New Kid on the Hallway

RBOC: Fast and furious edition (cuz that's all I have time for)

AKA: The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent

• Good: answering competently when called on in class #1
      
• Indifferent: not being fully prepared for class #2, but we didn’t really get to the material I hadn’t read, so no harm, no foul
     
• Bad: having to ask prof in Class #3 not to call on me.
     
  
  • This is part of the prof’s policies: if you’re unprepared, let her know, and she won’t call on you. You are required to be prepared, of course, so by telling the prof this, you are explicitly saying, “Hi! Unprepared! One black mark, please!” On the one hand, since this is the prof’s policy, presumably it would be way, way worse not to say anything, then get called upon and not be able to answer. I wasn’t willing to run the risk of that happening, so took my black mark, especially since a “good” student will follow policy and do as the professor asks. But on the other hand, I’m a little annoyed about it, because I know that some students, when unprepared, just keep their mouths shut and hope that the prof doesn’t call on them. And 90% of the time, they get away with it, because classes are big enough (especially this one – ca. 80 people) that the odds are in their favor. So I worry that I’m likely to be penalized for being honest enough to tell the prof that I’m not prepared, whereas a lot of people who are probably unprepared more often than I am won’t get penalized because they don’t tell and often don't get found out.
       
    I mean, I realize that it’s my own fault for not being prepared – I take full responsibility for that element of the situation. But still. Feeling a little peeved. Oddly virtuous for following policy, but peeved.
        
• Good: a prof whom I respect immensely backed up the argument I was making in a meeting today.
     
• Indifferent: the argument got shot down anyway. (This is indifferent because while I think my argument was, of course, superior to the other, I understand why the other side went the way they did. It's not something that will keep me up at night for losing.)
        
• Bad: NLLDH is out of town for the week and I miss him!

Okay, that's what I've got. I have a post brewing related to my last post about my friend's tenure denial (and thank you all for your nice comments! your sympathies/insights are much appreciated), but it will have to wait till I can do more than spew stream-of-consciousness from the keyboard to the screen!

A moment of selfishness

A friend of mine just found out zie was denied tenure. I'm not going to go into why, mostly because it's not my story, but partly because I think the knee-jerk reaction to such a decision is to try to figure out why it happened, which too easily turns into trying to figure out what the person in question did "wrong." Which, to me, is kind of like trying to figure out why a given person doesn't succeed on the academic job market - it turns too easily into a kind of "blame the victim" game, which mostly serves to help other people feel like they have control over the process -- that if they do everything "right," unlike those poor unsuccessful folk, they will suceed/get the job/get tenure. That in fact, the system is rational.

(This isn't to say that there aren't ever very good reasons for someone to fail on the job market/at getting tenure. But I'm more and more convinced that success at either of those is 95% context and 5% qualifications.)

But anyway, my point is that I have, on one level, a very selfish reaction to this: it brings back all the stupid feelings of losing my own job at Former College.

Which pretty much sucks rocks.

(I'll grant you it's worse for my friend, who has gone through the whole tenure track, while I only had to get through half. And if we do want to get into why, I think zie's been treated much worse than I was, although I also think there are some disturbing parallels. Nonetheless, sometimes I just wish I could wipe the slate clean and forget I ever had a career before law school.)

My undergrad alma mater is full of psychotic people

So, the home of the lavender bovine sent me a press release announcing the award of various fellowships the school offers for post-graduate study at Cambridge and Oxford. Here's a sampling of the people who won:

- art history major who studied at Oxford hir junior year.
- Named Scholarship holder.
- has interned at the X College Museum of Art, a major news channel, and a national magazine.
- a member of the varsity track and field team, the varsity cross country team, the varsity tennis team, the concert and chamber choirs, and the -------, an a capella group.

- physics major
- Phi Beta Kappa
- winner of a scholarship for contributions of music.
- a member of the X College Symphony, the [Local] Symphony Orchestra, and the X College Symphonic Winds.
- interned at the Argonne National Laboratory and studied at the U.S. Particle Accelerator School
- is writing an honors thesis on [scary quantum physics topic].
- captain of the fencing team.

- history major
- Phi Beta Kappa
- Named Scholarship holder.
- studied at Oxford hir junior year
- took part in X College program in X studies (residential off-campus program in cool stuff).
- winner of Named Travel Fellowship and spent last summer in food research and interning with a number of premier pastry chefs in France.
- member of the X College Brass Ensemble, Oxford crew team, and the X College Bhangra dance troupe.

- political science major
- co-founder of [Organization], an organization that aims to reclaim childhood for Iraqi refugees in Jordan by organizing sports camps for young girls.
- awarded a Really Cool Grant to fund [Organization].
- op-ed columnist for the X College Newspaper.
- has interned for a national news channel.
- serves as the co-head of an X College tutoring program and is a member of the X College Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility. 
- co-author (with Professor --------) of "Cool Article Title Here."
- awarded a [Emeritus Professor's Name] Fellowship to fund a research project about the Olympics and national identity. 
- a member of the X College varsity ski team, captain of the X College cycling team, and a member of the X College varsity crew team.

Now, I realize that college-sponsored press releases are like Lake Woebegon on steroids - everyone is WAY above average. But still. Are these students not insane? How do they accomplish such things??

Well, actually, I take that back - one of the ways they "accomplish" such things is by getting into a school that has the money to hand out named fellowships/scholarships left and right and create opportunities for students. Not that these students haven't done impressive things to get those fellowships/scholarships. But my alma mater has a LOT of money and a LOT of connections. That helps undergrads do things like intern at the Argonne National Laboratory (which may not be all that big a deal, I am not a scientist, but hell, it sounds really prestigious to me).

Nonetheless, these are crazy impressive people. Granted, these scholarship winners are 8 people out of a class of about 500. Still scary, though. I look at these students and think, dang, they're all WAY more impressive than I was when I was there! (Of course, I don't know if today I'd even get IN to my alma mater.)

But I also look at this and see the intense professionalization that has pervaded graduate education trickling down to undergraduates. Sure, these kids are going to Oxford and Cambridge, so are (theoretically) the cream of the crop. But I swear that when I graduated, you didn't have to have saved the world and played a varsity sport while doing so in order to go to grad school. There were students in the sciences (and maybe psychology) who were named authors on articles, but not nearly as many as you see now. It wasn't quite such a necessity to intern at really cool places in order to do something when you graduated (and boy, is that a practice that depends on having money - of your own, or your college's. If you have to work to put yourself through school, you literally can't afford to do unpaid internships at national news channels, no matter how much you want to get into that business).

I forget, sometimes, how unusual and downright bizarre the small, elite (rich!) liberal arts colleges really are - until I encounter people who've never spent any time at one. It really is an attitude you have to experience to understand. They're amazing sites of opportunity - people attend this college (and others like it) precisely because they can set you up with amazing internships, give you the chance to do cool research, and put you at the head of the pack. (Which isn't to say that other kinds of institutions can't do this - of course they can. But you have to be much more willing to take the initiative at a huge research university, and I think there's a lot more specialization; I don't think there's as many students who, say, do lots of cool internships AND play in a musical ensemble AND play a varsity sport, while doing independent research in their major field. Feel free to rebut that assumption in the comments.)

And at the same time, these colleges are incredible bastions of privilege. They would, I know, HATE that characterization, and they do extend opportunities to many students from underprivileged backgrounds (they have so much money, they can afford to do so). And I know that many of their alumni go on to do amazing social justice-y kinds of things. But they also, by virtue of their wealth and connections (and incredibly strong alumni network, which fuels both those things), continue to raise standards for undergraduate success. The more students graduating from these schools rack up the nifty accomplishments, the harder it is for students at schools that don't make such accomplishments possible to distinguish themselves. (It's not impossible, of course. But harder.) And there's something about that that makes me a little uncomfortable. (Though it could just be my inferiority complex talking.)

Brief note on the generation gap

I meant to mention something interesting that came up in the mock interview experience: the straight-out-of-college (or close to it) young women in my class who participated were chagrined to learn that the skirt-suit was considered a more conservative choice than the pants-suit, as a number of them consciously chose to buy pants suits. Their reasoning? Pants have to be more conservative than skirts, because with skirts you're showing your legs, and pants, you're not. Flashing your gams, they reasoned, can't be the more conservative choice.

I just thought this was a funny generation-gap moment, because I realized that I was old enough vaguely to remember that pants suits on women had been a big deal, and to realize that for the truly stuffy traditional, skirts are always the most appropriate wear for women.

And that these classmates had no awareness of that attitude at all.

In which I am amused

So, my school held mock interviews this week, and I broke out my new suit and did one.

It was really helpful - the guy had some very useful tips about how to present myself - but the really funny part was that he could NOT believe how old I was. He graduated from college a year before I did, and said he would never have guessed that we were the same age. He kept saying how I didn't look any different from the other students.

(It was in the context of interviewing - that I looked young enough that I'd need to make sure right from the beginning to remind them that I have done other stuff before going to law school.)

It was pretty darn funny. I think he must have been smoking a little crack before the interview, but hey, I'm not complaining.