you will NEVER fit in

The worst student to assign to the redrafting of your PR brochure is...

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 16:05:06 GMT

a person who hates the department.

We have a winner.

finals week

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 05:05:24 GMT

This upcoming week is finals week. Only two more projects to go and then i'm done for the semester!

TAing right now is a bitch, but I'll get back to that later.

If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning...

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 18:52:24 GMT

"Complaining is good for you as long as you're not complaining to the person you're complaining about."
-Lynn Johnston

You hate your adviser. Do you:

a. Just deal with it and figure that she can't be all that bad. After all, you only have her for the next 5.5 years, right?
b. Switch advisers.
c. Determine that you will someday compete with her for all of her stupid grants and take away her job.
d. Find out where she lives.

the GRADE

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 20:06:32 GMT

Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise.
-Lawrence J. Peter

Today I spent stuck inside, working on the project of doom. The project of doom is a 15 page website, in which we are supposed to show all the important stuff about the learning theory of behaviorism. I hate behaviorism. I’m sure I will say the same things about the next two units as well, cognition and social learning.

I’m cold (keeping the heat turned down to save money), I’m tired (I have a list of 12 things to do by Friday), and I’m starting to really hate my learning theory class. And it scares me that I have gotten this far in my studies and I still care about the grade. Caring about the grade sucks. I tell myself that I only care about the grade because it determines if I will get funding next year. But in reality, I know that the grade is a label that I use to justify my measly existence on this planet.

I am truly addicted to grades. That is why I have tortured myself about grades all through what will be my 20th year of school. I love to get good grades. I think I must love lying awake at night and worrying about if the prof will take two points off for this or that. I also love smearing my MS 4.0 in everyone’s face. Hey- how easy is it to sustain pure A’s for 2 years? Damn hard. And I love being that perfect girl.

I am going to make myself a cup of tea and get back to the website of doom.

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 05:14:34 GMT

For my first entry, I will begin with a quote:

Anger makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond what you were.

-Cherie Carter-Scott

This i should keep in mind as a graduate student. Always at the forefront of my mind. Why do you ask? Because I constantly want to choke people. Below is a letter I would like to write to the people in the main office about my Graduate Assistant work:

Dear People who I am forced to be with too much of the time,

As you are probably somewhat aware, I generally keep about three hours each week in the main office where I am at my cubicle. I typically go in, ask the secretary if she has department stuff for me to do (to which she normally says no) so I just sit down, open up my laptop, do any TA things that have come up since that morning, and then move onto coursework until my class. I always remind the secretary that if she needs extra help throughout the week to email me. I have come in on extra occasions to do departmental stuff.

Several times I've had faculty or other students come up and ask me if I can do GA stuff for them. That is the reason why I am there for 3 hours, because that is time I have dedicated to the department if they need my help in addition to my TA work. (They said that I needed to have a set time to help out, and the secretary thought three hours would be good, with additional hours as scheduled). What bothers me is the comments that other students and professors make about how I have chosen to use my time. Normally I get comments that say "you're not doing GA work" or "you're doing you own work/classwork." These typically aren't in the light joking sense (sometimes they are) but sometimes they border on being semi-accusatory, as if the professor or student has caught me "cheating" on my time sheet.

This only bothers me because I spend alot of time on my assistantship. I check the course at least twice a day to answer student questions or do any required tasks. It often goes over 10 hours a week, which is fine with me. Any work I do additionally for the department (some photocopying I did a few weeks ago) is often over my hours. It's in my job description to answer student questions and address the course needs when they come up- I am not going to wait to answer all of my questions once or twice a week while I sit on my ass in the department.

I have a nice suggestion for you people. Next time you tell me I'm not doing GA work, I am going to let you do MY work as a TA for a week. Yes, all 23 hours that I normally do while I get paid for ten. I'll let you teach the poor students who feel like they've been stranded on the dessert island of online courses by the department how to zip their files or make a webpage. I'll let you break up student fights that happen on collaborative team projects. I'll let you take the occasional 2am panicked phone call. I'll let you have eight hours of face to face meetings. I'll even let you deal with emails about grading and how they want to kill the professor and the GA as well for the grade they got, despite the fact that I, as a GA, do not grade things!

Then I'll tell you you're not doing any GA work, and watch you cry.

Thank you,
Your GA Slave.