le-cheval-qui-souffle-en-tempete:

writingfromfactorx:

I am! The people in my cohort seem pretty cool, which is good as I’m spending a lot of time with them lately. I’ll be taking Tribble to agility in a few minutes, so that will be fun, too. This weekend is pretty low-key, since I had my first grad school test last week and so there really isn’t much going on right now. So a lot of it is going either cooking, relaxing, and writing. 

Yeaaah, that’s a hard one, isn’t it? I kind of circumvented the question with more school, but I definitely feel you about finding a career path being hard if you decide not to go on to grad school. Have you seen the latest Captain Awkward post? It’s got some awesome advice for resumes and how to frame the things you’ve done as reasons you’re great for a job, once you figure out what you want to shoot for. (I, ah, have become unreasonably fond of Captain Awkward in the last few months. It’s total comfort reading.) 

Yay for finding cool people! And I’m glad you get to do agility with Tribble. That was something you wanted to do with Oliver but couldn’t, right? Cooking, relaxing, and writing sounds like a perfectly lovely weekend. I’ll admit to being more than a little jealous. ~grins~

I want to do more school as well, but the question is where and how and all that. But a lot of what I’ve heard about grad school freaks me out because it’s all like, “you need to know exactly what you want to do and who you want to do it with and you need to be assertive and good at networking and willing to put yourself out there!” and i am… none of those things. At all.

I don’t read Captain Awkward, but roommate does, so with both of you recommending it to me I might just have to start doing so. ~grins~

It was! I’m SO glad to be doing it with her now. We’re neither of us very good yet—she’s terrified of the teeter-totter, for one thing—but we’re getting better every week, so I will be satisfied with that. And it really is fun! 

Applying isn’t that bad, really. You don’t need to know exactly what you want to do, but you do need to know what subfield you want to be in (like me and sexual selection/evolution + behavior). You do need to be willing to put yourself out there… but that consists pretty much entirely of finding people who are doing work you think is SUPER cool and emailing them to tell them so, and then ask them if they have room for a new student in the fall. If you want, I’ll forward the emails I sent to people at my grad school? They’re pretty scary to do, but I never had anyone do worse than just not respond, or tell me they’re so sorry but they don’t have the money for another student next year. And I had a LOT of people email me back and ask what I was interested in, and a couple of people even gave me good advice about applying right back. 

Captain Awkward is AWESOME, okay. *grin* I rec it to just about everyone who is willing to read advice blogs. Even if you don’t need advice, it’s just something I feel better after reading, because everyone is so nice. 

(Source: kingedmundsroyalmurder, via kingedmundsroyalmurder)