better things are coming

Just because the system is set up in a way that fosters a super high stress lifestyle doesn’t mean that it needs to be that way. There’s nothing inherently competitive about science (except evolution).

Grad school, and STEM in general, should be intellectually difficult but not nearly as emotionally difficult as it is, and yet way too many people just accept it because that’s they way it’s always been.

I’m not saying it should be easy, but we shouldn’t have to sacrifice out mental and emotional well beings, anything resembling a personal life, or just a somewhat normal work/life balance at the altar of Science. 

The pressure cooker environment of grad school and science in general is both unnecessary and bad for science. It self selects for a certain type of scientist and drives out anyone who varies from the norm. 

But the people in charge aren’t incentivized to change it because they’re products of the system. They are the very type of people who the system was built to serve. When people fail they shrug and say it was unfortunate but not everyone was cut out for this life. 

That is bullshit. You do not have to be broken down and built back up to be a good scientist. Science is not war. We are not soldiers. We are curious, creative people who want to understand the universe. 

A report recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science surveyed medical students and residents on their beliefs about race and health. The study concluded the following:

Out of 418 medical students and residents in the study, 222 were white. About 50% of the white respondents held at least one false ‘biological’ belief about black people, which included at least one of the following:

Black people have less sensitive nerve endings than white people

Black people feel less pain than white people

Black people’s blood coagulates more quickly than white people’s blood

Black people have thicker skin than white people

58% of the total medical students and residents quizzed believed that black people had thicker skin than white people. This included about 40% of first and second year students and 25% of hospital residents

It was further shown from this study that racial biases falsely rooted in biology affects the treatments that doctors give to black people. For instance, a 2000 study from Emory University found that “74% of white patients with bone fractures [in an hospital emergency room in Atlanta] received painkillers compared with 50% of black patients.” Likewise, “a paper last year found that black children with appendicitises were less likely to receive pain medication than their white counterparts.”

Finally, “a 2007 study found that physicians were more likely to underestimate the pain of black patients compared with other patients,” which overall correlates the ignorance in the medical community about race and biology. 

Solutions

As it might turn out, patients of a certain race or ethnicity may fare better when they visit a physician of the same race or ethnicity. For example, “A recent study published in The American Journal of Gastroenterology found that black patients are 19 percent more likely to die from common gastrointestinal problems than white patients, but fare better when treated by black doctors.”

shoutout to the students who had to give up their dream schools because they couldn’t afford it

shoutout to the students who recycle their stationery year after year

shoutout to the students illegally downloading books and textbooks because they can’t afford even the e-book versions

shoutout to the students living on the cheapest coffee

shoutout to the students who have sewed their bags/backpacks over and over again because they can’t afford a replacement

shoutout to the students working part time and full jobs to make ends meet and pay their bills

shoutout to the students who have to give up their passions, indulgents and going-outs because extra money is hard to come by

shoutout to the students affording to go to school, but too poor to do anything else

shoutout to the students that run themselves thin in the process of getting an education

shoutout to the students that prevail despite all this

shoutout to the students who need to take a break from all of this

Black Ivy Panther 

This is my trick for remembering trigonometric values. Forget memorizing those little charts or triangles, this is so much easier. 

I learnt this in 10th grade from my favorite teacher (who wasn’t actually my maths teacher at the time) and I still used it for the rest of High School and will probably continue to use it in University.

So what do you do? You draw the chart in the picture. That one. 

OK, but how do you read it? Like a table. (If you’re unfamiliar with radians, do not worry. It also works in degrees, just write: 0, 30, 45, 60, 90 instead.)

For example, if you want to find the sin(pi/2), you simply start at sin(x) and then move over until you’re at pi/2 (or 90 degrees). It says sqrt(4). Now you put that over 2, and you have it. Sin(pi/2) = (sqrt(4))/2, also known as 2/2, or 1. 

If you want to find the cos(pi/4), you do the same thing: start at cos(x), move until (pi/4). It says sqrt(2), now put that over 2, and you have cos(pi/4) = sqrt(2)/2.

For tan(x), just take the sin(x) value and divide it by the cos(x) value!

So tan(pi/6) = sqrt(1) / sqrt(3) = 1/sqrt(3).

In January of 2015, I created this blog. I live in an impoverished area with an underfunded school district. My family lives below the poverty line. Growing up, my motivations to get good grades and standardized test scores was to make sure that the schools I attended did not get closed (because a school in my district that fell below a particular threshold ran the risk of getting closed) and to make sure I could provide for my family in the future. When I found out there was a community of people here on Tumblr that enjoyed studying and learning for the sake of knowledge, I was curious & excited. I joined the studyblr community because I saw a group of people who were dedicated to learning and who were always striving to better themselves and others.

However, I have recently become quite disillusioned with certain parts of the culture this community has established. For many months, while I was on hiatus, I debated within myself about leaving altogether. I have since decided against doing that but if I am to continue here, I must address a few concerns I have about the studyblr community:

THE “IVY LEAGUE OR BUST” IDEOLOGY: not all studyblrs ascribe to this philosophy (in fact, many studyblr don’t do a lot of the things I address in this post) but it is one I have seen go rampantly unchecked within the community. Honey, high school is already stressful without the ridiculous stress of trying to make sure you get into one of 8 colleges (when there are hundreds of colleges in the U.S. alone) and for what? Prestige? “Better opportunities”? My love, you make what you want out of college; college doesn’t make what it can out of you. Ivy Leagues can be great if they are the right environment for you. This kind of ideology is not something that should be promoted in any way

ABLEISM: I must start off by saying that the studyblr community is absolutely amazing when it comes to addressing the obstacles that differently abled people face in their studies, especially when it comes to mental illness. However, making posts for coping with chronic illnesses, mental illnesses, and disabilities is only the tip of the iceberg of what we can do to make this a truly inclusive space for everyone. I suffer from several mental illnesses, including depression and anxiety, and I have often had to log off Tumblr when I am already in the middle of a panic attack and I see posts about being productive every day or posts asking whether I “have done anything today to accomplish my goals”. I have seen posts where people include pushing through negative feelings and discomfort during study sessions as a study tip – when sometimes, these negative feelings are indicative of larger issues that may or may not have to do with studying that might need to be addressed nonetheless.

STUDYSPO / “PRETTY PICTURES”: This is a topic that has been addressed in the community ad nauseam, and I don’t really have too much to add. I have nothing against “studyspo” posts; if you say you need pretty notes to study and aesthetic images to be motivated, I promise to take you at your word. 

But I absolutely hate two particular things regarding these kinds of posts:

1) the fact that some of these posts literally add nothing to our community: The best kind of studyspo, in my opinion, are the ones with descriptions of a person’s day or of the supplies in the photo. When I see studyspo with no caption or a mere link to someone’s blog, I know that this is just a gimmick for followers.

2) the fact that these posts have essentially become synonymous with the studyblr community: We all (should) know that studying is not a glitzy process - it is riddled with frustrations, disappointments, and failures. The most important thing we as studyblrs do is support each other through tough times. But for many people, studyspo is what they noticed first about our community – in fact, that may have been what drew them in. I think we are much more than that. The “studyspo culture” has become so bad that some people feel like the easiest way to get popular in our community is to steal other people’s pictures and post them as their own. I’m not defending these people at all – it’s despicable behavior & I have another post coming about that alone – but the fact is if unique and effective study tips were as popular as many of these studyspo posts, people would be stealing those instead of pictures. 

(The classism and ableism perpetuated by a lot of these posts are also important to me as well, but we’ve discussed those things at length and I have nothing more to add to what has already been said.) 

ACKNOWLEDGING CRITICISM & DISSENTING OPINIONS: Talking about studyspo, the way I have seen many studyblrs address the issue has me very concerned. Many posts seem to take criticisms about “studyspo culture” as personal attacks or brush them off as mere “studyblr drama”. All community have rifts; we do not have to be happy, go-lucky group of friends. I promise you, we can have debates and differing opinions and we will be just fine. But ignoring people who don’t agree with what we have accepted as our status quo or belittling their views only makes our rifts larger and further alienates people who already don’t feel like they belong. I don’t want to be a part of a community with a sort of hive mind; I want my communities to be diverse in every aspect including in our opinions. 

…

Look, I know it looks like I just have a million criticisms. This whole post may even come off as condescending (my particular brand of neurodivergence doesn’t allow me to really notice how I sound to others, sorry). But I love y’all and I just want our community to be equally conducive to learning for all of us. I want us to address the ways we fail each other as members of this community and take measures to make this a more inclusive community for all of us. I want us to have real conversations about these things. I want people to see us as a community of real people who are passionate about learning not just a bunch of pretty note creators, Apple laptop operators, and white desk organizers.

In my broke college student phase of life, I’ve been trying to find cheaper alternatives to common studyblr supplies and I came across one that is super useful! I found that the Crayola Supertips are a great cheap alternative to mildliners. 

Color In terms of comparison, I’ve made a quick chart of the mildliners I own. I only have 11 of the 20 mildliner colors available, but for the most part, I was able to find a color that is very similar. You’ll notice that the crayola colors tend to be a bit more opaque than the mildliners. This isn’t really a problem for me because I tend to write with a black gel pen, but if you generally write with pencil some of the colors may be too dark.

Price A single mildliner usually sells for about US $1.50, and 5 packs range from about 6-8 dollars, depending on which pack you get/where you buy them from. On the other hand, a 20 count pack of crayola supertips runs for about US $6.50, and a 50 count pack is about US $12. Overall, it’s cheaper to get the 50 pack of crayola markers because A) the total cost for the 50 pack is cheaper than buying all 20 mildliners and B) you can get many more colors. 

You can use them for calligraphy! 

the main reason I got these supertips was because they were a lot cheaper than buying tombow brush pens, especially because I’ve just begun learning. [ If you want to know more about using supertips for calligraphy, check out @10012039‘s post on that here. ]

pick your school because you love it, pick it because it has programs you like, pick your school because it has the best food in the country, but don’t pick it because you think other people will be impressed. you won’t be happy there if you don’t love something else about it too, and going through life with the sole purpose of trying to create an image of intelligence and status is no way to live, now is it?

So anyway I graduated with a major in linguistics and a minor in French over the weekend. UCLA class of 2016. Graduated with departmental honors and magna cum laude distinction! 

So just some backstory, when I was in high school I was a victim of sexual assault and was forced to drop out of school for over a year. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, and I could barely get out of bed. My counselors didn’t help me. My parents didn’t know what to do. My entire world crumbled around me. Everything I worked for seemingly fell apart in one night. I failed all of my classes and barely graduated high school with a shitty GPA, severe PTSD and a shattered dream of getting into UCLA. 

Then I went to the University of Oregon, the only school that accepted me. Again, I failed. I was scared and nervous and the anxiety brought on by my PTSD was so severe that I dropped out of college at the end of the quarter. My family and friends came to expect failure from me. I came to expect failure from myself. 

After months of healing and crawling my way out of depression, I enrolled in community college. I was patient with myself. I took online courses until I felt comfortable enough to go to class in person. I felt myself growing and blossoming again. I finally felt happy being around people and being in the classroom. I applied to UCLA and in April of 2014 was accepted on a full scholarship.

I learned not to let anybody tell me that I couldn’t. Not even myself. My motto throughout college was that nothing could get in my way. That I could take on any obstacle that came my way and keep climbing and growing. 

In my two years at UCLA I worked as a teacher’s assistant at an elementary school, then a middle school. I was community service chair for my sorority, then I was president. I was on the executive board of a program that taught ESL to first generation immigrants on weekends. I got a full scholarship to study in Paris. I became a course reader for a professor that I admired greatly. I interned at Hispanas Organized for Political Equality. I trained and worked at a local domestic violence shelter. I graduated with distinction from my dream university.  All things I never dreamed I would be able to do because the world told me I couldn’t.