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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • 100% on the not forcing yourself on anything in a PhD. I was ABD and my heart wasn’t in it anymore. The whole thing was a disaster, committee was unreachable, department was no help, and by the time I was done, I hated myself for ever doing it. It was an exercise in completion. Absolutely be open to saying “this isn’t fun anymore.” There is zero problem with just getting a masters — in fact, I think you get the most value out of one because it’s a concentrated experience on what you want to do. There’s a stigma on “mastering out” but that’s crap. Know your limits and stop while you still love what you’re doing. I wish you the best in returning to school!



  • It’s not so much that they don’t give a damn, but that they can’t tell. I taught some basic English courses with a research component (most students in their first college semester), and I’d drag them to the library each semester for a boring day on how to generate topics, how to discern scholarly sources, then use databases like EBSCO or JSTOR to find articles to support arguments in the essays they’d be writing for the next couple years. Inevitably, I’d get back papers with so-and-so’s blog cited, PraegerU, Wikipedia, or Google’s own search results. Here’s where a lot of the problem lies: discerning sources, and knowing how to use syntax in searches, which is itself becoming irrelevant on Google etc. but NOT academic databases. So why take the time to give the “and” and “or” and “after: 1980” and “type: peer-reviewed” when you can just write a natural-language question into a search engine and get an answer right away that seems legit in the snippet? I’d argue the tech is the problem because it encourages a certain type of inquiry and quick answers that are plausible, but more often than not, lacking in any credibility.