The Anthro Grad Student: MAPSS at UChicago

Chicago’s First Snow was about two weeks ago, and I was truly overjoyed for the day, before it was shattered upon receiving my perspectives midterm back. My preceptor said at the outset before passing them back in the discussion group that “most people got a B+, which isn’t terrible, but there is room for improvement.” Thanks, preceptor, considering that anything less than a B in graduate school is actually considered failing, making a B+ the equivalent of a C or C-. It was particularly infuriating because the thing that everyone had failed to do was define specific terms from different perspectives; e.g. “superbase/structure” or “alientated” if discussing the Marxist perspective. The reason none of us--including myself--did not define these terms is not for lack of good writing skills, but because we were explicitly told to write the paper *FOR* the preceptors/MAPSS audience! We only had 6-8 doublespaced pages (which means only 3-4 pages of actual writing) to flesh out THREE perspectives AND make an argument for an interpretation of the piece we were given to apply these perspectives to. They even told us not to worry about proper citation, or a bibliography, because that’s how tailored to the audience it was. So none of us defined terms, and the entire cohort was marked down for it. Out of 270 people, only 17 people got an A or A-. The course is seriously set up for failure; I think it’s some way of creating a use for themselves. It truly is the most useless course I’ve ever taken. The amount of hand-holding that is done is also embarrassing- just when I thought I had shaken off this ridiculous course/my preceptor group for the quarter, I’ve learned that in addition to the three classes I will be taking for the winter quarter, I have to attend a 2 hr discussion group AGAIN with my preceptor group as a workshop for our MA proposals. I didn’t pay 50k to attend this school to be forced to help other MA students craft a good idea/proposal. Why on earth this is required is completely beyond me. 

The funny thing is that I am actually doing extremely well in my other two courses, despite some depression I’ve been experiencing. In my Food & Cuisine course I actually wrote a prospectus that will double as my MA proposal for MAPSS and I earned a solid A on it, and the attention of a well-known Anthro faculty member. In Cultural Psychology we have five total papers over the quarter to submit in addition to the midterm, and I’ve earned solid As on all four I’ve turned in at this point. We get the grades for our midterms back tomorrow, which I’m really nervous about. I definitely took advantage of the soft guidelines and went over the ten page expectation, which I hope didn’t hurt my grade or my ability to be thorough and precise. 

I definitely was having a rough go of things for most of October and bleeding into the beginning of November as well. It is very difficult to remember why I’m here, sometimes, especially when it’s so lonely. I feel as though I lose my grip on things easily when I’m overwhelmed. I tend to constantly keep the future and my chances of being happy in mind, and view every decision i make in the present as having a disproportionate amount of bearing on my future. I tend to think in “all or nothing” terms, and my world comes spiraling down daily. 

I’ve been slacking off on a lot of readings lately, for all my courses. For perspectives, I just don’t see the point, being that I know what to expect of the final now that the midterm is over. If the discussion group was any good it would be incentive enough to do the reading, but the discussions are not very fruitful, so why bother? I still do what I can for Food and Cuisine, but the class is structured in a way that students actually present every single class on the material and try to stoke seminar-style conversations which never works. I get a good summary from them on the readings, and because the final is going to be research paper based on my own topic, the readings aren’t absolutely essential to me, though I wish I had the time to read them for my own interest and intellectual growth. I still do the readings for cultural psychology, mainly because it’s so fascinating and contentious that I can’t help but want to read these works. 

The most salient thing I’ve learned so far in my short time at UChicago is that, like always, things are never what they seem. All the hype around UChicago being such a brutal and intense place just isn’t the case. It might be more stimulating or require more reading than other universities, but the people here aren’t any different than people I’ve met anywhere else; we’re all the same. As long as you’re able to rise to the occasion, you can do it. I’ve often overestimated other things in my life, like prestigious jobs and social statuses. I’ve always been a nervous kind of person to think that I won’t be smart enough or capable enough to handle various things, including UChicago. While it’s intense and deserves credit where credit is due, it’s doable. 

I recently completed an embroidery project (above) where I sewed/beaded four constellations on a wool beret I purchased. It took probably 20 or so hours to complete, but I think it’s pretty, and gave me an excuse to shirk more readings. The constellations are: Pegasus, Ursa Major, Perseus, and Cetus. 

Finals are coming up and thankfully I’ve only got two to worry about, Perspectives and Food and Cuisine. Cultural Psych doesn’t have a final, likely because of the five papers (4-5 pages each) due throughout the quarter. I know what to generally expect out of the Perspectives final, but I’m nervous about the Food and Cuisine final because it’s a research paper based on the prospectus written for the midterm. The prospectus was essentially just my MA proposal, so the research paper would be a mini version of my MA, which is daunting to complete within one week. I have a few sources already lined up, I just don’t know how to properly condense and tailor such a huge project to such a tiny space (really, it’ll be five pages of writing, which is nothing). 

My boyfriend is driving down from Ithaca to visit me this week, which will be a lovely respite. He’s also forcing me to go to San Diego for a week during the Christmas break, which I’m not really looking forward to. For once in my life, I wanted a real-life snowy Christmas, and here was finally my chance. Now I’ll be in 70-degree weather as usual. 

It’s the beginning of the fifth week, midterms are due soon, and it’s really feeling like autumn- it has been incredibly windy with thunderstorms/rainstorms every other week. It feels like the earth is turning over in its sleep, bringing with it a cascade of wind and water. Next week the temperature is supposed to drop in the high forties; never in my life have I been in weather below 56! 

I broke down twice last week, once to my mother and once to my boyfriend, who is in law school in New York. They are really the only people I have to talk to, in my life. I don’t have any friends in California or new friends here in Chicago. I feel alone, ugly, and am getting the sense that maybe coming here was a mistake. 

There are a couple of reasons for feeling the latter point. These weeks have been zooming by, and I feel like there’s too much in too little time; I don’t understand who thought the quarter system was the best way to learn dense material. Even if you’re a damn Rhodes Scholar, the amount of reading assigned, assignments, and how little time there is to do it, there is simply no way one can truly penetrate often abstruse and dense theoretical texts. UChicago is famed for being intellectually rigorous, and that’s all good and well, but what is the point of this rigor if you don’t even get to truly absorb it? It might be one thing if the discussions in class were more engaging; but students rarely contribute anything, and when they do, it’s often with meek temerity for contributions that are usually wrong/misunderstandings anyway. Something should give; classes should focus on up to three heavy-duty thinkers for a given class subject, or just assign less reading if they really want to cover everything that they aim to cover. I feel like UChicago is making me a sort of jack of all trades, but master of none.

Two of my classes (not the perspectives course) have given extremely vague details about the midterms, but and discussed in class as being rather demanding (i.e. ten page research papers). The length, of course, isn’t what bothers me; it’s just this strange and unfair expectation of students to go out and collect fieldwork/data for a research paper they have little experience in, all in less than 10 days. 

I am definitely falling behind. There is so much reading for Perspectives that I just can’t do it. I’m starting to feel like I wasn’t cut out for graduate school at UChicago, specifically, after all. I don’t know if I want to continue pursuing a PhD; hell, I don’t even know what I want to do at all, at this point. I feel like I’m floating, like I’m no one. People I interact with on campus are self-involved and inconsiderate to the world around them; I can’t seem to make a connection anywhere. If you engage anyone in the slightest, you are met with a hostile, blank, “who are you? why are you talking to me? can you speed this up?” kind of look. People aren’t nice here. 

It may sound small and petulant to complain about people not being nice, but I’ve found that it has a huge impact on one’s mental health; think about people who are trying to assimilate in new societies, who are completely alone and don’t know how to engage communities. There’s a reason why shunning exists as a social behavior in many monkey/ape groups- it’s incredibly effective. People/monkeys actually die from being ostracized. When you’re in a community of people who don’t acknowledge, engage, or be nice to you, your mental health goes does at the same time your self-esteem does. 

It’s almost the end of the third week, and I feel a little discouraged. I’ve been keeping up with all the readings (which to be honest has been miraculous- I have been impressed with my newfound ability to properly manage my time!), participating in lectures in meaningful ways, and feel like I’ve actually been absorbing all of the content I’ve been taking in.

I knew that slight feeling of success wouldn’t last for long. It’s only the end of the third week, but somehow we’re already discussing midterms, which I feel a little unprepared for. I am just barely getting a grasp on the important themes in my courses, and I’m not sure I’m ready to do three research papers!

I feel a bit frustrated with the MAPSS program, to be honest. I’m frustrated that we are required to take the perspectives course. Many of the people who are admitted to MAPSS are people who were almost admitted to the PhD program- they don’t necessarily need a course that glibly covers the hot topics of different paradigms in the social sciences. Further, if the goal is truly to graduate in June, doesn’t the administration understand how difficult that is to do when you’re forced to take a course in something unrelated to your thesis, and requires upwards of 400 pages of reading per week? I’m actually sacrificing time I could dedicate to my other courses (that actually are relevant to my thesis) in order to ensure I’m doing all of the reading for Perspectives, which is utterly ridiculous. As if that weren’t bad enough, my preceptor actually admitted that the Perspectives course will be our lowest grade, and that historically it always sees low grades across the board. If they have this knowledge, shouldn’t something have to give? They are tacitly participating in lowering our GPA, which they KNOW is of utmost importance, especially for those wishing to pursue a PhD! It’s insane.

Having said that, I must confess that a large part of this frustration this week stems from the fact that I couldn’t even begin the readings for Perspectives, and it was an important week, dealing with Marxism. Of course, Marxism is not new to me and I’ve read so much of Marx over and over again since 10th grade in high school- but there were supplmental readings as well, and it would have been nice to have completed them. I feel like a failure. I feel upset that I’m operating within a system that seems built to fail to. 400 pages of reading on top of my other 400 pages of reading, plus a presentation, plus allowing myself a little personal time (my long-term boyfriend is on break from Cornell Law and is visiting) for once, is just impossible. There’s nothing else to say but I’ve failed myself.

One might think that the solution is easy; just complete the readings a little later on, and catch up. If only that were possible. As I said, I’m barely keeping up with the readings I have each week as it is- and that’s reading about 3-4 hours 7 days a week. I also work, and I literally have no extra time for anything else. If you fail to do something at UChicago, there is no catching up; you’ve just got to accept that you missed the mark and move along…nothing stops here.

The weather has finally turned–at least, temporarily–to what feels like Fall weather. It’s been raining, cold, and windy, which has been a nice change from the god-awful 90-degree humidity we’ve been dealing with all throughout September. I saw Hamilton two nights ago with my boyfriend (I bought us great seats for his birthday) and it was phenomenal- truly lives up to all the hype! Of course, my boyfriend and I have been listening to the songs for about two years now, so we already knew it was gold, but seeing it performed live was just amazing.

I’ve just gotten through my first week, and it has been both exactly what I expected and not really what I expected at all. 

Before even making my decision to attend UChicago, I did as much research as I could find about not only my program (MAPSS), but the different PhD programs, the undergraduate life- I wanted to see what it would be like to attend the school from every perspective because I knew that it would have an impact on my experience no matter what (e.g. disgruntled Anthropology PhD students might make for a poor potential network). It seemed that wherever I searched, I was met with sort of the same thing, and it always revolved around how difficult the school was; where fun came to die, etc etc. I became nervous that I wouldn’t be able to handle it, especially not with my state-school training, and being out of school for two years. 

I expected the worst when classes started- even though I only have a load of three courses, I knew the amount of reading was going to be herculean (I was told to expect upwards of 1800 pages of reading per week for all three classes). I expected to come to class and be outshone by brilliant ivy-league-undergrad-grad-students, by prodigy undergrads taking grad courses; I expected professors to be abstruse and esoteric, whose attention would be difficult to grab. 

It hasn’t really been any of that. I’m taking the Anthropology of Food and Cuisine, Cultural Psychology: Philosophical and Theoretical Foundations, and the required Perspectives course. The reading has been a lot, but certainly manageable, and I’m working between 15-20 hrs a week for my job back in San Diego still (remotely). There are roughly 200 pages of reading per course/week, but I find that it’s not too bad because the material is incredible interesting. If you’re like me and are attending graduate school (more specifically, the MAPSS program) because you love your field, love reading, love learning, then the most “difficult” part of graduate school is not really a problem at all; it certainly isn’t for me. 

Further, the classes I’ve chosen are quite small (one is an actual seminar and the other, while a lecture, didn’t have many people sign up for it, so it’s like a seminar as well), which probably is why I don’t feel lost among many, or feel like I have to fight for the professor’s attention. 

I haven’t really run into any PhD students yet- or, not that I know of. This is surprising to me because the school consists of double the amount of undergrads there are, yet the undergrads seem to be everywhere. One of my classes (food & cuisine) is filled with all undergrads, save for one PhD student and myself, which to be honest, is rather disheartening. I don’t have a particular issue with undergrads, or feel like I’m too good to be around them or anything (especially since many of them are way smarter than I am!), but I don’t like being in a class where everyone is an undergrad. My reason for this is that these 18, 19, and 20 year-olds just don’t have the perspective that I need at this point in my life- I’ve done what they are doing, seven years ago now, and it’s rather boring to me. Most of them haven’t had jobs, haven’t had professional experience, and really lack an awareness that ventures beyond the academic setting. I was the same way when I was that age. Next quarter I’ll do my best to register for classes with mostly graduate students...

The only class I’m having “trouble” with is the perspectives class. There’s a lot of reading for something I don’t feel like I need training in; it feels like those painful intro courses I was forced to take in my first year of undergrad, where they’re supposed to teach you “how” to think. I know how to think, thank you, and I don’t need to read Marx for the hundredth time to prove it.

In closing, this week has shown me that academic rigor UChicago is famed for is real, but it’s not entirely overwhelming like people made it out to be. I am still in the first week, so this could change, but looking at the syllabus for all my courses for the rest of the quarter, I don’t see it changing too much. I haven’t had anyone (students or professors alike) discredit me or shame me for being a MAPSS student; I haven’t felt lost or out of place in class, like I’m lesser-than by being a MAPSS student; and I don’t feel like I’m being crushed. Again, we’ll see where I am mid-quarter!

I’ll try to keep this brief and offer a few pointers for those who are moving from California to the Midwest by car, like I did. It can be useful for students of all kind looking to find an apartment near the University of Chicago. 

Pre-move

I am a bit obsessed with budgeting and did a reasonable calculation of how much money I would need to move, and what I could save up in the two months leading up to the move. I calculated about $600, but I knew I would have help with food costs from my mom, who would be making the drive with me, along with my cat. It turns out $600 was just about what we needed, with her contributing $200, making it just shy of $1000. 

I had a bit of a hard time finding housing for a good six months. I couldn’t afford to come out to Chicago all the way from San Diego and find an apartment in person, so it all had to be done remotely, which was challenging. Some property management companies refused to even work with me, saying I had to physically be in Chicago (or have a relative on my behalf) come and see the unit before discussing moving in--looking at you, TLC Management Group. I read online that MAC Properties was shady, didn’t take care of their apartment buildings, and was extremely overpriced, so I avoided them as long as I could before I became desperate. I ended up almost getting an apartment with them before I received help from StudentSpace, a third party organization that helps connect students with properties free of charge, and ended up signing a lease with Hyde Park Management. I highly recommend this route to students like me who can’t afford to make it out, but need a trustworthy agency to help find a place. 

What’s nice (and interesting) about Chicago is that securing an apartment is relatively low-cost and easy to save for, as they don’t collect what I considered to be the normal costs. In California you ALWAYS pay first months rent, last month’s rent, and a deposit that is at least the amount of the rent and sometimes more, making total move-in costs in the thousands. All of the units I looked at only required a non-refundable move-in fee ($200 since I used StudentSpace, otherwise it would have been $400),  and a pet fee (I have a cat). These costs are just to secure the apartment. You don’t have to pay the first-month’s rent until the lease date begins, which depending on when you’re looking, gives you some time to save. 

Hyde Park 

I found a place a little less than a mile north from campus, near “downtown hyde park”. It is a very quiet neighborhood with several primary schools nearby, and all of the buildings are apartment buildings filled with families and students. This isn’t to say that I feel safe, though. I don’t say this lightly, either, being raised in San Diego’s “ghetto” in Logan Heights, having lived in Oakland’s “ghetto” areas, and also having spent a great deal of time in San Francisco’s Tenderloin and Bayview districts. I have always maintained that if you’re aware and vigilant of your surroundings, you shouldn’t have to worry too much. Indeed, I never did have to worry, in the past, and never felt uncomfortable or unsafe. I’ve never owned pepper spray. 

Hyde Park and the surrounding areas (like getting to the L stations) are a bit different. It’s not immediately what you would consider “ghetto” but there are a number of young people who seem to always be on the lookout that is slightly unsettling. In the week before I moved here, I received FIVE alerts from the university about five armed robberies that took place near the campus, and when I moved here, I received an alert about an armed car-theft that happened while two men were IN the car, and it happened on my street. Even in the worst parts of Oakland, I never was afraid of having my car stolen while I was in it, or being held at gunpoint in broad daylight. I think that being a student definitely makes you  a target in Hyde Park, because people know that students have laptops, nice cell phones, headphone gear, etc. I don’t like going out at night, and again, this is coming from someone who used to take street photography in the tenderloin at 2am. 

Moving by Car Across the Country

I have a very small Nissan Versa Note, which is a tiny hatchback, and this is what I used to move all my stuff (one medium sized room’s worth). I did not move any furniture, including no bed. I seriously recommend using vacuum-sealed bags for storing clothes- I did this and saved a huge amount of space, especially with all my cumbersome coats. My car was completely packed, save for a tiny space in the back for my cat to lay down in. I stored her litter box on the floor, partially under the passenger seat. 

Starting from San Diego, we took the most time-efficient route offered by Google Maps, which was to take the 15N to the 70E. It was a pretty good route until we hit the Rocky Mountains. My mother an I did not anticipate the climb that tiny car would have to make, and we lived to regret our lack of foresight. The car, packed with 600 lbs worth of stuff, operating on only 4 cylinders, simply couldn’t handle the 10,000 ft climb. I strongly advise that if you’re going through the Rockies, to have a 6 cylinder car! We ended up having to go 40mph through most of the mountains, delaying our trip by an entire day. 

After Colorado, we went through Nebraska, Iowa, and then Illinois. We started at 6am on Saturday morning and made it in Tuesday morning at 9am. 

This may be one of the most important posts of this little journal, because the decision to attend the MAPSS program was certainly something I struggled with for months. I took the exact amount of time allotted after admission to the program to give my decision, and it was mainly due to one ugly thing: perception of the program by other grad students online. I, like many other MAPSS admitted students, had never heard of or considered the program before being admitted. 

2015 and 2016 Application Cycles

Before getting to the decision process, this is what I went through before I was admitted to MAPSS: I was a reject from 11 programs over the course of 2 application cycles. As I mentioned in my intro post, I graduated from my undergraduate institution in the Fall/Winter semester of 2014, and I had graduated early. While in undergrad, I was sure that I had wanted to pursue graduate school, but I never quite knew in what capacity. I was also interested in the Peace Corps, and even was successful in securing an offer to volunteer in Africa before it was rescinded due to violence in the region. This is all somewhat relevant inasmuch as it expresses how multi-directional I am in general. After graduation, I was eager to work full time in a “real” job (i.e. anything that wasn’t food/retail sector, which had been miserable during my undergrad years) and make money. About three months after I graduated, I found a job in the tech industry, like many other freshly-minted college graduates in San Francisco. The company was and continues to be a large, national on-demand service provider for food and retail goods, and what I found in the industry was violent stratification, not only internally within the company, but in the consumers and providers of the services all over the nation.  I began to see a shift in identity formation, and more than a tenuous correlation between online social media identity and how one treated others in the “real” world. 

While my job was taxing on my soul, it revealed important shifts taking place in the market, and in the area of technology and social media, sparking the academic in me once again and stoking the fires of my anthropological curiosities. I decided to go to graduate school. I studied for the GRE and by all accounts failed the quantitative section and did just above average for the verbal and writing sections (at least, average for top anthropology programs in the U.S.) Having taken the GRE pretty late in the application cycle (November 2015), I didn’t have time to retake it, and so I applied to 7 programs that cycle with my paltry scores. I rounded up my Letters of Recommendation (LORs) from undergrad professors who knew my work well and liked me (which is always a plus!), and I was (naively) confident I would secure admittance to at least one PhD program. I was rejected across the board, and one of my LOR writers graciously offered to edit my State of Purpose (SoP) in a way that she knew would be readable to application committees, which was immensely helpful for me, a person with no contacts in the graduate school world and had no idea what committees were looking for. 

After months of rewriting my statement of purpose and training myself to write in the manner of my proposed projects--by writing articles in my intended field, even if they would never be published--I narrowed down my second cycle of applications to programs that were absolutely, positively, the best fits for my intended project. I found faculty members and did my best to correspond with them prior to applying to secure familiarity and support of my application and project. Despite having chosen the most perfect programs for my intended project (MIT HASTS, UChicago PhD, Cornell PhD, and UMASS Amherst Masters) they still were some of the most prestigious programs in the country/world, and it was not too much of a surprise when I was rejected, yet again. The Chicago rejection was the last to come in, and it was because along with the rejection, there was also the referred admission to the MAPSS program with 50% scholarship. At the time, I was overjoyed; I had secured admission to graduate study (even if it was an MA and not the PhD that I wanted) with scholarship to one of the world’s most prestigious and renowned universities! 

Making the Decision

This joy did not last long after I began googling the program and lost myself in the sea of negativity on Grad Cafe. I felt disappointed, as some readers of this might also have felt, or currently feel. People on Grad Cafe and Reddit said that it was a “cash cow” program that was not very selective and was a sort of “consolation prize” for lesser-than intellects who were good enough to pay to be at UChicago, but not to be one of the exclusive PhD students. I spoke with at least a dozen MAPSS grads and more non-mapss graduate students who had a strong opinion about the program, trying to get to the bottom of the “real” perception of the program among faculty and graduate students both in and outside of the university. MAPSS grads, unsurprisingly, did not have many bad things to say of the program and were extremely appreciative of what it had provided them in the intellectual and practical sense. Faculty members at the University of Chicago did not seem to express any of the vitriol that had been rumored on Grad Cafe. The only consistent reservations I received both from faculty and previous students was cost of attendance. As many will attest, it is not a cheap program to attend, being nearly $60k for the year. The good thing about the program is that it does provide some financial aid to a good portion of its students, and the even better thing about that aid it that it is completely merit based; If you put out the best statement of purpose you possibly can and show your strong intellectual capacities, you will get funding. 

While still not feeling 100% about the perception of the program, my most concrete concern was the cost (despite having 50% tuition scholarship, it would still be $50k to take out in loans additional to the undergraduate loans I had). It didn’t seem prudent to spend $50,000 to attend a program that was dismissed and held in poor regard with serious academic circles. I sought advice from current graduate students at universities all over the country via grad cafe. The “advice” given was frustrating, and maybe it has frustrated you, too.

Many of the current grad students I spoke with strongly advised against ANY graduate program that required you to pay any kind of tuition or living expenses (e.g. programs that didn’t offer living stipends). This essentially rules out any Masters program across the country, as it is not customary to receive fully-funded masters; masters degree are usually attained en route to the PhD once already admitted to a PhD program, especially for cultural anthropology. 

This advice seems logical enough, except one tiny tidbit; if you’re aiming for a top PhD program in the country, you either need an undergraduate degree from an intellectually-rigorous Ivy League (or the rare equivalent thereof) or you need a masters degree. If you aren’t among the majority of college grads who didn’t attend an ivy-league institution, then you need to be wealthy to afford the masters program you need to show that you’re intellectually capable of the graduate workload. The advice becomes frustrating, quickly, because most of us aiming for a PhD in a social science don’t have an ivy-league undergraduate education, nor do we possess the trust funds for a masters, which leaves us to make the decision to pay for a masters, which grad students advise never to do.

The reason the masters becomes so important for the non-ivy-league-college-grad is that the most important aspect of your application is showing these top-program-committees is that you have a strong theoretical foundation in your discipline and can handle the rigor of the PhD at their renowned institution. One of the most important pieces of advice I’ve received on this note from a UChicago faculty member was this: the committee needs to know that you have the necessary training in your field to handle work at the graduate level, and many of these faculty members went to ivy-league institutions themselves and are very familiar and confident with the training they’ve seen at these institutions. I.e. they can vouch for the training, and know that you are prepared, at least based on the name of your school and the GPA you attained. 

If you attained an undergraduate degree from a lesser known, or known but less prestigious university (think state universities), that committee most likely has no idea what kind of training you’ve had, and if you can handle the level of work being done at that program. You’re a risk, no matter how good your statement of purpose might be. This isn’t to say that those with just an undergraduate degree from lesser-known or less prestigious universities can’t or haven’t been admitted to top PhD programs; they surely have, but they have a smorgasbord of field work, conferences, and published works. If you were like me, who had nothing but a cum laude degree from a California State University, then there’s no way for the committee to know what you’re capable of (which is most likely, a lot! you just need your chance to shine!). 

Numbers & Perception of MAPSS

Most of the things I read in regards to MAPSS and MAPH (I have literally found every piece of public information on these programs that is available on the internet) were about their lack of prestige, respect, and competitiveness. After doing some research about the MAPSS program with regard to its numbers, I couldn’t reconcile the results with the low-esteem people held it in. Someone had to be lying, and I seriously doubt it was the division of Social Sciences at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Of my admitted MAPSS class, over 1,200 applications were read (this includes referred applications like mine, and direct applications) and only 279 students were admitted. That is a 23% admission rate. While not as exclusive as the 2.5% admission rate for PhD applicants into the MIT program I had also applied for, or even UChicago’s >10% admittance rate into the Anthropology PhD program, it’s nothing to scoff at. 23% admittance rate for a masters program is selective. 

Someone like me (with a slightly above average GPA from a run-of-the-mill state school and no published work) has no shot at earning a funded PhD from a top program. If you’re like me and trying to pursue a social science PhD, you need to be getting that PhD from a top university. It’s no secret that the social sciences are not a lucrative field. If you want any chance at entering academia or even using your graduate degree to your advantage in the nonprofit or private sectors, you must have a degree from a top-program in your field.  

The advice of people on places like Grad Cafe can be incredibly isolating, because it feels like what it boils down to is money and experience in your field. People will tell you that you either must be brilliant and gain entry into a PhD program straightaway (bypassing the need to attend a separate school for a masters degree), or you must be independently wealthy (or have access to a great trust fund) to pursue a graduate degree. While the advice has the best intentions in mind--e.g. avoiding future financial ruin--only you can know yourself, and what you’re capable of. For me, I decided MAPSS would be worth it because I value education more than anything else in my life- this is a fundamental part of me, and will never change. Higher education, and becoming thoroughly trained in a field I am passionate about is a life-fulfilling goal for me. Many people have told me that one of the biggest reasons NOT to go to graduate school is what I’ve just mentioned: that you shouldn’t go merely because you’re passionate about it. I think this is largely true- I would never suggest someone devote tens of thousands of dollars to pursue any passion, be it basket-weaving or the fine arts. My passion-while perhaps not immediately clear that it will be lucrative- is more than just something I love, it’s something that informs my entire being and worldview. 

As it so happens, MAPSS has a lot of data to back it up in terms of job placement in the nonprofit and private sectors, as well as securing funded PhDs for those still pursuing that route. 

I have started this informal blog as a way to document my experiences as a UChicago grad student as they happen, so the details of it all do not become lost or subject to the degradation of my memory. I myself came to rely heavily on the mere three blogs there were out there already about three individual MAPSS and MAPH experiences, despite some of them being quite dated (2004!). Nonetheless, they helped inform my decision to attend the MAPSS program heavily, as I was extremely torn about going. I knew that if I decided to accept, I would start my own journal for the benefit of others; hopefully it will serve that purpose. 

My academic interests surround the following: media studies, aesthetics, anthropology of food, technology and science studies, on-demand service culture, identity, and social media. 

My geographic interests are restricted to the global West, particularly the United States, which has been difficult in proving to anthropology departments that it IS an anthropological site and not a sociological one.