Anyone with tuition money can get a PhD these days because it’s apparently impossible to fail a class. We have to write 1000-word essays ever week on the current topic, and I swear, these people wouldn’t know a thesis if it bit them in the ass. From people who can’t spell “al Qaeda” to those that don’t know what a comma is, it’s a never-ending parade of non sequitur, rambling, pedestrian commentary.
Normally I wouldn’t care that people are terrible writers, but it pisses me off that part of the assignment is to respond to these people. I have to read and respond to their drivel as part of my grade. And I have to do it with a straight face! It’s like having a job interview where the other guy forgot to wear pants.
“A realization came about in the years following 1942.”
“This emphasis has shifted from tools of war to tools of knowledge-tools that provide our leaders with greater knowledge and understanding and tools that buttress arms control agreements and reduce the possibility of conflict through misunderstanding.”
“Evolution is inevitable over time as stated earlier however there are drawbacks.”
“President Truman signed the NSA into effect on October 24, 1952.”
“The Israelis stated that it was a complete accident, while conspiracy theorists believe it was done to conceal Israel’s expansion operation.”
“When you think of the element of surprise what do you think of? I know for me I though mainly about the timing but [an author] opened my eyes to what the element of surprise really means.”
My favorite has to be one of these scholarly citations:
Channel, Discovery. YouTube.com. YouTube[URL removed by me] (accessed May 22, 2012).
Hopefully you’re getting a PhD for research and not teaching.
You should transfer schools or programs. Your graduate school/cohort is a reflection of your education and if they are as bad as you say, it will be seriously harmful when you try and get a job.
I’m not a grad student but I remember taking a composition class PSEO and being astounded at the number of people already in college who couldn’t manage to write a sentence with a subject. By the 3rd round of peer-review, I wanted to refuse to read any paper lacking even a semblance of coherent structure on the grounds that I can hardly be expected to give content-based feedback if I can’t fucking figure out what the content is.
I just want to point out how hilarious it is (to me) that in the “New Posts” list this one comes up right after Diamonds02’s “I feel like I am the victim of my own education”.
As for the meat of your rant: 10/10. I laughed (at the “interviewer with no pants” analogy). I cried (at the memories of my own college days).
Maybe my expectations were destroyed by the abysmal essay-writing skills of my own (undergraduate) classmates years ago, but some of those don’t sound that bad to me. What’s the offense in the Truman one, for example?
Problem is, his program is not an outlier: as the OP’s first sentence notes, many, many programs have low standards. He presumably already got into the best program he could, or at least the best program he could afford. Ergo, wherever he switches to is likely to be more of the same.
It’s be better to make sure that, if the program is admitting numbskulls, the degree is going to be worth having at all.
It’s very awkward phrasing. It’d be far better to say Truman “signed the bill creating the NSA” for example.
“President Truman signed the NSA into effect on October 24, 1952” is not gramatically incorrect per se, but “not gramatically incorrect per se” is a hell of a low bar for a PhD candidate in humanities or social science.
I stopped graduate school for teachers because I found more value in my undergrad education from an affordable but mediocre university. There is no way I’m adding any more debt to my bill. If I can do the homework in the thirty minutes before class, it’s not worth it.
I did someone’s homework recently (he’s getting his principal’s license/M.A.) and it was even worse. How many ‘Why I Want to Work in Education’ essays does one have to write over their academic career?
If you don’t respect or like your peers, you should probably move on to another school. Maybe get your Master’s and apply to a program you respect. Good writing is important in all areas of work. If the program you are in does not recognize that, it does not look good for your program, or ultimately for you.
First, “no” because it’s National Security Agency.
Second, “depends” because it would depend how the sentence went.
For example, it could have read like this:
Some in the intelligence-gathering community recognized that there were organizational problems within the Armed Forces Security Agency, and argued that it was not doing a good job of coordinating intelligence activities on a national level. A report by an investigating committee suggested consolidation of AFSA’s work in a new body, the National Security Agency. President Truman authorized the creation of the NSA in 1952.
You know it’s funny you pick that as an example, as it’s a rather stupid one. The only “correct” spelling of al-Qaeda is: القاعدة
Transliterating into the Roman alphabet is a matter of taste, and there is no truly “correct” spelling of a word transliterated from a language that uses a different alphabet. Alternative spellings in English include al-Qaida and al-Qai’da, with the latter actually being the most accurate. But all are equally “correct”.
The last one sounds like something I would’ve written in sixth grade. Earlier, probably.
I was always taught that personal stories and the use of the word “I” should be kept out of most academic writing. I often traded papers with a friend in one class freshman year of college for “peer editing” (required by the professor) and every paragraph she wrote contained some sort of rambling personal story. She would ignore my suggestions to eliminate them, and would still always get a B+ or higher on every assignment. My high school English teachers would have given all of her essays C’s or lower. It still baffles me.