Splice Today

The Texas textbook takeover

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:43:18 -0400

In Texas, Thomas Jefferson is set to be removed from the textbook standards explaining how Enlightenment thinkers have influenced revolutions since 1750. Replacing him will be the French theologian John Calvin.

The Grading Curve

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 09:55:26 -0500

Here we report on historical and recent grading patterns at American four-year colleges and universities. Records of average grades show that since the 1960s, grading has evolved in an ad hoc way into identifiable patterns at the national level. The mean grade point average of a school is highly dependent on the average quality of its student body and whether it is public or private. Relative to other schools, public-commuter and engineering schools grade harshly. Superimposed on these trends is a nationwide rise in grades over time of roughly 0.1 change in GPA per decade. These trends may help explain why private school students are disproportionately represented in Ph.D. study in science and engineering and why they tend to dominate admission into the most prestigious professional schools. They also may help explain why undergraduate students are increasingly disengaged from learning and why the US has difficulty filling its employment needs in engineering and technology.

More crazy school policy

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:58:07 -0500

It seems to me that it may be time to give all school administrators a course in remedial thinking. Here's another absolutely ridiculous case where a student was suspended from school after turning down drugs from another student.

Well... don't get much crazier than that

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:02:09 -0500

How far is too far? The Badger Herald and a Holocaust denial ad

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:28:43 -0500

Issues of free speech, advertising and the Holocaust clashed on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus on Wednesday as about 150 students rallied to honor the victims of the Holocaust and call for an end to an ad in a campus newspaper.

Dear Applicant: Sad Face

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:09:17 -0500

At the tippy top of my list of Things to Hate are rejection letters. Woo they get on my nerves!

Can I get an Amen?

It’s not that I think I’m too good to be rejected from things. Listen, nobody loves being below average. Rejection is a part of life, especially if you’re trying to be fabulous. What pisses me off is that rejection letters are so good at making you feel shitty, in a really tacky, tactless and self-aggrandizing way.

It’s that time of year. Your BFFs and your girl/boyfriend applied for grad school, or a job, or a fellowship, and now it’s the waiting game. Did I get picked? Will I be validated? You check your email every hour. You might even be obsessed with the Grad Café, a blog that lets students post their admissions decisions so you can see if there’s still hope!

This year I helped many prospective students apply to my program. And they are all so desperate to get it in—just as desperate as I would be at an Alexander McQueen sample sale. Waiting to hear back from The Powers That Be is the worst part of applying for anything, because you’ve just poured your heart and soul into a couple sheets of paper, or you’ve had interviews and even bought a new outfit to try and impress the selection committee.

You want to be validated, stamped, branded.

So you wait.

And you wait.

And you still wait.

Meanwhile, all your friends start hearing back from the places they applied to but you haven’t heard anything yet—fuck!—so you start to doubt yourself. You sweat at night, panic, can’t eat. Hysteria.

Graduate school admissions decisions are horrible to sit though because you wait so many months to hear back. And the rejection letters are worst part. It’s how they’re worded. I recently applied to this thing that I thought I had an okay shot at—I didn’t think I was a shoe-in, but I for def. believed I had a shot. Tell me why these bitches sent me a super wordy rejection email leading me to believe, visually, that I got in. I kept reading and the email foamed at the screen about how fabulous the program was, what great things it does for humanity and all that. The letter made a point, however, to let me know that I do not get to participate in the humanity changing!

Don’t you hate when rejection letters are like “you weren’t picked because we had over 300 billion applications for only two slots, the greatest number of applications that have ever been received by any organization, anywhere, throughout all time.” Translation: we’re so fabulous, everybody wants to be with us. And you can’t!

Okay, okay, I didn’t get in. Pardon me while I slit my wrists.

Nobody wants to hear about how much they suck. That’s why I think rejection letters should be as simple as possible:

Dear You,

☹

Signed,
Us

Wouldn’t that be so much less demoralizing?

The best rejection letter I ever got came from New York University. You’re gonna love this. I applied to a Ph.D. program there and I didn’t get in, obviously. But instead of a rejection letter, these bitches sent me a letter that said:

Dear Madison,

Congratulations! You’ve been admitted to the Draper Master’s Program in Social Thought!

Say what? I didn’t apply to no “Draper Program.” Oh, I get it now! When you don’t get into the program you applied to, they automatically admit you to the general Master’s! Faaaaabulous!

Don’t let their game get you down. Take off your earrings and fight with the letter, if you need to. A little while back I read about a dude who applied to Princeton. Got rejected. What’d he do? He sent a rejection letter to the school rejecting the rejection. And then, poof! He got in.

I’m tellin’ you, sometimes a bitch slap is all it takes.

So as you get your rejection letters from fellowships, schools, jobs or whatever this month, treat yourself a new outfit, frame the letter, and laugh at it when you win a Nobel Prize.

Sonic boom wave lancing atmospheric ice crystals

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 13:06:47 -0500

School-issued laptops used by administration to spy on students

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:54:41 -0500

A class action lawsuit filed late yesterday in Federal Court in Philadelphia has shed light on a secret surveillance program targeting Americans, but this particular operation is not being run by the FBI or the NSA. It’s being run by the Lower Merion School District, in the old-money Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia, PA.

The Cornell Sorority Fashion Police

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:34:10 -0500

This morning, I was forwarded six pages worth of dress code requirements for Pi Phi’s Cornell chapter.

Murphy’s Law Is Not A Joke

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:12:00 -0500

How come every time I’m in a hurry and need to be somewhere, like, right now, something always creeps in and fucks it up? Just the other day I went through the hassle of ordering a cab for 7:45 p.m. I even let my class out five minutes early so I would make the taxi to make the 8:07 p.m. train from New Haven to New York.

“Alright, see you next week!” I say at virtually the same time as I’m slamming my laptop and gathering my things and heading out the door and running down the stairs and chasing after the taxi that’s waiting on me. But it’s now slowly starting to pull away so I panic, then run even faster at it.

I’m in the cab. Fifteen minutes to go, start to feel confident that I’ll make the train.

Light Number 1: Red.

Green. Go. 10 seconds pass.

Light Number 2: Red.

Green. Go. 10 seconds pass.

Light Number 3: Red.

Green. Fuck!

By the time we get to the fourth light, I realize that I’m not going to make my train because we are going to get stopped at every light between downtown and Union Station. FML.

It shouldn’t have happened this way! Sure, it was the last minute, but I had plenty of time to make the train. You know, until Murphy’s Law came in and fucked up all the traffic lights.

Confession: I’ve always been a last minute person. Not in the sense that I turn things in after a deadline; more that I wait to do stuff until I can’t wait any longer. I will watch Project Runway marathons even when I have a paper due in four days, but two days before it’s due you will not see me until after the paper is turned in. This does not make for the best personal relationships, I’ve noticed, because the stress puts you on edge and you can only focus on this thing and nothing/nobody else.

I like to do things at the last minute because there’s something exhilarating about having to birth a paper of earth shattering brilliance in a compressed amount of time and under obscene amounts of pressure. Having a short paper due in two days really forces you to make intelligent connections, to figure out really difficult issues because you don’t really have the time to lollygag! People who don’t procrastinate, who write their papers days or even weeks before they are due can’t be trusted.

Is this the best way to work? Perhaps not. But when I’m under so much pressure, I focus in such an intense way that it’s almost addictive. Everything else around me shuts off, even if I am in a coffee shop, and I zoom into whatever I’m doing.

However, every time I finish a project this way, my preferred way, my computer explodes, or else all of the printers on campus mysteriously run out of ink, or else the earth has opened and The Lord has returned.

One time I had to write a tough paper while I was going on an audition at the Cleveland Institute of Music during my senior year of high school. I obviously didn’t start writing the paper until the minute I was on my way to Cleveland, because it was a really hard essay to do.

When I got to Cleveland I practiced my scales and worked on that paper. I stayed up late to finish it and, though I had a ton of trouble with it, I remember having a couple more pages than I really needed. So, yay! The next day I proudly mailed off my masterpiece and played Barber with all my heart.

Back to school. The professor hunts me down, tells me she never received the masterpiece. Panicked, I show her my receipt, proof that I mailed it. Not good enough. I tell her I will reprint it. Okay. But now the disk I saved it on is damaged, obviously, and there is only an unfinished version on it, of course.

Why is this happening?

I finally get her the piece, and she reads it. Wait a few days. Now the trollop tells me I’m In Big Trouble because she thinks I plagiarized my piece. Her reasoning? The ideas were way too sophisticated, especially given that before I left for Cleveland I cried in her office because I didn’t think I could do the paper. At the end of all the drama, she accepted the paper and gave me a C-, my lowest grade.

I think that this is my worst case of Murphy’s Law to date. And yet, I still procrastinate. What can I say, I’m addicted!

In my life I’ve seen that Murphy’s Law is basically the truth—that whatever can go wrong at the last minute will in fact go wrong. So when my students come to me and are all “the dog ate my computer” or “aliens landed in my house” I’m just like: I don’t want to hear this. Sometimes you’re telling the truth, but maybe this time you’re not. Just get it in to me.

You know what, though? If you take step back and think about a time that Murphy came to get your ass, you’ll see just how funny it all really is.