Get This Man a Doctor

After spending about twenty minutes today catching up on the Virginia Tech story, I’ve used up about as much energy as I can. Most people have used the story as a political soapbox, spouting nonsense about everything from gun control and racism to prescription drugs and the media.

I can find no deeper meaning in this tragedy than as a reminder of the frailty of human lives and minds.

On a personal note, I’ve thought carefully about whether this event will have any effect on my teaching next year, since I will likely have a sizable class of undergrads. And when I honestly consider it, I expect that I will have the rampage in the back of my mind, and probably form prejudices about students who seem too introverted. But, so it goes.

Well, I didn’t really feel comfortable writing about which schools I did and didn’t get into, but this is supposed to be a blog about my experience with grad school. So to remain true to that purpose, I have to make a post about how I am going to be rejected from almost every school I applied to.

The rejections have begun rolling in in the form of emails. It’s kind of ruining my vacation, but at least I’ll finally have some closure. I knew I wasn’t a very strong candidate, but I was secretly hoping that this might be one of those years with little competition. I was clearly wrong.

Out of the ten schools I applied to, my fifth and sixth choices just rejected me. Since they’re pretty much ranked by how competitive their programs are, that only leaves the bottom four.

My biggest fear now is being rejected from all ten schools, which will pretty much end my academic career. I don’t expect that I will be have the strength to apply again, and after another year I will be an even more undesirable candidate.

After some reflection, it was my lack of dedication that led to these rejections. In the three years since graduation I have had to deal with more adversity than I faced in college, and one thing it has elucidated is that I simply did not work hard enough during those four years. I only hope that I have the strength to overcome this failure in the future.

Yeah a post titled still waiting… I know. No word yet from schools, and I’m getting pretty apprehensive. Some of my peers told me that they got their acceptance/rejection letters right around this time, so I should brace myself. Also, one particular school promised me a decision in “mid-Feburary” and I believe that it has reached late-mid—nay even early-late-February. Grumble.

I’ve been debating whether I’ll post where I am accepted on this site. I decided against it—that’s not something I want to broadcast. Instead, I’m providing the official Get This Man a Doctor Grad School Accept-o-Meter (at right) that gives you all the information you need to know. It is currently set to straight face… expect it to reach frowny sometime soon.

By popular demand, I’ve decided to go through and calculate just how much I spent on applying to graduate school. Well, actually, no one really seems to ask me how much I spent, but every time I think about it I can’t believe how much money I blew on a bunch of forms.

So to review: I applied to ten schools around the country. The one with the least fees was Carnegie Mellon, which charged $0.00 to read my application. The one with the greatest fees was the City University of New York, Graduate Center, which charged me $125.00 to read my application. The mean was $58.50.

The ETS charges $15.00 to report your (required) GRE scores. Per school. Plus a service fee per request. Since I had to submit one school twice, the total amount I paid the ETS was $216.00.

The total amount I spent on shipping is a bit skewed, since I FedExed everything. Most of my applications didn’t come down to the deadline, but I wanted to get everything in as quickly as possible. Total shipping costs: $199.73.

Finally, I spent $148.25 on transcripts, office supplies, books, and miscellany.

So, the grand total I have spent applying to grad schools since October comes to $1148.98. I wonder if I can get a tax write-off…

It’s so cold outside my little desktop application has to use its full montage of weather icons for this week.

24 degrees with a 13 degree wind chill, and we still can’t get more than two inches of snow? Weather, I’ve done gone given up on you.

Nice application [OS X], by the way, as it’s the only one I’ve found that is: 1) Reliable, and 2) Fast.

Since I got all of my ten applications in on January 15, it’s interesting to see how often the different schools contact me. For example, my long shot choice Berkeley sent me one automated email when I submitted my application more than a month ago, and hasn’t sent me anything else since. U Oregon, probably smoking something, has sent me not one but two information packets about their residence halls, and nothing else.

NYU, on the other hand, has sent me a sequence of three confirmation emails, followed by a physical confirmation in the mail, followed by another email from an administrative assistant somewhere, all within two weeks of when I started my application. What’s weird is the experience I’ve had with contacting NYU in the past.

When I moved to New York in 2005, I didn’t have a job lined up, so I tried to set up some interviews for when I got here. One of the places I desperately wanted to work was NYU; since I knew was going to grad school, the free tuition benefit was a pretty sweet perk.

NYU’s HR department has something called the MATCH system. All I remember is that I applied to at least ten jobs through their site and never once received a response. I even stooped to calling someone in the HR department, and, in true stalker fashion, showed up at the IT department, stopped one of the Directors in the hall, and asked him just what had happened to my job applications. You know, now that I think about it, I’m surprised that I’ve never been detained by security.

I kept applying for every job I could find between September of 2004 and May of 2005, and finally got called into an interview at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (which, by the way, is pretty sweet). The guy who interviewed me said that I was a good fit for the job, but that they almost always hired recent NYU graduates. In fact, he claimed they were required to interview a certain number of outside candidates, but they generally never hired them. A kind euphemism for why I didn’t get the job? I sure hope so.

Since then, I have repeatedly sent emails to various people at NYU for a number of reasons. Once, I sent an email to some event coordinator about a graduate school fair they were holding. Then, I sent an email to the Courant Institute asking them to clarify blatantly contradictory information about their application process. Nothing back. I still have no evidence that any person actually saw these emails… I was pretty sure that I had been blacklisted by their mail server as a spammer for the vast number of times I’ve tried to contact someone there.

Now that I’ve paid their $80 application fee, I’m their best bud. Well guess what, NYU. It’s going to take a lot more than that to win back my heart.

* = required question

Residence Halls Buildings Survey (Prospective Resident)

1. I am a:*
(X) Prospective Resident

2. What is your impression of UO residence halls?*
If I ever visit I will go look at them.

3. Not considering room rates or the assignment process, if you could live in any residence hall building on campus, which would you choose?*
( ) Barnhart
( ) Bean
( ) Carson
(X) Earl
( ) Hamilton
( ) Living-Learning Center
( ) Riley
( ) Walton

4. What is it about this building that is attractive to you?*
I like the name Earl.

7. What would make you want to live in the residence halls your first year at the UO?*
Probably a bribe.

8. What would make you want to live in the residence halls for more than one year?*
Yearly bribes.

9. Would residence hall facilities impact your decision to attend a university or college?*
(X) No
( ) Yes

10. Did/do your parents or family members encourage you to live in the residence halls?*
(X) No
( ) Somewhat
( ) Yes

What factors influence the decision to live in the residence halls versus living off campus?
I’m not 18 anymore.

11. Demographics:*
Gender
( ) Female
(X) Male

Age
24

Just when I thought it was over and the four-digit cost for applying to schools was final, I get an email from Carnegie Mellon informing me that they never got the GRE scores I sent back in October. I don’t really know why, but I’m guessing it has to do with the fac tthat the department is “Mathematical Sciences” instead of “Mathematics” and therefore has a code of 20740799 instead of 20740703.

Total cost to get ETS to send another copy: $15. Plus $6 for the phone call. Yippee.

Two days before the keynote heard round the world, a little known billionaire named Bill Gates made a similar announcement at the now outdated trade expo CES. The purpose of Bill’s keynote was to stir (scrounge) up excitement and buzz for Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows Vista.

Okay, so let’s review. Nearly six years after the release of Mac OS X, Microsoft is dragging out its latest operating system on January 30th. It’s so massively ahead of its time, it’s going to be released in no fewer than six (6) editions, ranging in price from $200 to $400. The top edition, called Windows Ultimate and priced $100 higher than the next cheapest version, will offer a number of awesome upgrades. What exactly these will be is unknown. Instead, Microsoft announced three awesome upgrades at CES that will be part of the so-called “WaveZero” round of updates (further attack waves will occur after the January 30 release). They are:

1. A program that allows you to set your background to be a video,
2. A program which makes it easier to use an existing encryption feature of Vista, and,
3. A Texas Hold-em game.

Gnarly, right? Even more awesome than that is Microsoft’s rather tasteless attempt at a community-based/viral marketing campaign called Show us your “Wow.”

The only thing good about that site is how it makes me feel slightly less bitter about my job.

Time magazine just eliminated all prestige associated with their Person of the Year issue by naming everyone currently alive as this year’s winner. Let the celebration begin.
What does it feel like to be named Time magazine’s Person of the Year? Personally, I’m pretty stoked. In fact, I’ve just added it to the bottom of my resume. That’s right, please refer to me as Sean Kelly, Time magazine’s 2006 Person of the Year. I’m probably not going to be using that thing for another five years, so it doesn’t really matter.

The only problem is that this maverick issue is going to take a lot of allure out of the award. I mean sure, everyone born after 2006 won’t have the title like we do. So when we all die, there will be a fresh batch of losers to pick from. But until then, who will Time pick to up the ante next year? Time magazine’s 2007 Person of the Year—God?

On a side note, my favorite Wikipedia article of the day is Unsuccessful attempts to amend the U.S. Constitution. What? There’s a chance the ERA could still be ratified? Get to it, Pelosi!