[lbo-talk] 15% of the Population, 2 Hours per Weekend (was Development of Political Underdevelopment)

joanna 123hop at comcast.net
Tue Mar 27 11:22:05 PDT 2007


Jordan Hayes wrote:


>Wow, you must know some pretty special people. Nearly all the people I
>know who went to grad school (including those who completed their PhD, a
>minority):
>
>1. Can't do research to save their lives. Why look things up? It's so
>much easier (and satisfying!) to just make guesses and posture about
>things. Or worse: have a clever thought and claim you discovered
>something really interesting (except that it has already been considered
>and discarded long ago). My favorite question: have you looked around
>to see if this has been done before? Blank stares.
>
Well, OK. You're right about that. I mean, they didn't teach me how to do research, but they did expect it. So I just did it on my own.


>2. Get nothing done (I don't mean 80%, 90%, or even 95% -- I'm talking
>about getting things actually COMPLETE) unless pressured, and then it's
>often late and thus of poor quality (planning counts!) ... this mirrors
>the only "output" from grad school: the conference paper that is
>invariably full of handwaving and doctored graphics. This translates
>easily into shoddy Powerpoint presentations in your future.
>
Well, yes, I guess that's true too for a lot of people. In fact, how I managed to finish my dissertation is that I got a job as a professional/technical writer where I learned that if your break up a job into small enough pieces, you can get anything done. On my tech writer job, I was writing a 300-500 pages book every year....so that's how I learned to finish books and that's how I learned to plan and finish my dissertation.....(mostly at work and on the weekends.)


>4. Talk about writing books, but never complete even abstracts or whole
>papers. Their dissertation is the last thing they ever complete, and
>even that took years beyond what it should have.
>
Oh, I thought everyone was writing like mad these days because you can't get tenure without lots of publications....

????

Joanna


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