“
I cast my mind back, to before grad school, before undergrad even, all the way to the first moment I remember loving a story. Feeling like I was living it. Being, even as a child, bowled over by how something imaginary could become real, could wring every emotion from me or make me homesick for places I'd never been
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Emily Henry (Funny Story)
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The lesson of the Funk Dog: “You can forget what it used to feel like to feel good about life; feeling rotten—or just a low-grad funk—seems normal and therefore acceptable. I just don’t believe that God intended for any of his creatures to be petted with sticks.
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Jill Conner Browne (The Sweet Potato Queens' Book of Love: A Fallen Southern Belle's Look at Love, Life, Men, Marriage, and Being Prepared)
“
I laughed when she said “utilize” and she said “what?” and I said “just utilize, it’s a meaningless word” and then she tried to tell me that it “communicated” something different from the word “use” and the way she looked at me, chuckling, glancing over at James like “oh, how sweet, it tried to talk,” made me so mad that I might have said, maybe, something along the lines of “yeah, it communicates something, it’s a real first-gen-college-grad kind of word, like your parents are small-town conservative Christians who didn’t have any books in the house, and you’re self-conscious about your upbringing so you want to stand out by using elitist intellectual language, but you don’t actually know any long words, so you just truss up the word ‘use’ for no fucking reason other than to try to make people feel like you’re the one with the big mental dick, even though ‘utilize’ is basically just administrative jargon and completely déclassé to them that knows.
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Halle Butler (The New Me)
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Before I grad her book and mine, I go sit next to her on the organ bench and she gives me a big grandma hug - her special version, made from strong arms, old-fashioned perfume, and years of practice. The kind that makes you think you've won the best prize in the world. For love and safety, find your grandma. (76)
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Kirstin Cronn-Mills (The Sky Always Hears Me: And the Hills Don't Mind)
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In the dresser mirror, my face looks the same, but I feel something happening around me, some change as palpable as weather. Stuck in the mirror are mementos from my childhood—red and yellow ribbons for various underachievements, a brown corsage from grad school graduation, a curling and faded picture of me petting a deer in Wisconsin—which is now over. I wandered through it and came out the other side.
It’s a stark feeling. Like getting to the last page of a book and seeing ‘The End.’ Even if you didn’t like the story that much, or your childhood, you read it, you lived it. And now it’s over, book closed, that long-ago deer you petted in the Dells as dead as the one in The Yearling.
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Jo Ann Beard (In Zanesville)
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Frankly, the overwhelming majority of academics have ignored the data explosion caused by the digital age. The world’s most famous sex researchers stick with the tried and true. They ask a few hundred subjects about their desires; they don’t ask sites like PornHub for their data. The world’s most famous linguists analyze individual texts; they largely ignore the patterns revealed in billions of books. The methodologies taught to graduate students in psychology, political science, and sociology have been, for the most part, untouched by the digital revolution. The broad, mostly unexplored terrain opened by the data explosion has been left to a small number of forward-thinking professors, rebellious grad students, and hobbyists. That will change.
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Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are)
“
an important point, throughout this book, whenever I describe work done by Jane Doe or Joe Smith, I actually mean “work done by Doe and a team of her postdocs, technicians, grad students, and collaborators spread far and wide over the years.” I’ll be referring solely to Doe or Smith for brevity, not to imply that they did all the work on their own—science is utterly a team process. In addition, as long as we’re at it, another point: At endless junctures throughout the book, I’ll be reporting the results of a study, along the lines of, “And when you do whatever to this or that brain region/neurotransmitter/hormone/gene/etc., X happens.” What I mean is that on the average X happens, and at a statistically reliable rate. There is always lots of variability, including individuals in whom nothing happens or even the opposite of X occurs.
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
“
See especially academia, which has effectively become a hope labor industrial complex. Within that system, tenured professors—ostensibly proof positive that you can, indeed, think about your subject of choice for the rest of your life, complete with job security, if you just work hard enough—encourage their most motivated students to apply for grad school. The grad schools depend on money from full-pay students and/or cheap labor from those students, so they accept far more master’s students than there are spots in PhD programs, and far more PhD students than there are tenure-track positions. Through it all, grad students are told that work will, in essence, save them: If they publish more, if they go to more conferences to present their work, if they get a book contract before graduating, their chances on the job market will go up. For a very limited few, this proves true. But it is no guarantee—and with ever-diminished funding for public universities, many students take on the costs of conference travel themselves (often through student loans), scrambling to make ends meet over the summer while they apply for the already-scarce number of academic jobs available, many of them in remote locations, with little promise of long-term stability. Some academics exhaust their hope labor supply during grad school. For others, it takes years on the market, often while adjuncting for little pay in demeaning and demanding work conditions, before the dream starts to splinter. But the system itself is set up to feed itself as long as possible. Most humanities PhD programs still offer little or nothing in terms of training for jobs outside of academia, creating a sort of mandatory tunnel from grad school to tenure-track aspirant. In the humanities, especially, to obtain a PhD—to become a doctor in your field of knowledge—is to adopt the refrain “I don’t have any marketable skills.” Many academics have no choice but to keep teaching—the only thing they feel equipped to do—even without fair pay or job security. Academic institutions are incentivized to keep adjuncts “doing what they love”—but there’s additional pressure from peers and mentors who’ve become deeply invested in the continued viability of the institution. Many senior academics with little experience of the realities of the contemporary market explicitly and implicitly advise their students that the only good job is a tenure-track academic job. When I failed to get an academic job in 2011, I felt soft but unsubtle dismay from various professors upon telling them that I had chosen to take a high school teaching job to make ends meet. It
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Anne Helen Petersen (Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation)
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Robert Askins Brings ‘Hand to God’ to Broadway Chad Batka for The New York Times Robert Askins at the Booth Theater, where his play “Hand to God” opens on Tuesday. By MICHAEL PAULSON The conceit is zany: In a church basement, a group of adolescents gathers (mostly at the insistence of their parents) to make puppets that will spread the Christian message, but one of the puppets turns out to be more demonic than divine. The result — a dark comedy with the can-puppets-really-do-that raunchiness of “Avenue Q” and can-people-really-say-that outrageousness of “The Book of Mormon” — is “Hand to God,” a new play that is among the more improbable entrants in the packed competition for Broadway audiences over the next few weeks. Given the irreverence of some of the material — at one point stuffed animals are mutilated in ways that replicate the torments of Catholic martyrs — it is perhaps not a surprise to discover that the play’s author, Robert Askins, was nicknamed “Dirty Rob” as an undergraduate at Baylor, a Baptist-affiliated university where the sexual explicitness and violence of his early scripts raised eyebrows. But Mr. Askins had also been a lone male soloist in the children’s choir at St. John Lutheran of Cypress, Tex. — a child who discovered early that singing was a way to make the stern church ladies smile. His earliest performances were in a deeply religious world, and his writings since then have been a complex reaction to that upbringing. “It’s kind of frustrating in life to be like, ‘I’m a playwright,’ and watch people’s face fall, because they associate plays with phenomenally dull, didactic, poetic grad-schoolery, where everything takes too long and tediously explores the beauty in ourselves,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s not church, even though it feels like church a lot when we go these days.” The journey to Broadway, where “Hand to God” opens on Tuesday at the Booth Theater, still seems unlikely to Mr. Askins, 34, who works as a bartender in Brooklyn and says he can’t afford to see Broadway shows, despite his newfound prominence. He seems simultaneously enthralled by and contemptuous of contemporary theater, the world in which he has chosen to make his life; during a walk from the Cobble Hill coffee shop where he sometimes writes to the Park Slope restaurant where he tends bar, he quoted Nietzsche and Derrida, described himself as “deeply weird,” and swore like, well, a satanic sock-puppet. “If there were no laughs in the show, I’d think there was something wrong with him,” said the actor Steven Boyer, who won raves in earlier “Hand to God” productions as Jason, a grief-stricken adolescent with a meek demeanor and an angry-puppet pal. “But anybody who is able to write about such serious stuff and be as hilarious as it is, I’m not worried about their mental health.” Mr. Askins’s interest in the performing arts began when he was a boy attending rural Texas churches affiliated with the conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod denomination; he recalls the worshipers as “deeply conservative, old farm folks, stone-faced, pride and suffering, and the only time anybody ever really livened up was when the children’s choir would perform.” “My grandmother had a cross-stitch that said, ‘God respects me when I work, but he loves me when I sing,’ and so I got into that,” he said. “For somebody who enjoys performance, that was the way in.” The church also had a puppet ministry — an effort to teach children about the Bible by use of puppets — and when Mr. Askins’s mother, a nurse, began running the program, he enlisted to help. He would perform shows for other children at preschools and vacation Bible camps. “The shows are wacky, but it was fun,” he said. “They’re badly written attempts to bring children to Jesus.” Not all of his formative encounters with puppets were positive. Particularly scarring: D
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Anonymous
“
Prema Landeru, pitanje Crvenog terora bilo je riješeno za jedan dan. Čekisti Piatigorska odlučiše pogubiti 300 osoba za jedan dan. Oni su definisali kvote za grad i za svaku okolnu varoš, i naredili orgaizacijama Partije da sroče liste za egzekucije. U Kislovodsku, u nedostatku drugih ideja, boljševici su odlučili ubiti ljude koji su bili u bolnici.
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Stéphane Courtois (The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression)
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On Books - Books are the ultimate accessory; they go with everything. Carpets wear down, drapery fades, statuary chips, wallpaper tears and appliances become obsolete and out of date. Movie posters simply scream “Poor high school grad”. But no one ever looks at books and scoffs, “Books? Really? What are you, a college professor?
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Marsha Hinds
“
Malcolm Gladwell goes so far as to say that attending the most highly selective schools can even harm you. In his best-selling book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, Gladwell explains that most kids shouldn’t attend the most prestigious schools they get into, because at every college it’s the top kids who get the most attention, resources, and opportunities that lead to greater success in grad school.12 Going to a place where you will be in the bottom half of the class not only means you won’t get goodies such as attention from faculty and access to select experiences in your chosen major, but it also damages your self-esteem, says Gladwell. If you want college to be the strongest possible springboard for what will come next in your life, Gladwell advises going to a college where you know you can be in the top 5 or 10 percent there. The only exceptions to this rule are students from underrepresented backgrounds for whom attending a name-brand school seems to provide a bump in after-college options regardless of where they rank in their college class.
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Julie Lythcott-Haims (How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success)
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When she met and fell in love with Paulo, a fellow student in grad school, Lima wasn’t interested in becoming a wife; she wanted to build an empire. She wrote in her bestselling book Believe IT, “I grew up believing that men hold women back, and that belief transitioned into the conviction that I didn’t want to get married.”17 Yet she was so in love with Paulo that, sensing deeply that she belonged with him, she surprised herself by answering yes when he proposed. “My intuition [to marry Paulo] shocked the heck out of me. . . . I set aside my fear and doubt to follow it.”18 Together, they worked on the business plan for her company while traveling for their honeymoon in 2007.
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Josh Axe (Think This, Not That: 12 Mindshifts to Breakthrough Limiting Beliefs and Become Who You Were Born to Be)
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All the models were preening and posing while Mario clicked away, twisting this way and that, upward, downward and every which way in order to capture the perfect shot. Not surprisingly, Andy was a natural in this modeling game. Like a well-trained Bahriji grad, he worked his seductive charms while posing with the three females, exuding an unmistakable flair and panache at every turn. Viewing the photographs later, I was definitely fooled by Andy playing the role of a 'straight’ man. It was strange for me to see how photographs trick the eye. I saw, until I analyzed it, exactly what the creator wanted me to see, and believe.
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Young (Initiation (A Harem Boy's Saga Book 1))
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Paul Graham is the founder of Y Combinator, one of the most successful and sought-after startup accelerators in the tech world. Graham has invested in several blockbuster companies, including AirBNB and Dropbox, both of which are valued in the billions at the time of this writing. After investing in hundreds of companies and considering thousands more, Paul Graham has perfected the art of identifying promising startups. His methods may surprise you. In an interview, Graham highlighted two key strategies: Favoring people over product Favoring determination over intelligence What’s most essential for a successful startup? Graham: The founders. We’ve learned in the six years of doing Y Combinator to look at the founders—not the business ideas—because the earlier you invest, the more you’re investing in the people. When Bill Gates was starting Microsoft, the idea that he had then involved a small-time microcomputer called the Altair. That didn’t seem very promising, so you had to see that this 19-year-old kid was going places. What do you look for? Graham: Determination. When we started, we thought we were looking for smart people, but it turned out that intelligence was not as important as we expected. If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.[74] Your intelligence doesn’t matter as much as you think it does. If you’re reading this book, you’re probably more than capable. Your ideas don’t matter much, either. What matters most—by far, is your perseverance. Stop worrying about your mental aptitude. Stop worrying about the viability of the project you’re considering. Stop worrying about all the other big decisions keeping you up at night. Instead, focus on relentlessly grinding away at your passion until something incredible happens. Your potential output is governed by your mindset, not your mind itself.
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Jesse Tevelow (The Connection Algorithm: Take Risks, Defy the Status Quo, and Live Your Passions)
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And if by grace, then it cannot be based on works; if it were, grace would no longer be grace. —Romans 11:6 (NIV) I couldn’t help noticing something on the dashboard of the cab I was riding in this morning: a snapshot of a college grad with mortarboard and gown, holding a diploma, smiling proudly; maybe the driver’s son. “Congratulations,” I said. “Your son?” “No,” he answered, “that’s me.” Momentarily mortified, I found myself thinking, Tough luck, driving a cab with a college degree. I got a better look at the driver. Middle Eastern, middle-aged. Probably has a PhD in astrophysics back in his home country. “Well,” I said awkwardly, “congratulations all the same. That’s great.” “An education is the best thing this country has given me. I just got an accounting degree and pretty soon I will find a job in my field, God willing. But meanwhile I have a family to support. Want to see them?” “Sure.” He flipped open the glove box where there were pictures of two boys and a girl, all in caps and gowns, all recent grads of high school and college. “I try to set a good example for them,” he said with a laugh. “God willing, they will find good jobs too. Education is the key to everything.” As we pulled to the curb, I thought of my own family coming to this country and struggling to reach the American dream, just like this man and his family. I thought of all the opportunities I’d been blessed with and how I can take it all too much for granted at times. “It was an honor to ride in your cab,” I said, handing the driver his fare. “Have a good day, sir,” he replied. “I shall,” I said, “God willing.” Jesus, they called You “Rabbi,” which means teacher. This month please bless all those who have worked so hard and so long for that great key to the future, a diploma. —Edward Grinnan
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Guideposts (Daily Guideposts 2014)
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Whether you’re currently a marketing executive or a college grad about to enter the field—the first growth hackers have pioneered a new way. Some of their strategies are incredibly technical and complex. The strategies also change constantly; in fact, occasionally it might work only one time. This book is short because it sticks with the timeless parts. I also won’t weigh you down with heavy concepts like “cohort analysis” and “viral coefficients.”* Instead, we will focus on the mindset—it’s far and away the most important part. I start and end with my own experiences in this book, not because I am anyone special but because I think they illustrate a microcosm of the industry itself. The old way—where product development and
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Ryan Holiday (Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising)
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Are you in the military?"
"No, I'm a grad student. I used to be a boy scout, if that helps.
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Anna Durand (Reborn to Die)
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There’s a country that does something a little like this. Its young people, including its very best educational prospects from all different backgrounds, spend two or three years training and solving problems in a nonhierarchical environment and get together every year. Many then collaborate to start companies. This country leads the world in venture capital investments per capita (over $170, versus $75 in the United States in 2010).1 It has more companies on the NASDAQ than any non-US country except for China, despite having a population of less than eight million.2 Its quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate was above 5 percent in 2011 and it’s in the top thirty globally in per capita GDP, above Spain and Saudi Arabia, among others.3 This country is Israel, where eighteen-year-olds complete two- or three-year tours in the military, getting to know each other in highly selective military units. They operate at a high level of autonomy and responsibility and then travel the world for months before heading to college and/or grad school. In Dan Senor and Saul Singer’s book Start-up Nation, this network and training ground is credited as helping give rise to a culture of risk taking and entrepreneurship. By the time Israelis graduate from college, they’re in their midtwenties and mature; in many cases, they’ve already been in operating environments and borne life-and-death responsibilities. This cocktail of experience gives rise to a mixture of both courage and impatience. As one entrepreneur put it, “When an Israeli entrepreneur has a business idea, he will start it that week. The notion that one should accumulate credentials before launching a venture simply does not exist. . . . Too much time can only teach you what can go wrong, not what could be transformative.”4 Another observer commented, “Israelis . . . don’t care about the social price of failure and they develop their projects regardless of the economic . . . situation.”5
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Andrew Yang (Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America)
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In 1993, I tried out the Mosaic browser, created by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina while they were grad students at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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Kara Swisher (Burn Book: A Tech Love Story)
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sobering statistics compiled by Literacy Inc., that 33 percent of high school graduates never pick up another book, and that 42 percent of college grads don’t either. Oh yeah, and apparently 80 percent of American families did not purchase a book this year.
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James Patterson (The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians: True Stories of the Magic of Reading)
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Doctor Dowers,” teased Connie. “Listen,” said Liz, “after all the crap I had to take in grad school, you bet everyone’s calling me Doctor. I’ll get my cabdriver to do it if I can. I’ll make my mother do it.
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Katherine Howe (The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs (The Physick Book, #2))
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Career wasn't a thing I'd been encouraged to consider with specificity, but I wanted one. I knew I was ambitious. I knew I liked to write. I knew I loved to read and critically engage with books. I knew I craved authentic, meaningful conversations and connections, had a knack for listening, and a capacity for empathy. I knew I wanted to contribute to the world, help others, and maybe even go to that elusive thing called grad school. All of this, at the time, seemed impossible to negotiate with a husband.
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Rachel Rueckert (East Winds: A Global Quest to Reckon with Marriage)
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He wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” Indeed, Frankl remarried, had a daughter, published prolifically, and spoke around the world until his death at age ninety-two. Rereading these notes, I thought of my conversations with Wendell. Scribbled in my grad-school spiral were the words Reacting vs. responding = reflexive vs. chosen. We can choose our response, Frankl was saying, even under the specter of death. The same was true of John’s loss of his mother and son, Julie’s illness, Rita’s regrettable past, and Charlotte’s upbringing. I couldn’t think of a single patient to whom Frankl’s ideas didn’t apply, whether it was about extreme trauma or an interaction with a difficult family member. More than sixty years later, Wendell was saying I could choose too—that the jail cell was open on both sides. I particularly liked this line from Frankl’s book: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
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Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed)
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Grad school was a surprise. I had no idea I'd be given a week to read four books at a time. No one warned me that I would be required to write 10- to 25-page papers plus a two-page paper for each class while simultaneously working on my master's thesis. For nearly two years. I saw my wife and son mostly on weekends.
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Rick Cormier (Mixed Nuts: or What I've Learned Practicing Psychotherapy)
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Please allow this book to offer one piece of serious advice (don't worry, this is the only one): Take control.
Decide that enough is enough. Stop waiting for your advisor to guide your work - write a paper using your own brain and slap it down on his or her desk. Study - really, actually study - what it is you're studying. Realize that you can't include everything in your thesis, and drop your lofty and unrealistic plan to transform the field. You won't. Plan what you need to do to graduate, write it down, sit with the person whose approval you need, and work up a timeline. Seek out interesting conferences, and if your department won't pay for you to attend them, search for outside sponsorship. (You have the freaking internet, for crying out loud.) Actively pursue your goals, because - and it's so easy to forget this - that's why you're here.
Can't find the motivation to work today? Tough shit.
It's like a snow day: Every day off you give yourself makes you feel good that day, but it's one more day you'll have to make up in June when you really want to be out of school.
It's possible that many graduate programs want you to get depressed, say "Fuck it" and take charge of your own destiny. They may consider this part of your necessary struggle. Well, so be it. Wait no longer. Take charge now.
And get on with your stupid, stupid career.
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Adam Ruben, "Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go To Grad School""
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Also, in grad school, I learned about the Five Laws of Library Science, as outlined by S.R. Ranganathan in 1931. One of these laws - number two, as it were - is "Every Reader HIs Book." Every member of a community, Ranganathan argued, should be able to walk into a library and find the material they want. Libraries should exist for all patrons and provide a collection that meets the needs of everyone in that community, not just certain demographics. It's a great standard for most libraries.
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Jill Grunenwald (Reading Behind Bars: A True Story of Literature, Law, and Life as a Prison Librarian)
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The last editorial meeting I had was with a 24 year-old Vassar grad who tried to explain to me (after I had been selling novels longer than she had been alive) how to write a book. I kept my cool and was nice to the human, but as Kris and I walked down the sidewalk after that meeting, I remember my only words were ‘I’m done with this shit.
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Dean Wesley Smith
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you must train yourself to read for thesis, not just content. In some undergraduate courses, and in most graduate ones, you will be quickly overwhelmed by the amount of reading. If you try to read every word of every book assigned, you will drown. You will not sleep. You will not eat. Instead, you will become one of the many Book Zombies—gaunt, sullen figures who haunt their department hallways. They appear as apparitions, weighed down by the mass of books loaded in their backpacks, creeping from class to class, unable to articulate a coherent thought.
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Zachary Shore (Grad School Essentials: A Crash Course in Scholarly Skills)
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During a belated New Year’s cleaning, I come across my grad-school coursework on the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. Scanning my notes, I begin to remember his story. Frankl was born in 1905, and as a boy, he became intensely interested in psychology. By high school, he began an active correspondence with Freud. He went on to study medicine and lecture on the intersection of psychology and philosophy, or what he called logotherapy, from the Greek word logos, or “meaning.” Whereas Freud believed that people are driven to seek pleasure and avoid pain (his famous pleasure principle), Frankl maintained that people’s primary drive isn’t toward pleasure but toward finding meaning in their lives. He was in his thirties when World War II broke out, putting him, a Jew, in jeopardy. Offered immigration to the United States, he turned it down so as not to abandon his parents, and a year later, the Nazis forced Frankl and his wife to have her pregnancy terminated. In a matter of months, he and other family members were deported to concentration camps, and when Frankl was finally freed, three years later, he learned that the Nazis had killed his wife, his brother, and both of his parents. Freedom under these circumstances might have led to despair. After all, the hope of what awaited Frankl and his fellow prisoners upon their release was now gone—the people they cared about were dead, their families and friends wiped out. But Frankl wrote what became an extraordinary treatise on resilience and spiritual salvation, known in English as Man’s Search for Meaning. In it, he shares his theory of logotherapy as it relates not just to the horrors of concentration camps but also to more mundane struggles. He wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” Indeed, Frankl remarried, had a daughter, published prolifically, and spoke around the world until his death at age ninety-two. Rereading these notes, I thought of my conversations with Wendell. Scribbled in my grad-school spiral were the words Reacting vs. responding = reflexive vs. chosen. We can choose our response, Frankl was saying, even under the specter of death. The same was true of John’s loss of his mother and son, Julie’s illness, Rita’s regrettable past, and Charlotte’s upbringing. I couldn’t think of a single patient to whom Frankl’s ideas didn’t apply, whether it was about extreme trauma or an interaction with a difficult family member. More than sixty years later, Wendell was saying I could choose too—that the jail cell was open on both sides. I particularly liked this line from Frankl’s book: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
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Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed)
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First, the conventional approach to discovering God’s will focuses almost all of our attention on nonmoral decisions. Scripture does not tell us whether we should live in Minnesota or Maine. It does not tell us whether we should go to Michigan State University or Wheaton College. It does not tell us whether we should buy a house or rent an apartment. It does not tell us whether we should marry a wonderful Christian named Tim or some other wonderful Christian guy. Scripture does not tell us what to do this summer or what job to take or where to go to grad school.
Once, while preaching on this topic, I said in a bold declarative statement, “God doesn’t care where you go to school or where you live or what job you take.” A thoughtful young woman talked to me afterward and was discouraged to hear that God didn’t care about the most important decisions in her life. I explained to her that I probably wasn’t very clear. God certainly cares about these decisions insofar as He cares for us and every detail of our lives. But in another sense, and this was the point I was trying to make, these are not the most important issues in God’s book. The most important issues for God are moral purity, theological fidelity, compassion, joy, our witness, faithfulness, hospitality, love, worship, and faith. These are His big concerns. The problem is that we tend to focus most of our attention on everything else. We obsess over the things God has not mentioned and may never mention, while, by contrast, we spend little time on all the things God has already revealed to us in the Bible.
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Kevin DeYoung (Just Do Something: A Liberating Approach to Finding God's Will)
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For many women who have been caring for and putting others first, midlife is the time when there’s finally space to start thinking about you. You may feel compelled to make room for you, to live with greater purpose, or to answer the call to do something big in the world. It’s during this time that we can begin to define what legacy we want to leave.
If you’ve lost sight of who you are and what you want, it’s time to explore and experiment and define your own new milestones. Up until this point, there have been socially defined milestones like college, first job, maybe marriage, maybe kids, maybe grad school, maybe the first house, and then if there are kids, the kids’ milestones. The lack of milestones can make midlife feel like uncharted territory.
It is, and it’s ready to be explored and conquered.
If you’re reading this book, it’s time. Time for you. Time for vision. Time for clarity. Time for you to resolve unresolved issues from your childhood, adolescence, and early twenties. Because if you don’t, they are going to keep resurfacing. Trust me on this one.
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Terri Hanson Mead (Piloting Your Life)