I wish they would write the letters already

[giallarhorn]

Firstly, HAPPY 21ST BIRTHDAY TO hecatescurse! CONGRATULATIONS AND WELCOME TO THE HEALTHY WORLD OF INTOXICATION AND CHASING AWAY SORROWS WITH DRINKS!

I ran about two miles this morning and felt like I was dying for most of it. Lungs what is up with your exchange rate seriously gah

Almost done with grad school apps. Augh, no pressure on a one page response at all.

Comments

[ladymercury_10]

Congratulations on your grad school apps! Ugh, those applications are so stressful. Seriously, I think applying to grad school was worse than anything they have made me do in grad school so far. It was like a scavenger hunt + soul-search + multiple essay assignments + hunting down recommendations + why am I saying all this, you know how horrible it is, you are doing it right now. :P BUT ANYWAY, good job!

Yay, friending meme! I am losing my mind from insomnia and having stayed up too late on the internet yesterday. I saw your post on the friending meme and read the word "backup" as "teacup." So I sort of briefly thought you had a Dreamwidth "teacup" journal. :P

[giallarhorn]

GAH, TELL ME ABOUT IT. I keep rewriting my SoP because I think there's some flaw in it and it doesn't communicate my goals across well and then it sounds too negative and then too jargony and fahjkflsefs. It's stressful enough, but more stressful when they go 'here, write one page of why you want to go here+why you should be accepted+what you're gonna do with your life+what you've done'.

It doesn't help I'm really really concerned if my PI will actually manage to get the letters in because he's got a horrid track record with deadlines

Haha, yes, it's a new feature in fact! It's a bit like...Teaspoon meets LJ, but without the annoying formatting changes. All rolled up into one.

Though, tea is an excellent way to combat drowsiness. Not as effective as coffee, but that's partially due to caffeine content.

[ladymercury_10]

Oh, the what you're going to do with your life one is really fun. I was like, what do you mean, where do I see myself in the future? I thought I was doing good by having an idea of where I wanted to spend the next two years?

AHHHH the letters thing is always so nervewracking. Good luck, I hope he gets them in! I actually had one professor turn in her letters late, but it was okay in the end because the other two were on time and she got them in quite soon after the deadline and/or some of the schools only needed two letters anyway.

HAHAHA that would be fantastic.

I already tried coffee, it has not helped with my sleep-deprivation English fail. :P

[giallarhorn]

Yeah, I'm taking it as a 'where do you see yourself after you're done and have your degree?' to which I opted to respond with 'next degree/school and then post doc work at a school' XD I mean, two year plan is pretty splendid (though your program is only two years? Mine are mostly 3-4 years, depending)

Yeahhhh, especially so close to the holidays and all. I keep thinking that all of my letter writers will just up and out go on vacation somewhere without checking their email and forget I need those letters. Haha, well, that worked out for the best then! Though, I think all of mine require three.

Someone should start up a site like that. Just combine like a more selective fanfic.net meets LJ. I bet someone's done that, somewhere.

Oh, well. Sleep deprivation English fail is an irreversible syndrome of sleep deprivation and can only be cured by excessive sleeping to pay off your sleep debt. Or something. Point- sleep is good for correcting English fail caused by lack of sleep.

[ladymercury_10]

Yeah, mine is just a master of science. What degree are you doing? Or are you looking to do more than one

[giallarhorn]

Huh. Mine's a M.S too- I guess the curriculum is different? I think it's possible to finish some of the programs in two years, but the profs probably want to keep you around to get as much labor for their research XD After the Masters, I wanna try for a PhD cause another 5+ years in school is so much fun!

I don't know if it's actually possible to create a really unified model for a blogging/archive platform. I suppose you could have an optional archive assigned to each user upon signing up and have an archive comm or something similar to a comm so you could browse? And then have the mainstay as a blogging platform?

Ngl, I had trouble doing basic fractions after I took calculus. It just didn't make sense.

Ahhh, sleep is very good for finals. Very good.

[ladymercury_10]

Ah, well, maybe it's a math vs. science thing. There's not terribly much research to be done at the master's level in math. You can do a thesis, but I think it's less original research and more like a fancier version of an undergrad's big senior research paper? But I could be wrong.

Hmm, I wonder if anyone has ever tried to make such a platform?

Yeah, the more math you do, the harder the easy math seems to get. And I was always bad with basic algebra. Plus they spoiled us by giving us Mathematica when I was an undergrad. :P

It is true. :)

[giallarhorn]

Ohh, really? I always thought there was some level of research being done at a master's level. I know in the case for sciences, it's a lot more of just hitching onto a preexisting project from a prof, though I don't know if it's actually required. I know there tends to be a thesis esque thing at the end, which I suppose is really just a research paper in of itself :P

I honestly don't know. I suppose that most blogging platforms kind of have that feature built in by virtue of being a blog, but it's less neat and overt? You can post fic, and technically search through a journal by tags, but there's no search function to find them.

Haha, they gave us Mathmatica too! Except I couldn't ever figure out how to use it, so I just ditched it and did everything by hand.

[ladymercury_10]

Right, yeah, I think a thesis is fairly common, but it's my impression that you're not necessarily proving new theorems or lemmas, just compiling existing research. I may be way off base, though, because I haven't really talked to our grad director about doing a thesis, I just know vaguely from my friend who is doing a master's thesis at a different university. I think a thesis is usually an option for math, though, and it's primarily coursework, because math is so cumulative that it's hard to do original work before you finish your prereqs and stuff, and there is not really lab equipment to deal with or that kind of thing to help a professor with. Although even undergrads sometimes help with research, like at REUs

[giallarhorn]

Yeah, I had gotten the impression that doing research in math was a bit more difficult as opposed to just jumping in like the sciences, since you did need all the foundations to even begin looking at a project.

We had the option to use it (though I think that upper level math classes had it as a requirement) and I just got fed up trying to learn the syntax that I just didn't bother. Heh, that is a little unimpressive if you can't bother to add whole numbers together XD

[ladymercury_10]

Right, yeah, I think that's what's happening. (Although PhDs, of course, do original research in math.)

Haha, we unimpressed him with several of the things we did. We also used it to integrate variations on e^x because we forgot how. It was pretty bad. :P