Realization about the fam, and education

[prog]

One of the reasons I wasn't accepted into grad school in 2002 (if I might make an educated (ho ho) guess) is that I had literally no clue about what I was getting into, and made many mistakes, surely enough to make my application look quite unattractive. Half of the reason for that is because I was too young and stupid to realize that I had built

Comments

[mmcirvin]

You're more or less in the situation my parents were in. In grad school I always felt like a bit of an outsider because I didn't come from a family with a multigenerational tradition of higher education, though my mother had gotten a master's degree when I was a kid and my father actually got one while I was in grad school.

Right now, I'm fumbling around with a job search and ascending the learning curve there, just because I haven't really had to do a job search since 1997. I have a pretty good idea of the mistakes I made back then, but the market's changed and there are different mistakes to make.

I've encountered the same rule: My social network is way more extensive and useful than I thought it was, and a lot of what I've had to learn is just how to ping people I already know for help.

[radtea]

My g/f, now working on her Ph.D., is the first person in her family to graduate from high-school. It's been fascinating to watch her learning "how to be a grad student" without any family history of expectations to guide her. I never realized how much easier it is to navigate academic culture if you grew up around people who are themselves products of it.