study & learn

i was terrified of doing this in undergrad, and now that i’m asked to write them fairly often, i am fondly exasperated when my students don’t know how to ask for them. obviously there’s no single way, but here’s the way i usually do it.

(obviously ask in person if you can! but email is also fine.)

THE FIRST EMAIL

should be short & should mainly be asking whether they’re willing to write you the letter

should provide only the basics - what the professor absolutely needs to know.

the position you’re applying for

when the letter would be due

optional: if you’re afraid they won’t remember you, a quick line identifying yourself & your relation to them

i like to provide an “out,” in case they don’t want to or are unable to write the letter

SAMPLE Dear Professor X, I’m applying for a job as an English tutor at the University Student Resource Center, and was wondering if you’d be willing to write me a letter of recommendation for the position. [optional identification: I really enjoyed taking English 300 with you in Winter 2016, and I’m hoping to develop and pass on those skills to other students through this job.] The letter would be due by September 1st - I know you’re very busy, so I completely understand if you’re not able to write one.  All best, Your Name

THE SECOND EMAIL

they said yes!! amazing.

this one can provide a little more information – a link to the job posting, if there is one, or you can write a quick summary of the position, plus a sentence or two about why you’re excited/interested in the job.

also tell them where to send the letter!! 

directly to the recruiter for the job

to you, to add to your application packet

upload to an online LoR service or to an application website

99% of the time folks are fine with receiving electronic copies, but if they need to mail a hard copy, let them know up front.

SAMPLE: Dear Professor X, Thank you so much! I really appreciate it. Here’s the link to the job listing; the letter should be sent as a .pdf file to the email address at the bottom of the page, anytime before 9/1. Thanks again – I’m hoping that this job will provide me with some teaching experience and the opportunity to work on my own writing. Please let me know if you need any more information! Best,  Your Name

WHEN TO SEND A FOLLOW-UP

these stress me out real bad but here’s the deal: most professors have a very shaky relationship to deadlines (especially when they have half a dozen more important ones than your piddly LoR). 

the upshot: do not be afraid to nudge them. 

often they need the nudge and are appreciative of it.

when that nudge happens is up to you and how much room you’ve given them before the deadline, and it’ll look different depending on your relationship with that professor.

GRAD SCHOOL LETTERS

i offered to send my professors essays that i had written for their classes, especially if i had taken those classes more than a year before asking them to write the letter, just so they could refamiliarize themselves with my work. you can also offer to send them your writing sample, if you haven’t already asked them to look it over for you.

honestly i’d recommend asking for these in person bc it’ll give you a chance to talk to them about their grad school experience and your own hopes & aspirations, which will help them write a more personal, fleshed-out letter.

one important note: if this letter is intended for use in grad school applications, do not stress out if it’s a little late. most programs do not care, and pretty much all of them accept late letters without a problem. your professor’s ability to meet deadlines does not reflect on you, and professors are intimately familiar with running late on LoRs. they really honestly don’t care. as long as it gets there before too long, you’ll be fine.

It is 2011 and I’m sitting in the Palais des Congres in Montreal, watching anthropologists talk about structural inequality.

The American Anthropological Association meeting is held annually to showcase research from around the world, and like thousands of other anthropologists, I am paying to play: $650 for airfare, $400 for three nights in a “student” hotel, $70 for membership, and $94 for admission. The latter two fees are student rates. If I were an unemployed or underemployed scholar, the rates would double.

The theme of this year’s meeting is “Traces, Tidemarks and Legacies.” According to the explanation on the American Anthropological Association website, we live in a time when “the meaning and location of differences, both intellectually and morally, have been rearranged”.  As the conference progresses, I begin to see what they mean. I am listening to the speaker bemoan the exploitative practices of the neoliberal model when a friend of mine taps me on the shoulder.

“I spent almost my entire salary to be here,” she says.

My friend is an adjunct. She has a PhD in anthropology and teaches at a university, where she is paid $2100 per course. While she is a professor, she is not a Professor. She is, like 67 per cent of American university faculty, a part-time employee on a contract that may or may not be renewed each semester. She receives no benefits or health care.

According to the Adjunct Project, a crowdsourced website revealing adjunct wages - data which universities have long kept under wraps - her salary is about average. If she taught five classes a year, a typical full-time faculty course load, she would make $10,500, well below the poverty line. Some adjuncts make more. I have one friend who was offered $5000 per course, but he turned it down and requested less so that his children would still qualify for food stamps.

… In most professions, salaries below the poverty line would be cause for alarm. In academia, they are treated as a source of gratitude. Volunteerism is par for the course - literally. Teaching is touted as a “calling”, with compensation an afterthought. One American research university offers its PhD students a salary of $1000 per semester for the “opportunity” to design and teach a course for undergraduates, who are each paying about $50,000 in tuition. The university calls this position “Senior Teaching Assistant” because paying an instructor so far below minimum wage is probably illegal.

In addition to teaching, academics conduct research and publish, but they are not paid for this work either. Instead, all proceeds go to for-profit academic publishers, who block academic articles from the public through exorbitant download and subscription fees, making millions for themselves in the process. If authors want to make their research public, they have to pay the publisher an average of $3000 per article. Without an institutional affiliation, an academic cannot access scholarly research without paying, even for articles written by the scholar itself.

… But all Americans should be concerned about adjuncts, and not only because adjuncts are the ones teaching our youth. The adjunct problem is emblematic of broader trends in American employment: the end of higher education as a means to prosperity, and the severing of opportunity to all but the most privileged.

… Anthropologists are known for their attentiveness to social inequality, but few have acknowledged the plight of their peers. When I expressed doubt about the job market to one colleague, she advised me, with total seriousness, to “re-evaluate what work means” and to consider “post-work imaginaries”. A popular video on post-graduate employment cuts to the chase: “Why don’t you tap into your trust fund?”

In May 2012, I received my PhD, but I still do not know what to do with it. I struggle with the closed off nature of academic work, which I think should be accessible to everyone, but most of all I struggle with the limited opportunities in academia for Americans like me, people for whom education was once a path out of poverty, and not a way into it.

My father, the first person in his family to go to college, tries to tell me my degree has value. “Our family came here with nothing,” he says of my great-grandparents, who fled Poland a century ago. “Do you know how incredible it is that you did this, how proud they would be?”

Okay so first, an anecdote: I had terrible test anxiety before the LSAT like I’ve literally never had in my life and that actually severely impacted my performance. I thought I could only take it once, (someone gave me the advice that schools only look at your first score. This is NOT true, as someone who has been on the admissions committee at a law school) so I FREAKED OUT in the middle of the test that I wasn’t doing well enough and then blew it. 

Second, a related piece of advice: don’t freak out! It’s fine! You can take it again! And even if you take it again and you don’t knock it out of the park, it’s still not the end of the world! The LSAT is just one piece of your application puzzle! Schools assessing you holistically, which many of them are apt to do these days, will not totally disregard you if your score is a bit lower than you’d like! Of course, though, you do want to take it seriously and you do want to do your best. But just. Don’t psyche yourself out. That’s all I’m saying. 

here’s to a soft 2019

Accurate and usable notes are key to successful academic research, and, unfortunately, it’s rarely taught. Not everyone finds the same thing useful, and how extensive your notes should be or are will depend on the type of research you are doing, but here are some tips for taking notes for the purpose of completing academic research (essays, research projects, dissertations, etc).

Record enough information that you can go back and find the information later. For every article that I read through, I record the title (or, if it’s very long, a shortened version of it) and the author’s full name. If it is from a specific journal that is indexed in a different place from what I usually use, I record the journal name as well. For every note I take, I record the page number as well. That way, I can go back and pull direct quotes or check context when actually writing my paper.

You might find it useful to record the citation at this stage using something like Zotero or EndNote. For long papers (dissertations, etc) I find that that can sometimes get in the way, because I’ll take notes on far more articles than I actually end up citing, and then I have to sort through a huge list of citations.

Write down enough that you know what you mean later on. Notes are meant to be used after they’re written, and so you have to be able to tell what they mean days or sometimes weeks or months later. That may mean avoiding abbreviations or writing more than you think you need to. It’ll save you a lot of time later on to write a little more now. Similarly, if you’re taking notes by hand, make sure they’re legible and in a place you’ll be able to find them later.

For very important articles, considering printing and making notes directly on the article. You may do this anyway, but if you’re going to be citing something ten or fifteen times, it can be easier to have the notes already in context on the page while you’re working. That said, you may also want to take separate notes so you can get your thoughts in order.

If you mark up articles, flag your notes. This can be literal–using different color stick-on flags to denote notes on different things (direct quotes, context, background, etc) or by using bright highlighters. The advantage of literal flags, particularly for longer articles, is that you can flip to what you need rather than going through every page every time you need to locate something.

Do what works best for you. I take notes by hand in a notebook and then outline on a computer with the notes open in front of me. The hand-written notes give me something concrete to work with and give me better structure, while the typed outline makes it easier for me to move things around or delete things. You may find something else what works for you, and that may take experimentation. It took me until graduate school to find what really works for me, and it has made dealing with massive numbers of academic texts significantly easier.

I write program descriptions for non-profits to submit to funders for a living. I’m going to let you in on my format because it is SO useful in making full course study plans, and even 5-year plans if you’re into that. Here it is:

Problem

Barriers

Objectives

Solution

Activities

Outcomes

[Budget] - optional/ use if relevant

A very tiny sample with only one thing in each slot:

Problem - my GPA is too low for grad school.

Barriers- I know I can do well in courses if I’m motivated, but I can’t find any outside sources to do that right now, and I don’t have the chutzpa right now from within.

Objectives - Achieve a grade higher than my average GPA in this course.

Solution - Engage with my course from a different lens and rigour to stimulate me and explore other avenues of learning

Activities - Skim readings before classes, annotate in and after.

Outcomes - A new approach to learning will be explored

type alignment chart: pencil case edition.

November Wallpapers

It’s the beginning of the month so I’ve made some wallpapers for y’all!

Download here!