I’m not clear on what you’re asking. Why can’t you what? Why can’t you successfully complete a graduate degree without acquiring a sense of responsibility etc? The answer is: Because if you do not have a sense of responsibility, you will almost certainly fail to fulfill those responsibilities that go along with dong graduate level work.
Unlike CanvasShoes and Lust4Life you’re post contains evidence that you’ve read the whole thread. This makes your post more inexplicable than theirs.
It should be clear by now I did not originally understand the OP’s official role in the admissions process. For this reason, it was not clear to me the situation was relevantly similar to a “job interview.”
Ummm, huh? I read the thread, including the OP, and stand by my perplexedness (not a real word) with the mentality that says it’s perfectly normal for these folks to have not understood that what they were doing was rude and unprofessional on ANY level.
I read the same OP as you did, and it was quite clear from the tone of the OP’s post that she had some form of authority as a screener for the selection process. Further, how does a person get to that point in their life and not know that this, (the fact that the person gathering info likely has some power in their interview/selection process), is part of the whole deal? It shouldn’t matter whether it’s graduate school, or a pre-job interview, or merely dropping off your resume with a receptionist.
It’s amazing that there are folks that don’t get, by the time they’re 20something, merely through plain old life experiences that these are times when you’re on your (taDAAA) “Best Behavioursup[/sup]”
I wasn’t talking about whether they should have known it was rude. Of course they should have known it was rude. And this is part of the OP’s point. But it was not in the scope of my own comments.
I did not originally understand it to be a “professional” setting. This has become clear as the thread has progressed.
There is nothing in the OP to imply this. It is barely even visible as a presupposition of the text.
Why would it matter that they’d behaved in this manner if she did NOT have some type of authority? (even if it was just as small as screening).
If you are out in the workaday world and you are required to have any sort of interview with someone, there’s a damned good chance that even if that someone is “only” a receptionist, that your behaviour will get back to those who count.
Why would it matter if you knew if she was, or was not directly connected to the admissions process. Though the “dear Couple interested in Grad School” part of her OP made it pretty clear that she had some sort of connection.
This sentence makes it even more clear.
Now you’re right in that they don’t say exactly what she does, but those two statements from her post make it clear that she does have a connection that can indeed have an affect on people’s success if they behave badly.
As to your question “am I still addressing you”. I’m addressing just the mentality of some people, and how amazing it is that they can get to that stage of life and not comprehend simple connections.
In this case, and to simplify “be professional even when in the presence of a “mere” receptionist when it comes to one’s career”.
To recap: On my original reading, the OP was saying the people were rude to her, so she “told on them” to the department they were interested in. But it was not clear from the OP that she had any official, administrative duty to do so. That has only become clear in subsequent posts.
As far as I can tell even at this point, it wasn’t even a screening. It was a voluntary, information-gathering meeting initiated by the student.
No, that sentence was exactly what failed to make it clear. The sentence doesn’t imply she has the administrative right or duty to communicate with the department about the meeting. It only says she did communicate with them about it. It is not unusual for people to overstep their administrative bounds in such communications. In many situations, this kind of communication would not even something that shows up on most people’s radars as a particularly bad or wrong thing to do. So simply saying the OP made such a communication does not clearly imply that it was the OP’s place officially speaking to do so.
Subsequent posts in the thread have cleared that up.
I was unclear. I meant to say that there is absolutely no reason someone who is entering graduate school, or attempting to enter graduate school, should still be needing to learn responsibility and professionalism.
Those of us who did not go to graduate school, but instead took our degrees out into the professional world at age 22 were already expected to know that you don’t bring extras to an interview, you don’t show up 45 minutes late, and if you are a tiny bit late you apologize for inconveniencing the person you have the appointment with. We also were expected to know that you behave in a polite manner to everyone you speak to, email, or meet at the company (in this case, university) in question because everyone is judging you from minute one, and that regardless of their ‘official role’, they will have influence on your entry into that company or university.
I suppose what I find inexplicable is that someone with an undergraduate degree doesn’t already know this.
It is indeed a fact: many of us who get a bachelor’s degree at 22 are still, basically, kids, without a clue. We have to pick up the “real world” mentality later on.
Many of the rest of us, degree or not, learned how to behave in public before we were 10. If you have to wait until you’re in the “real world” to learn respect for another person, their time, and their space, you’re as clueless as can be.
I wouldn’t say** Frylock** is clueless, but this couple certainly is! I wouldn’t have fully believed this story if I wasn’t in grad school myself–there are some very odd ducks in grad school. (My favorite is the blonde who when told to introduce herself said that she was in grad school on a “whim” because “daddy said he’d pay for it”).
Seriously, I got my first busboy job at 15 and even by then I knew how to act professionally like I actually wanted, and deserved a job. What’s with 22-year-olds getting a free “I’m still just a kid” pass? These “kids” already have kids of their own, time to grow up.
Regarding your questions of me in your previous post. Any reasonable person reading the OP would be able to say "ah, from her statements she must work in some capacity that has something (whether limited or not) to do with the admissions process. And from the way she described her actions, that much is clear. If she had not been “in the loop” so to speak, she wouldn’t have had such a positive and confident note to her writing about the incident as in, “that is what I said when I spoke to the department” her tone told me that this was something that she was confident in doing and did as part of her job.
You’re right in that it didn’t exactly define her precise role, but it was still clear that she was in the loop and had acted within what was normal for her job in the admissions procedures.
I’m sorry, not to pick on you personally. But like others in this thread, I just can’t comprehend this sort of mentality.
In grade school, Jr. High and HS, there were frequently quite adequate lessons to teach these very concepts (such as timeliness and responsibility). These places, as well as any part time jobs one holds ARE “real world”. Even back in the archaic times in which I went to HS we had classes that taught us how to balance a checkbook, how to apply for and receive our SS#s, how to apply for and interview for jobs and that sort of thing.
I mean, how does a person operate out in the world (buying food, gas, seeing how other people interact with one another, possibly working a part time “get them through college” job) without picking up how it’s supposed to be done?
Were your parents extremely wealthy and you were just completely sheltered from any reality until college or grad school? Color me confused.
Of course no one stops them. Its considered impolite and rude to stop someone from doing something completely stupid or disgusting in America. Besides if someone did object there or even here they’d be labeled a “child-hater” mosrt likely or be told they are infringing on someone elses rights.
I usually warn people that I’m about to say something unedited first. It gives them a chance to duck from the F bombs.
This is incorrect, as I have already explained. A reasonable person can say “I’ve known people to pass along information ‘under the table’ to members of other administrative deparments even when officially they had no business doing so, and indeed, this is common enough that in many cases, no one bats (or even should bat) an eye at such acts. I wonder if this is what the OP concieved of herself as doing, or rather, whether she concieved of herself as following some official role.”
And being a reasonable person, I did indeed think the above to myself, and followed up by asking the very question I had just thought to myself, out loud, in this thread. (Though not in so many words of course.)
I didn’t say anything about a mentality, nor did I exemplify a mentality. It’s just a fact: The way education works these days, it very often (esp. for particular areas of study) fails to turn out professionalized adults but rather “grown up kids.” I was such an example. I actually don’t regret it too much. It was not my lot in life to go “professional” until later. This is fine–it’s a way to be.
As for myself, what I’m referring to is just a general habit of sloppiness and half-assedness. This was born of the fact that sloppy, half-assed work was generally enough to get me a decent grade (this is the case for anyone halfway intelligent, at least in the educational institutions I attended as a lad), and the further fact that in general, I did not see anything I did in any “official” capacity as a “student” as being, or even having the potential to be, worth anything in any larger sense. To me it was all either fun and games or gruntwork, depending on the project and depending on my relationship to the teacher or professor. It did not present itself to me as having any larger significance in terms of the way “real life” works.
Even when I began zeroing in seriously on majors with the intention that they have something to do with a career I might have in the future, I didn’t approach (and did not find myself forced or even particularly pushed to approach) the issue with an attitude such as “How am I going to survive the ‘real world’” but rather with an attitude that might be characterized as “What course of study will allow me to do the most fun kind of thing I can think of doing for the rest (or a long stretch of) my life? And maybe get famous doing it?”
This wasn’t because I or my parents were rich and I thought I wouldn’t have to worry about “survival” in “the real world”–far from it, my family was below the poverty line for several years and even afterwards always struggled with some unfortunate heavy debts it had acquired in the past. But I suppose my parents (more specifically my mom) did try to instill in me a habit of thinking in terms of “following my own star” as they say and not worrying too much about the options offered to me by convention. (My dad sometimes tried to lecture me about “the real world” but at the time I took them as all adolescents take lectures.)
I’ll cop to the following strange fact, though: For some reason I’ve never been able to explain, people generally have always just had this tendency to be nice to me. Seriously. I don’t know exactly why this is. It has been overall good for me, yet has had the arguably negative effect of causing me not to realize until late in life just how serious “consequences” in the “real world” can actually be because, well, for a long, long time, for the most part, no one who knew me in any capacity greater than as a name on a form ever failed to want to protect me from the full extent of proper consequences of my ahem occasional clueless acts. Actually, this remains true–it’s just that there are a lot more people now who know me as nothing more than a name on a form. Welcome to the real world, Frylock.
Well enough about me. I can’t speak to why others have turned out to be still “kids” after graduating with a Bachelor’s.
I swear I truly believed at the beginning of my participation in this thread that I wouldn’t be starting a hijack. Oops.
Frylock, this is something you shouldn’t tell people. Ever.
Because it makes people like me – who pride themselves on being creative and following their dreams and also, somehow having the practicality to live in the real world – want to smack you silly.
Seriously, getting through life on a combination of your ability to half-ass projects and strangers’ inexplicable desire to be nice to you is nothing to be proud of.
It’s been harmful to me in many very important ways. I could have gone much further by now than I have, and much of what has held me back has been my underdeveloped sense of responsibillity and lack of real pride in my own work.
Sorry, I had thought I had included that in my previous post, but on rereading it I guess I didn’t say it explicitly.
I had been feeling bad for you in this thread. You were getting a lot of flak and I thought a lot of it was unwarranted. But your previous post did come across as a little self-congratulatory.
It was addressed to the notion that all 22 years olds who have a BA have no idea about how the real world works, and how to conduct themselves in front of a potential employer.
