xxp - most of my friends were also middle class kids from more middle-american locales. maybe that speaks to an aspect of human nature of seeking out people like oneself, but maybe it's just me being shitty at networking.
― sarahel, Monday, 19 October 2009 20:07 (fourteen years ago) link
i went to a not-really-an-ivy school but not a bad school either--most of my friends were similarly middle class or lmc and none of them in any kind of position to hook ME up with connections...
but i knew of/knew a lot of kids who werent "friends" per se who definitely had those connections, & if i had been more of a snake/better at networking i could have buttered them up and probably had a real job by now
― Bobby Wo (max), Monday, 19 October 2009 20:09 (fourteen years ago) link
there are def some middle class kids at the ivies (and yeah my gf's friend group is more middle class than the school in general) - but the statistics don't lie, middlle-middle class ppl are a minority at any top50 private school...hell, they're a minority at lots of crappy private schools.
― iatee, Monday, 19 October 2009 20:10 (fourteen years ago) link
^^ i am partially convinced that Brown admitted me as part of some diversity initiative, so they'd have someone with first hand experience of people who do all their shopping at Wal-Mart.
― sarahel, Monday, 19 October 2009 20:13 (fourteen years ago) link
I practically got paid to go to Sarah Lawrence because we were LOLpoor during my HS years due to mom's health issues (long since resolved) but it's not as if I went there not knowing what fork to use etc. SLC is very heavy on media, the arts and film/TV and prob 250 of the 1000 students there had some kind of network-worthy connection to those professions due to parents, other relatives and family friends but people didn't discuss it up front. A good chunk of the people you'll read about who went there and now direct movies or whatever have family in the entertainment industry. That said, when I graduated and moved over to London a ton of people from the Oxford college affiliated with SLC's JYA program turned out to know people I'd been to college with, greasing the wheels of industry somewhat.
― Yo! GOP Raps (suzy), Monday, 19 October 2009 20:17 (fourteen years ago) link
the closest I am at the present to college connections professionally is the program officer at one of the organization i work for's largest funders went to Brown when I did, but I'd rather that guy not remember me. I think I made fun of some project he was involved in in some campus publication, and I thought he was kinda douchey.
― sarahel, Monday, 19 October 2009 20:19 (fourteen years ago) link
oh u went to BROWN well u might as well have just gone to COMMUNITY COLLEGE i mean JESUS
― Bobby Wo (max), Monday, 19 October 2009 20:21 (fourteen years ago) link
yeah - I considered that i might have been better off going to UC Berkeley, could have had four years' lead time on rent controlled Bay Area apartments.
― sarahel, Monday, 19 October 2009 20:23 (fourteen years ago) link
plus you'd have been there in the era when there was the student who just walked around naked 24/7
― iatee, Monday, 19 October 2009 20:29 (fourteen years ago) link
SLC is very heavy on media, the arts and film/TV
Even with the v obvious context, years of abbreviating Salt Lake City this way lead me to be like, "Has Salt Lake changed or something? That wasn't my experience with it..." :P
― existential eggs (Abbott), Monday, 19 October 2009 20:30 (fourteen years ago) link
^^ yeah, that was my first thought upon seeing that abbreviation, too!
― sarahel, Monday, 19 October 2009 20:31 (fourteen years ago) link
IME if you're not looking to go into medicine, law, or i-banking, ivy league intern offices are pretty useless
― dyao, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 01:29 (fourteen years ago) link
journalism is a pretty good field for ivy-league grads ime
― Bobby Wo (max), Tuesday, 20 October 2009 01:30 (fourteen years ago) link
well yeah the dailies at ivies are basically NYT pressure cookers
― dyao, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 01:32 (fourteen years ago) link
by "good" i mean "slowly-dying and yet somehow attractive to graduates of our countrys best universities lol"
― Bobby Wo (max), Tuesday, 20 October 2009 01:33 (fourteen years ago) link
I see what you did there
― dyao, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 01:34 (fourteen years ago) link
the one time I visited a career counselor at my career office...the lady just said "think about what you like to do! then try to find a job doing that! don't give up!"
she also had several empty bottles of wine hidden in the back of her bookshelf
― dyao, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 01:39 (fourteen years ago) link
my career counselor was a MFA and published poet
― Bobby Wo (max), Tuesday, 20 October 2009 01:40 (fourteen years ago) link
made me feel psyched about pursuing a career as a writer ;_;
if you write good poetry and get published...you too can become a career counselor to undergrads
― dyao, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 01:42 (fourteen years ago) link
he has a job = success
― iatee, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 01:44 (fourteen years ago) link
one of my grad school classmates left his editing job to come here and says he writes poetry in one of his boring classes. found out today he edited a novel i read last year that made a big impression on me. i don't understand why he left his job!
― Maria, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 01:50 (fourteen years ago) link
And the novel was?
― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 01:50 (fourteen years ago) link
― dyao, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 01:39 (57 minutes ago)
Then she was taking her own advice - she enjoyed drinking and got paid to do it.
― Bay-L.A. Bar Talk (Hurting 2), Tuesday, 20 October 2009 02:39 (fourteen years ago) link
This one gets double points for also belonging in the "White People who May Be In Danger" thread:
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/in-school-in-debt-and-asking-for-help/
― Bay-L.A. Bar Talk (Hurting 2), Tuesday, 20 October 2009 02:44 (fourteen years ago) link
he comes off OK compared to most ny times rich people article subjects
but damn
$100k in loans for a jschool degree
― Bobby Wo (max), Tuesday, 20 October 2009 02:47 (fourteen years ago) link
i wonder how much of that is tuition & fees expense, and how much is cost of living though.
― sarahel, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 02:49 (fourteen years ago) link
how much can the tuition & fees cost? $40k?
― Bobby Wo (max), Tuesday, 20 October 2009 02:50 (fourteen years ago) link
i think NYU cost $20k a year when I was applying to college in 1991.
― sarahel, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 02:52 (fourteen years ago) link
people need to do a little math before grad school ffs
― velko, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 02:55 (fourteen years ago) link
What Velko said. I remain glad as hell I was lucky enough to attend on fellowship.
― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 02:59 (fourteen years ago) link
(Not to NYU, but grad school nonetheless.)
I went to Cheap State University for grad school and paid $900 semester
― sarahel, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 03:02 (fourteen years ago) link
yeah, i went cheapo for grad school, my relatively small 10k undergrad student loan was burdensome enough for me
― velko, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 03:04 (fourteen years ago) link
solidly middle-class and went to oberlin. and no, i cannot throw a rock without hitting some Obie in the head. however, i tend to like this, as that means we can go get drunk.
― my bach penises and their contrapuntal technique (the table is the table), Tuesday, 20 October 2009 03:07 (fourteen years ago) link
i ended up with $6000 of student loans from grad school for the semester I did my thesis (that I'd been putting off for 3 1/2 years) so I could afford not to have a job. I think tuition had gone up to $1300/semester by that point. But the majority of the loans were for cost of living, which was budgeted at far higher than it cost me to live.
table: there is an Obie that occasionally makes me want to throw rocks at his head.
― sarahel, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 03:10 (fourteen years ago) link
I sure wish cheapo state grad school was still $900 a semester
― iatee, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 03:13 (fourteen years ago) link
I just checked the current fee schedule for where I went to grad school, and the costs have doubled in the six years since my last semester!
― sarahel, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 03:16 (fourteen years ago) link
from that article's comments: This article is very reminiscent of the student who slept in the NYU library because he “couldn’t afford the dorms.” NYU went ahead and gave him a dorm room that year after all the publicity. I remember because I was an undergraduate student at NYU at that time. And it made me angry. I had to take out loans and pay for my dorm but because that kid made the papers, he got his for free. This is going to happen again. I bet NYU will give him a meal plan after this. I wonder if he contacted the times (note he is a journalism major) or if they magically found out that he was applying for food stamps in booklyn….Education costs money. We all have crazy loans from school (I am in grad school and am up to $200,000). This kid should have gone to state school if he wasnt willing to take out the money required for a private education.
— Elizabeth
I love how it starts off w/ the "I'm the voice of reason" tone and then ends with "oh and I have $200,000 in debt"
― iatee, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 03:17 (fourteen years ago) link
FWIW, I have known people who clearly thought it was cool that they were getting food stamps.
― Bay-L.A. Bar Talk (Hurting 2), Tuesday, 20 October 2009 03:19 (fourteen years ago) link
oh i know plenty, too, sarahel. if i see j0n pf3ffer again someday, i will punch that fucker in the gut.
― my bach penises and their contrapuntal technique (the table is the table), Tuesday, 20 October 2009 03:22 (fourteen years ago) link
ha ha ha! That's the dude from the band, Capi11ary Act1on, right? I think I know someone else who has similar feelings about him.
― sarahel, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 03:25 (fourteen years ago) link
yeah, that's him. god, what an awful, smug, self-satisfied douche.
― my bach penises and their contrapuntal technique (the table is the table), Tuesday, 20 October 2009 03:29 (fourteen years ago) link
the dude I want to throw rocks at who went to Oberlin - similar kind of guy, though sometimes he can be okay - it's just his posts to this other message board/listserv I'm on is just the lethal combination of precocious youth + long-windedness + self-absorbtion + idiosyncratic word coinages and abbreviations. It's probably a very good thing that it's text only.
― sarahel, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 03:33 (fourteen years ago) link
yeah I can't imagine what his animated gifs would be like
― iatee, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 03:34 (fourteen years ago) link
haaa
― ice cr?m, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 03:36 (fourteen years ago) link
There was a couple in my wife's grad program who were doing this, it was really weird - everyone there had a teaching fellowship so the guy was covered, and his wife had at least a part time job teaching classes, all in a town that was super duper cheap to live in. They were like weird southern hippie christians and were really proud that they were getting food stamps, like it was stupid for anyone not to do that.
Me and my wife lived for a full year on just her TA money and it was tight but wasn't that hard at all.
― joygoat, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 03:37 (fourteen years ago) link
xp - ha, more like, he avoided humiliation via image bombing.
― sarahel, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 03:38 (fourteen years ago) link
I bet they'd be way too large
― husband of blood - because of the circumcision (Z S), Tuesday, 20 October 2009 03:42 (fourteen years ago) link
all in a town that was super duper cheap to live in.
Yeah, that makes a big difference.
― sarahel, Tuesday, 20 October 2009 03:51 (fourteen years ago) link