(Untitled)

[alicia666]

Does anyone else find it...irritating, I guess, when someone with an MBA tries to talk to you about graduate school admissions, or graduate school itself? I don't think they realize how different it is, that most of our schools accept 12 students out of 700 applications when their schools accept 50% of applicants...and that the whole experience is

Comments

[markovnikov]

lol, at least you don't always have people assuming you're going to school to be a pharmacist. whenever i tell me i'm going to school to get my phd in organic chemistry, and they ask me what i can do with that, and i say something like "pharmaceutical research" (which is basically the only thing i can say that people would understand), i often get "oh my brother is a pharmacist. pharmacy school is difficult."

blah

[alicia666]

whenever i tell people i applied to graduate school, they assume MBA or law, because my BA is in econ...

haha pharmacy school is cool...actually if i knew how much pharmacists make before i decided on a major i would have become one!

[lepid0ptera]

It's harder to get into than med school, though.

[alicia666]

pharmacy ? i believe it.

[roseofjuly]

People are always assuming I applied to get my Ph.D in clinical psychology, because I'm a psych major. Or rather, that my goal is to be a psychologist. I get the requisite "Are you trying to psychoanalyze me now?" and "Tell me what I'm thinking" questions. *eyeroll*

[alicia666]

lol tell me what im thinking
even if you did want to be a psychologist, i still dont think youd be able to read minds!

[lacrimaeveneris]

I've got my response DOWN for the "Tell me what I'm thinking" comment: "I'm sorry, my Jedi powers aren't that developed yet." ::sigh:: And no one knows what a cognitive researcher is. I...

..need to stop ranting.

[happy_endings]

hahaha i've tortured all of my friends/family at some point with "econ is NOT BUSINESS RARGARAGARGH" rant. :)

[alicia666]

i know!!!!
why dont people understand that?
so frustrating!

[pinkstatik]

Man, why do people have such stupid responses to everything?

I'm technically a "psychology" major, but I haven't told people that in years because I'm so tired of everyone wrongly assuming that I want anything to do with therapy. (With 20+ fields of psychology in existence, how everyone automatically assumes I'm in a particular one of them is beyond me.)

Since my actual area within psychology is visual perception (how the brain interacts with the eye), I've taken to telling people my major is Vision, haha. Of course they don't understand that either, and when they asked what I do, and I say, "Research in vision," they ask what its purpose is and what it can be used for. Uh.

Blah is right.

[geethatwasdumb]

I tell people "biostatistics" and they're like .. "um .... ... ????"

Haha

[rolled_trousers]

Ha! My mom's a biostatistician and when I was young, I'd try to explain it to people and they'd just give me a blank look. I think a lot of times I just told them that she's a math professor, which isn't exactly true, but not exactly false either.

[iamtheshoshie]

Even better, try being an organometallic chemist.

"Oh, you're majoring in chemistry. Are you going to med school?"

"Nope."

"What are you going to do with chemistry then?"

"Be a chemist."

"So, work for a pharmaceutical company or something? I hear that's really lucrative."

"No, not really. That's organic chemistry. I do inorganic."

"...Oh. Why don't you want to go to med school?"

GAH.

[elution]

Just tell them you're going to brew the highest quality basement methamphetamine the world has ever seen.....

[mtplusj]

I'm applying to PhD in Higher Education... Usually a conversation would go like this:
"So you want to get a PhD in what?"
"Higher Education"
Here they give me a look like I didn't understand their question, and they start wondering how on earth I even think about going to gradschool since I'm obviously so stupid. But they don't give up:
"Well, duh! Of course it's higher education! What I mean is what subject, sub-ject, area, field, do you want to study?"
3 minutes later they can't grasp how higher education can be a separate discipline and still think I'm an alien. LOL.:))