asked what they had thought, as a group, of the problem.
"We just went with plug 'n chug," he answered, shrugging. And that was when I realized that no one in the class actually cared about getting the right answer. By some oversight, we hadn't been given the tools for this particular problem, and we did not want to learn. We were doing this for a letter P on our transcripts, to act like we understood math, and whether or not we actually understood it had no bearing on our lives.
That wasn't why I went to grad school. It sounds cheesy, but I had gone to grad school with all these wide-eyed ideals about learning and knowledge, and this was coming out a lot more like, if you'll pardon the expression, bullshit.
I went to the reserve desk, but the recommended book the professor has promised to have at the desk had never been put on reserve. Someone else had checked it out. I checked out two other books along the lines of "Calculus for Dummies" and carried them home in my backpack. Ten blocks with a weight that left my shoulders aching.
That night, I was near tears of stress and a feeling of stupidity that I didn't understand it. My arm had broken out in nickel-sized patches of psoriasis for the first time since finding a topic for my senior thesis as an undergraduate, a stress reaction. I asked myself whether a P on my transcript in an unrelated area was worth two weeks of stress and hating my life, and whether I wanted to start off my grad school experience that way.
The answer was no. It wasn't an easy decision. It may have been the first time I had ever quit anything in my life. I felt sure I was going to have to justify it to everyone from my former boss, who had tried to persuade me to stay at my job instead of moving to Chicago early for Math Camp, to my father. (Like most of us, I have a parental approval complex.) But I texted my study buddy and first Chicagoan friend, letting her know that I had decided it was better for me to quit while I was ahead, and telling everyone else got easier after that.
So I spent the next week and a half continuing to explore Chicago, paint, and get myself psyched for my "real" classes to begin. It was hard not to internalize my worries that I was starting out as a failure, and my entire graduate school experience would be marred by the spectre of Math Camp. But I remain convinced that the "failure" of walking away from Math Camp was nothing compared to how stupid and unhappy I would have felt had I stayed.
A week and a half later, I took the bus to campus for the first time on my way to Orientation week. By chance, I sat down next to another MAPSSter who I had briefly studied with on Day Two of my aborted Math Camping. She told me that I had given her the courage to drop out after Day Three, and I felt reassured. (I also made a lifelong bff. Yay for taking the 172!)
When we sat down for our first orientation event, we sat by a couple of guys we'd never met before, who were talking about dropping out of Math Camp. It was further vindication for us all.
Now, to be clear, Math Camp is not some impossible gauntlet you will never attain. And in fact, I'd recommend people try it out, just for the hell of it, if you can get to Chicago a couple of weeks early and want to meet people, or especially if your field will have you working a lot with math-y concepts. (As a historian, mine didn't.)
But what I AM saying is that dropping out of Math Camp is nothing to be ashamed of. You don't have to worry that you are stupid or less-than for not getting it. You don't have to feel like you will be judged if you decide it's not for you. In fact, you may meet some of the most important people in your life by NOT doing Math Camp. Just saying.
I do have two good friends who went on to complete Math Camp, one my study buddy and another this random kid we met during Math Camp who was very outgoing and became our friend before we really knew what was happening. My study buddy is a Psychology student who would go on to take advanced statistics during winter quarter; the other dude used to teach math before he went back to school. They both had a fine time with it.
And I met a kid from CIR during my first quarter who had also gone into Math Camp with a background in matrix algebra but not calculus. Like me, he checked out books on calculus and tried to deal with his misery. Unlike me, he lasted through day 8 until it got to the math he was familiar with.
Math Camp isn't for everyone, despite what the administration might try to tell you. But Math Camp also doesn't have to ruin your life. It's an individual choice, and if you're someone who has either the background or temperament for it, more power to you.
If not, there's nothing wrong with starting the quarter relaxed and rejuvenated and happy instead of stressing yourself sick and feeling like a fraud.
Math Camp, for any of you who have been living under a rock/running away from anything with the word "math" in it, is a two-week intensive math review the UofC offers for incoming social sciences students in the summer. It's offered pass/fail only, and believe me when I tell you, they want everyone to pass.
When I was touring campus last April during Campus Days, my tour guide mentioned that he hadn't done Math Camp, but kind of wished he had, because a lot of the students who did Math Camp seemed to form friendships and study groups from that alone, and they lasted throughout the year, and it was a good way to meet people.
The university will tell you that Math Camp is suitable for people with all levels of math education. It is pass/fail. Group work is encouraged. To me, it sounded like EVERYONE should take Math Camp!
Two days later, I decided that not everyone should take Math Camp.
I'm coming from a slightly unusual place. My high school diploma was not American; as such, I never took calculus or even pre-Calculus, but had taken matrix algebra, which is apparently rare for Americans. In college, I went with the easiest math courses available to me because I really don't enjoy math, at all. When I got here, I had still never encountered any calculus.
The Math Camp wasn't about teaching, pure and simple. It was about review. The teacher gave out massive packets with mysterious symbols, which he then read aloud using names I had never heard. That was pretty much the extent of it. Although I thought I was following along okay during the first day of classes, the first homework assignment revealed to me that I did not really know what I was doing.
Math Camp wasn't about grading any more than teaching. It was pass/fail, and on a participatory basis. Essentially, if it appeared you had attempted the homework and made a good faith effort, you got credit. Your answers might be marked as wrong, but I have serious doubts as to whether the correct solution would have been noted on the returned sheet.
The first homework assignment was postponed and due on the third day rather than the second; from the beginning, the class didn't go as quickly as it was supposed to go, due to students struggling to understand what was going on.
I made a good faith attempt to teach myself calculus. Or rather, I tried, really hard. I joined two different study groups, which were highly encouraged - apparently the idea was that your peers could help you understand the concepts that were completely over your head in class, or at least give you the correct answers.
I think the moment I knew I would drop out of math camp came when I had joined the second study group of the second day. One particular problem on the homework assignment was apparently asking for some sort of proof, but it gave no directions, and no one could find anything relevant in the handout from class. Like most of my fellow students, I had compensated by plugging in numbers for the letters, and solving for x until I had reached the entirely satisfactory and utterly wrong solution of 2=2.
The second study group, which was rather larger than my first one, also had no idea what the correct answer to the problem was. After some time of ignoring it in favor of working on other problems, we saw another Math Camper from a different study group pass. We hailed him and asked what they had thought, as a group, of the problem.
"We just went with plug 'n chug," he answered, shrugging. And that was when I realized that no one in the class actually cared about getting the right answer. By some oversight, we hadn't been given the tools for this particular problem, and we did not want to learn. We were doing this for a letter P on our transcripts, to act like we understood math, and whether or not we actually understood it had no bearing on our lives.
That wasn't why I went to grad school. It sounds cheesy, but I had gone to grad school with all these wide-eyed ideals about learning and knowledge, and this was coming out a lot more like, if you'll pardon the expression, bullshit.
I went to the reserve desk, but the recommended book the professor has promised to have at the desk had never been put on reserve. Someone else had checked it out. I checked out two other books along the lines of "Calculus for Dummies" and carried them home in my backpack. Ten blocks with a weight that left my shoulders aching.
That night, I was near tears of stress and a feeling of stupidity that I didn't understand it. My arm had broken out in nickel-sized patches of psoriasis for the first time since finding a topic for my senior thesis as an undergraduate, a stress reaction. I asked myself whether a P on my transcript in an unrelated area was worth two weeks of stress and hating my life, and whether I wanted to start off my grad school experience that way.
The answer was no. It wasn't an easy decision. It may have been the first time I had ever quit anything in my life. I felt sure I was going to have to justify it to everyone from my former boss, who had tried to persuade me to stay at my job instead of moving to Chicago early for Math Camp, to my father. (Like most of us, I have a parental approval complex.) But I texted my study buddy and first Chicagoan friend, letting her know that I had decided it was better for me to quit while I was ahead, and telling everyone else got easier after that.
So I spent the next week and a half continuing to explore Chicago, paint, and get myself psyched for my "real" classes to begin. It was hard not to internalize my worries that I was starting out as a failure, and my entire graduate school experience would be marred by the spectre of Math Camp. But I remain convinced that the "failure" of walking away from Math Camp was nothing compared to how stupid and unhappy I would have felt had I stayed.
A week and a half later, I took the bus to campus for the first time on my way to Orientation week. By chance, I sat down next to another MAPSSter who I had briefly studied with on Day Two of my aborted Math Camping. She told me that I had given her the courage to drop out after Day Three, and I felt reassured. (I also made a lifelong bff. Yay for taking the 172!)
When we sat down for our first orientation event, we sat by a couple of guys we'd never met before, who were talking about dropping out of Math Camp. It was further vindication for us all.
Now, to be clear, Math Camp is not some impossible gauntlet you will never attain. And in fact, I'd recommend people try it out, just for the hell of it, if you can get to Chicago a couple of weeks early and want to meet people, or especially if your field will have you working a lot with math-y concepts. (As a historian, mine didn't.)
But what I AM saying is that dropping out of Math Camp is nothing to be ashamed of. You don't have to worry that you are stupid or less-than for not getting it. You don't have to feel like you will be judged if you decide it's not for you. In fact, you may meet some of the most important people in your life by NOT doing Math Camp. Just saying.
I do have two good friends who went on to complete Math Camp, one my study buddy and another this random kid we met during Math Camp who was very outgoing and became our friend before we really knew what was happening. My study buddy is a Psychology student who would go on to take advanced statistics during winter quarter; the other dude used to teach math before he went back to school. They both had a fine time with it.
And I met a kid from CIR during my first quarter who had also gone into Math Camp with a background in matrix algebra but not calculus. Like me, he checked out books on calculus and tried to deal with his misery. Unlike me, he lasted through day 8 until it got to the math he was familiar with.
Math Camp isn't for everyone, despite what the administration might try to tell you. But Math Camp also doesn't have to ruin your life. It's an individual choice, and if you're someone who has either the background or temperament for it, more power to you.
If not, there's nothing wrong with starting the quarter relaxed and rejuvenated and happy instead of stressing yourself sick and feeling like a fraud.
MAPSS and living in Chicago
So I skipped blogging for like 6 mos, no big deal. Maybe I'll write like three entries tonight to make up for it/because it is a Monday night and I an eating lime popsicles and drinking. Yeah, super sexy. That's grad school.
So I moved to Chicago last August, and if I were a more entertaining and less lazy person, I would have illustrated that with a .gif of someone dancing in astounded delight. I had a Real Person Job (kind of; you know, the usual sort of job currently being worked by people with BAs in The Social Sciences) and I had started to hate it. So I started a countdown in my day planner and got several friends to help me pack up my belongings, mostly through bribing them with pizza, laser shows, and watching my preordered Hunger Games DVD on my 32-inch tv before I had to sell it rather than move it.
And when I got here, I seriously loved it. (Cue imaginary dancing .gif.) I had several weeks before the school year started, and I got to explore the city and feel like my life was about to begin.
So okay, a note about living in Chicago while studying at the UofC. I have friends who live in other parts of the city. And they fucking hate it. The commute is universally terrible, and I've also had a few people explain to me that they found it really difficult to socialize and make friends for the first few weeks because they were having to steel themselves for the drive back to Wrigleyville or a really, really long spell on a couple of different buses. So unless you really, really like commuting, or have a free/reduced housing offer already in place, I would probably advise you to live somewhere near Hyde Park. Like, in Hyde Park. (But, you know, not too far south or west.)
Of course, the problem with Hyde Park is that when you live here, you very rarely leave Hyde Park. Hyde Park is NOT on the eL, and UofC students don't get public transportation classes like basically every other student in Chicago. (Those assholes. Instead our student IDs allow us to ride three Hyde-Park-area buses for free. The joke is that this is so the university can keep all its serfs in the fiefdom, and even though I'm not a medievalist, that is bitterly true enough to be funny.) So basically if you want to go anywhere cool in Chicago, you either drive (putting up with the price of gas, the thick traffic, and either the cost of a parking permit and registration or car service fees, though most people I know who have zipcar seem to like it) or you ride on the bus forever. And ever. And ever. (There's a .gif for this too somewhere, I know.)
Personally, I live on the very northern edge of Hyde Park. Actually I think my address is technically in Kenwood, but that's a technicality. The moral of the story is that I live very close to the block that is always shut down and guarded by Secret Service SUVs because President Obama lives there. And that is kind of awesome and was especially bitching on election night when it shut down for like three blocks in every direction and I was all "ZOMG several hours after I've gone to bed, the President will be passing by my home!"
And when I walk to classes, especially those south of the Midway, it's a good thirty minutes for me to get there. If the commute was any longer I would probably shoot myself.
Then there's the debate over whether to live in student housing, or not. There are lots of opinions on both sides of that argument. What settled it for me was my tour guide during my Campus Days visit, who said that his friends in university housing were able to do most of their studying at their apartments, which were quiet. Let me tell you, living in a building that's full of other grad students is amazing in that regard. I have never lived in such a relatively distraction-free environment, and when it's 25 degrees outside and there are eight inches of snow on the ground and you have to write a paper, it's really nice not to have to think about fighting your way onto the bus to the library.
I'm also lucky in that I have a single. Being a lady with pets, I wasn't eligible for a roommate in university housing, which is probably a good thing because I am a picky bitch and don't always like people. Most of the people I know here have roommates, and their experiences have been interesting, to say the least.
The downside? You will probably pay more in rent through the university housing. In fact, you will almost CERTAINLY pay more in rent. I pay $831 a month for a one bedroom, and let me tell you, the amenities are not to die for. In my home city, $800 a month would get me an apartment twice this size with a balcony, community swimming pool, and fitness center. This shit is crazy, y'all. But at the same time, my friends and I usually hang out at my place because I have a nice big living area (though without a nice big tv) and no weird roommate who pops in and asks us to take pictures of her for her facebook page.
That being said, two of my friends are roommates who met briefly during Campus Days, decided to live together, and are now really close friends, despite being virtual strangers to begin with. These stories can have happy endings! And we're usually over at their place if we're not at mine, but theirs is University-furnished and mine is furnished with my own eclectic faux-leather futon and other young adult staples, so it's pretty homey.
Living in Hyde Park, you will quickly come to appreciate that things other than the rent are fucking expensive. You will learn to buy your peanut butter at CVS, but your mayonnaise at Hyde Park Produce, unless you can suck it up to walk all the way to Treasure Island, which is itself stylized as "America's Most Expensive Supermarket." But never fear, Hyde Parkssters! Within the next year or so, you will also be getting Whole Foods, or, as the witty are prone to call it, "Whole Paycheck." Enjoy your year of living on student loans, ramen, and tuna fish. But don't buy your tuna fish from Hyde Park Produce, because that shit comes packed in olive oil for $4 a pop. (I'm not saying it's not delicious. I'm saying you need to live within your means.)
So anyway, when I moved here last August, I was like "I LOVE CHICAGO!!!!" And I'm sure I tapdanced down Woodlawn and sang with the butterflies and stuff. And for the past couple of weeks, I've been wandering around campus thinking "On a day like this, how could anyone not be in love with this place?"
But there was an in-between time. That was the period from January to late April, and that, my friends, may have been the most miserable three and a half months of my life. It was freakin' cold, there was a perennial bank of hard-packed, dirty snow everywhere but the streets, there was no such thing as sunshine, and this sunshiney, outdoorsy girl who had never experienced snow that lasted longer than three days... just about died. I think I have a vitamin D deficiency, and I definitely had a dispositional deficiency for a while there.
If you don't know what winters in Chicago or some equally hellacious place are like, I can't really prepare you. The snow if one thing. The seasonal affective disorder is another. The best advice I can have for you is to hold tight to your shred of sanity. For me, this came in the form of being craftsy. I knit. I baked. I painted. And I survived. But it wasn't pretty.
I don't mean to scare you all away, just to prepare you, o potential readers of this blog. If I had to make the choice to do MAPSS again, even knowing what I now know about Chicago winters, I would still do it. But I might have asked for a bright light therapy lamp for Christmas instead of books about the intersection of gender and culture. (This is what academia does to your head.)
Will I be applying for my next degree in places that have winters like this? Well, one. I'll be applying to Chicago again, because I'll stand a good chance of getting in and getting funding, and funding is gonna be very important. But I'm seriously thinking about Florida for the rest of my applications. Kind of seriously. Anyway, you aren't going to catch me dead anywhere colder.
So I moved to Chicago last August, and if I were a more entertaining and less lazy person, I would have illustrated that with a .gif of someone dancing in astounded delight. I had a Real Person Job (kind of; you know, the usual sort of job currently being worked by people with BAs in The Social Sciences) and I had started to hate it. So I started a countdown in my day planner and got several friends to help me pack up my belongings, mostly through bribing them with pizza, laser shows, and watching my preordered Hunger Games DVD on my 32-inch tv before I had to sell it rather than move it.
And when I got here, I seriously loved it. (Cue imaginary dancing .gif.) I had several weeks before the school year started, and I got to explore the city and feel like my life was about to begin.
So okay, a note about living in Chicago while studying at the UofC. I have friends who live in other parts of the city. And they fucking hate it. The commute is universally terrible, and I've also had a few people explain to me that they found it really difficult to socialize and make friends for the first few weeks because they were having to steel themselves for the drive back to Wrigleyville or a really, really long spell on a couple of different buses. So unless you really, really like commuting, or have a free/reduced housing offer already in place, I would probably advise you to live somewhere near Hyde Park. Like, in Hyde Park. (But, you know, not too far south or west.)
Of course, the problem with Hyde Park is that when you live here, you very rarely leave Hyde Park. Hyde Park is NOT on the eL, and UofC students don't get public transportation classes like basically every other student in Chicago. (Those assholes. Instead our student IDs allow us to ride three Hyde-Park-area buses for free. The joke is that this is so the university can keep all its serfs in the fiefdom, and even though I'm not a medievalist, that is bitterly true enough to be funny.) So basically if you want to go anywhere cool in Chicago, you either drive (putting up with the price of gas, the thick traffic, and either the cost of a parking permit and registration or car service fees, though most people I know who have zipcar seem to like it) or you ride on the bus forever. And ever. And ever. (There's a .gif for this too somewhere, I know.)
Personally, I live on the very northern edge of Hyde Park. Actually I think my address is technically in Kenwood, but that's a technicality. The moral of the story is that I live very close to the block that is always shut down and guarded by Secret Service SUVs because President Obama lives there. And that is kind of awesome and was especially bitching on election night when it shut down for like three blocks in every direction and I was all "ZOMG several hours after I've gone to bed, the President will be passing by my home!"
And when I walk to classes, especially those south of the Midway, it's a good thirty minutes for me to get there. If the commute was any longer I would probably shoot myself.
Then there's the debate over whether to live in student housing, or not. There are lots of opinions on both sides of that argument. What settled it for me was my tour guide during my Campus Days visit, who said that his friends in university housing were able to do most of their studying at their apartments, which were quiet. Let me tell you, living in a building that's full of other grad students is amazing in that regard. I have never lived in such a relatively distraction-free environment, and when it's 25 degrees outside and there are eight inches of snow on the ground and you have to write a paper, it's really nice not to have to think about fighting your way onto the bus to the library.
I'm also lucky in that I have a single. Being a lady with pets, I wasn't eligible for a roommate in university housing, which is probably a good thing because I am a picky bitch and don't always like people. Most of the people I know here have roommates, and their experiences have been interesting, to say the least.
The downside? You will probably pay more in rent through the university housing. In fact, you will almost CERTAINLY pay more in rent. I pay $831 a month for a one bedroom, and let me tell you, the amenities are not to die for. In my home city, $800 a month would get me an apartment twice this size with a balcony, community swimming pool, and fitness center. This shit is crazy, y'all. But at the same time, my friends and I usually hang out at my place because I have a nice big living area (though without a nice big tv) and no weird roommate who pops in and asks us to take pictures of her for her facebook page.
That being said, two of my friends are roommates who met briefly during Campus Days, decided to live together, and are now really close friends, despite being virtual strangers to begin with. These stories can have happy endings! And we're usually over at their place if we're not at mine, but theirs is University-furnished and mine is furnished with my own eclectic faux-leather futon and other young adult staples, so it's pretty homey.
Living in Hyde Park, you will quickly come to appreciate that things other than the rent are fucking expensive. You will learn to buy your peanut butter at CVS, but your mayonnaise at Hyde Park Produce, unless you can suck it up to walk all the way to Treasure Island, which is itself stylized as "America's Most Expensive Supermarket." But never fear, Hyde Parkssters! Within the next year or so, you will also be getting Whole Foods, or, as the witty are prone to call it, "Whole Paycheck." Enjoy your year of living on student loans, ramen, and tuna fish. But don't buy your tuna fish from Hyde Park Produce, because that shit comes packed in olive oil for $4 a pop. (I'm not saying it's not delicious. I'm saying you need to live within your means.)
So anyway, when I moved here last August, I was like "I LOVE CHICAGO!!!!" And I'm sure I tapdanced down Woodlawn and sang with the butterflies and stuff. And for the past couple of weeks, I've been wandering around campus thinking "On a day like this, how could anyone not be in love with this place?"
But there was an in-between time. That was the period from January to late April, and that, my friends, may have been the most miserable three and a half months of my life. It was freakin' cold, there was a perennial bank of hard-packed, dirty snow everywhere but the streets, there was no such thing as sunshine, and this sunshiney, outdoorsy girl who had never experienced snow that lasted longer than three days... just about died. I think I have a vitamin D deficiency, and I definitely had a dispositional deficiency for a while there.
If you don't know what winters in Chicago or some equally hellacious place are like, I can't really prepare you. The snow if one thing. The seasonal affective disorder is another. The best advice I can have for you is to hold tight to your shred of sanity. For me, this came in the form of being craftsy. I knit. I baked. I painted. And I survived. But it wasn't pretty.
I don't mean to scare you all away, just to prepare you, o potential readers of this blog. If I had to make the choice to do MAPSS again, even knowing what I now know about Chicago winters, I would still do it. But I might have asked for a bright light therapy lamp for Christmas instead of books about the intersection of gender and culture. (This is what academia does to your head.)
Will I be applying for my next degree in places that have winters like this? Well, one. I'll be applying to Chicago again, because I'll stand a good chance of getting in and getting funding, and funding is gonna be very important. But I'm seriously thinking about Florida for the rest of my applications. Kind of seriously. Anyway, you aren't going to catch me dead anywhere colder.
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
MAPSS in general
So this blog entry by a former MAPSS student sums up my experience so far pretty well, with one exception:
she says you shouldn't expect to like everyone. Okay, that is probably true on the surface. No one likes everyone and gets along with all their classmates and they can all be BFFs forever at that ivy-covered hall in the sky. But I've been astounded by how much I like MAPSS and UChicago people.
Sure, there is one particular person who posts on the MAPSS Facebook page who I am happy not to have encountered, because I think I would not get along with [them] in the slightest. That's one person, out of 180. And because it's a big program and this individual is not in my preceptor group, it has not come up. (And, okay, there is one kid in my preceptor group who makes me feel dumb, but I think that's my own insecurity talking.)
Everyone else I've met has been amazing. I'm really surprised by the fact that I don't tend to stick exclusively to other history students. In fact, my best friends here turned out to be mostly anthropology students (with dabbles of sociology, history and psych.)
Everyone here is driven and intelligent - that's why they're here. Most of them don't rub it in your face, and are happy to explain things that go over your head for whatever reason, commiserate about shortcomings, and unashamedly ask for help in understanding agency and structure in Historical Narrative. My new MAPSS friends already feel like people who will be in my life for the rest of my life. People who will get invited to my wedding, even if we don't stay in close contact after this year. They're good people, they're interesting people, and they're my kind of people.
A lot of the focus of MAPSS is on peer learning and fostering community, which differentiates it from most of your graduate school horror stories and makes a compelling, inclusive environment. I'm not a competitive person by nature - I loathe conflict and actively avoid dramatics - so it's a really wonderful place for me to be. And I haven't met anyone, even the people I know casually from class who might not be positive what my name is, who isn't ready to form an impromptu study group and discuss Marxism and Structural Functionalism out on the lawn.
(Okay, we had snow flurries this week and when a friend and I were drinking juice outside on the quad today, he hastily suggested we move to the library. It's cold now. But you get the idea. We ran into each other outside the MAPSS lounge, and he was willing to take his free hour and a half to talk over a paper we have due Friday, listen to the problems I was having, and make suggestions about relevant readings.)
So no, you shouldn't expect to like everyone in MAPSS. But with the above information, you should bear in mind that I am notoriously independent and super awkward at making friends. Tonight, I'm meeting up with several people at Ida Noyes just because I can. You may not like everyone, but you would have to make a major effort not to like most people you meet, and find some you really get along with.
she says you shouldn't expect to like everyone. Okay, that is probably true on the surface. No one likes everyone and gets along with all their classmates and they can all be BFFs forever at that ivy-covered hall in the sky. But I've been astounded by how much I like MAPSS and UChicago people.
Sure, there is one particular person who posts on the MAPSS Facebook page who I am happy not to have encountered, because I think I would not get along with [them] in the slightest. That's one person, out of 180. And because it's a big program and this individual is not in my preceptor group, it has not come up. (And, okay, there is one kid in my preceptor group who makes me feel dumb, but I think that's my own insecurity talking.)
Everyone else I've met has been amazing. I'm really surprised by the fact that I don't tend to stick exclusively to other history students. In fact, my best friends here turned out to be mostly anthropology students (with dabbles of sociology, history and psych.)
Everyone here is driven and intelligent - that's why they're here. Most of them don't rub it in your face, and are happy to explain things that go over your head for whatever reason, commiserate about shortcomings, and unashamedly ask for help in understanding agency and structure in Historical Narrative. My new MAPSS friends already feel like people who will be in my life for the rest of my life. People who will get invited to my wedding, even if we don't stay in close contact after this year. They're good people, they're interesting people, and they're my kind of people.
A lot of the focus of MAPSS is on peer learning and fostering community, which differentiates it from most of your graduate school horror stories and makes a compelling, inclusive environment. I'm not a competitive person by nature - I loathe conflict and actively avoid dramatics - so it's a really wonderful place for me to be. And I haven't met anyone, even the people I know casually from class who might not be positive what my name is, who isn't ready to form an impromptu study group and discuss Marxism and Structural Functionalism out on the lawn.
(Okay, we had snow flurries this week and when a friend and I were drinking juice outside on the quad today, he hastily suggested we move to the library. It's cold now. But you get the idea. We ran into each other outside the MAPSS lounge, and he was willing to take his free hour and a half to talk over a paper we have due Friday, listen to the problems I was having, and make suggestions about relevant readings.)
So no, you shouldn't expect to like everyone in MAPSS. But with the above information, you should bear in mind that I am notoriously independent and super awkward at making friends. Tonight, I'm meeting up with several people at Ida Noyes just because I can. You may not like everyone, but you would have to make a major effort not to like most people you meet, and find some you really get along with.
Less than a year of MAPSS
So I thought long and hard about creating a MAPSS blog (okay, if I'm honest, the thought crossed my mind for all of a minute and a half over the summer before I decided no one wants to read about my life.) But I see all these people googling MAPSS and grad school in general, and now I've discovered a couple of MAPSS-centric blogs, and so I thought, what the hell. I'll write what I can write, on the off-chance that it helps some people. And maybe I'll send the address to my mom. Hi, Mom! I'm blogging!
This is Week 7 of the first quarter, and I'm legitimately amazed it's gone by so quickly. I feel like I've barely started school, and I'm always a little slower on the learning curve with new material, so I'm also just getting a handle on some of it. (Perspectives.)
I'll probably make a couple of posts on things that have already happened in MAPSS, like Math Camp and the Perspectives midterm, because I think those are probably important things for prospective students to know about. But those posts will come as I procrastinate on my papers, et cetera.
I originally applied to UChicago's history program, and history remains my primary academic focus, so I feel contractually obligated to tell readers of this blog not to expect absolute truth. This is my remembered and perceived experience, and by the way, apparently no one else in Chicago studies the crap I study, so your mileage may vary.
I made a deliberate decision not to put my name on here, although once I start talking about individual classes, it will probably be fairly obvious who I am to anyone who knows me. But I fear an online presence, and I also think the veneer of anonymity is going to give me the ability to say things I would otherwise be too embarrassed to say (like, did you know I got rejected from every single grad program I applied to? Yup. I did.) or feel like I was being too self-promoting (but that's okay because MAPSS gave me full funding! Also true.)
So it is my hope that this blog will serve as a guide to anyone considering grad school, not just MAPSS, and to frustrated students everywhere, who can see a beacon of -
Nah. It's my hope I actually get around to updating this thing.
This is Week 7 of the first quarter, and I'm legitimately amazed it's gone by so quickly. I feel like I've barely started school, and I'm always a little slower on the learning curve with new material, so I'm also just getting a handle on some of it. (Perspectives.)
I'll probably make a couple of posts on things that have already happened in MAPSS, like Math Camp and the Perspectives midterm, because I think those are probably important things for prospective students to know about. But those posts will come as I procrastinate on my papers, et cetera.
I originally applied to UChicago's history program, and history remains my primary academic focus, so I feel contractually obligated to tell readers of this blog not to expect absolute truth. This is my remembered and perceived experience, and by the way, apparently no one else in Chicago studies the crap I study, so your mileage may vary.
I made a deliberate decision not to put my name on here, although once I start talking about individual classes, it will probably be fairly obvious who I am to anyone who knows me. But I fear an online presence, and I also think the veneer of anonymity is going to give me the ability to say things I would otherwise be too embarrassed to say (like, did you know I got rejected from every single grad program I applied to? Yup. I did.) or feel like I was being too self-promoting (but that's okay because MAPSS gave me full funding! Also true.)
So it is my hope that this blog will serve as a guide to anyone considering grad school, not just MAPSS, and to frustrated students everywhere, who can see a beacon of -
Nah. It's my hope I actually get around to updating this thing.
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