Second day of classes!
SECOND DAY, HOLY CRAP!
Today’s classes:
Music 321: Concert Band – always a good class to have.
Philosophy 490: Senior seminar – the senior seminar in philosophy…a class I would have NEVER expected I would be taking if you’d ask me about it my first semester. Meets only once a week, but for 3 ½ hours.
Oh yeah, and more research is happening this semester.
ALSO: 19 credits is a frighteningly low amount for me.
First day of classes!
Oh, look.
Another semester.
Hello, semester.
Today’s classes:
Philosophy 240: Belief and Reality – Dr. O’Rourke!
Philosophy 447: Theory of Knowledge – Dr. O’Rourke bonus hour! I adore this man.
Math 330: Linear Algebra – this class will destroy my soul.
Statistics 519: Multivariate Analysis – YAY STATISTICS!!!!!
That is all.
WHAT
Holy shit.
I don’t know how, I don’t know why, and I don’t know by whose power, but somehow I managed to get a 4.0 this semester.
So I got what I have been working for so hard these past five semesters. I finished college with a 4.0. I feel slightly proud of myself for the first time since starting at this stupid school.
It was worth it. It was worth all the stress. I’ve never been happier in my life.
Rock on.
I’m freaking DONE!
FINALLY.
This was the longest semester in the history of the universe, I swear. But now, finally, it’s over. I’m past caring about much of anything, I’m just glad it’s finally done. AND I NEVER HAVE TO GO BACK IF I DON’T WANT TO.
That is a liberating feeling, my friends.
Why must finals week be AFTER graduation?
Well, I didn’t have a panic attack like I did last semester…probably because I know my 4.0 is impossible.
Whatever.
One paper and one online test left, and then I’m DONE.
THURSDAY, PLEASE HURRY UP AND GET HERE.
Graduation!
WOO!
FINALLY!
Even though I have finals to deal with next week, I graduated today. Five long, busy semesters later, I’ve finally figured out what I want out of my life. Cool, huh?
Too bad this summa cum laude cord is a lie.
How dumb do you have to be to cheat in an ethics class?
Story time!
“How I Experienced a Real-Life Ethical Decision Thanks to a 100-Level Ethics Class” (or, “A Real-Life Example of How Dumb Freshmen Are”)
Okay. So our final project in Ethics 103 was a group project. We were to read the graphic novel Watchmen and write a paper on it. The paper was broken into four sections; since our group consisted of four people, we felt the most logical (and easiest) thing to do was to each take a section and write it, then combine our sections before the paper was due.
Well, we all plan to get together a week before the paper’s due in order to get things figured out. We all show up except for this one girl—let’s call her “Beth”—so the three of us choose our parts and get working on them, figuring that we’ll just give her the leftover part ‘cause she never showed up.
Fast-forward to the night before the paper’s due (keep in mind that the paper’s due by 5:00 PM on Friday the 12th, the last day of dead week). We had our in-class final in Ethics, so we all decide to meet afterwards. And what do you know, we finally see Beth (for the first time since our group formed in October). She’s completely lost, she doesn’t know what part she’s doing (even though we’d emailed her several times), and she doesn’t seem to get the concept of her assigned part of the paper (which is very simple and very straightforward: “summarize the ethical issues in Watchmen”).
Eventually, in order to get everything formatted and organized in a coherent manner, everyone agrees to send me their part of the paper to me by 10 AM the next day. Everyone seems okay with this, and we all go home.
Now fast-forward to 4:00 PM the next day—an hour before the paper’s due. What do you know—everyone but Beth had gotten their parts of the paper to me by 10 that morning. Luckily, I had decided the night before to write Beth’s part of the paper, figuring something like this would happen. I had just gotten home around 4 that afternoon in order to print the paper and get it up to the philosophy department by 5. Well, I checked my email one more time and guess what? Beth, at about 4:00, had finally emailed me her part. “Here is what I wrote for my part,” her email message said. “Sorry it took me so long.” Following this was her paper. Okay, I thought. No big deal. She’s a slacker, but at least she got it to me.
I copy and paste her paper part into Word, and instantly I notice something wrong: hyperlinks. About 20 or so words in her essay are underlined in the familiar “this is a hyperlink” fashion. I take a quick look the first paragraph of her “essay,” and notice it seems especially well-written.
So I click one of the hyperlinks and sure enough, it leads me to a page with the exact same essay on it. She had found a summary of Watchmen, copied it and pasted it into an email, and claimed it as her own work. Classic plagiarism.
IN AN ETHICS CLASS.
So I debated with Aaron and Lanky for about 10 minutes over what I should do in my little situation, then finally decided to put what I had written for Beth’s part into our final essay, ran up to the philosophy department (it was like 4:50 by this point), turned it in, and told our recitation leader what the situation was. I later forwarded Beth’s email to him as well as provided him with the link to “her” essay online.
I felt like I should have emailed her and warned her instead of turning her in, but then I realized that she had put all of our grades in jeopardy if her plagiarism had been caught by our recitation leader rather than by me, since he would not have known we had broken up the sections person by person. So I have very little sympathy.
People are dumb.
The things you can learn from I/O research
HI PEOPLE!
So I finally finished my Stat 514 project.
Setup: suppose you’re a prospective employee being interviewed by an individual who will determine what your starting salary for the job is. What would you do to increase your odds of getting a higher salary offer?
We (Dr. Thorsteinson, Tanya and I) designed a study that involved participants reading a script between an employer and a prospective employee and were asked, after reading the script, what they as the employer would offer the employee as a salary. We looked at three different types of anchoring methods that could lead to a higher offer than if there was no anchor offered. An “anchor” is an irrelevant or random number offered in some situation off of which other people tend to reference. For example, if I gave you a jar full of pennies and asked you how many pennies were in it, you might give me any number of answers. But if I said, “I think there are about 400 pennies in here, what about you?” your guess would be somewhere around 400.
Here were our three scenarios used to compare to a control scenario in which no anchoring number was offered:
1) Irrelevant number: the prospective employee mentions some unrelated number, like the number of employees at his last job.
2) Relevant number: the prospective employee mentions a dollar figure, like a previous salary.
3) Joking comment: the prospective employee jokes that he’d like a very large salary, like $1 million.
So what was the conclusion?
The joking comment significantly increased the offered salary over that offered in the control. The relevant number also significantly increased the offered salary, but not as much as the joking comment.
So when you’re getting interviewed and are asked what you’d like your salary to be, be sure to jokingly ask for $1 million.
!TEUQNAB DNAB
WOOOO BAND BANQUET!!
This made me sad. I’m going to miss marching band an obscene amount. Though I did like our performance at Seattle, that was pretty snazzy.
Also: TOO DAMN COLD FOR SKIRT.
Hawaii Adventures: Football Edition
GOOD LORD WHY DID IT HAVE TO RAIN?!
And why couldn’t anyone realize that we had to sit SOMEWHERE, we couldn’t just be invisible?
Oh well.
Additional note: Matt + drunk chicks at football game = hilarity.
Additional additional note: don’t sit in the cheerleaders’ section of the bus if you want to keep your sanity.
Hawaii Adventures
Fun fact: a group of college band geeks can take approximately 5 times longer to get across the island of Hawaii than any of them thought was possible. And take far too many additional buses.
But aside from that, we actually got to Pearl Harbor today. The video we watched was very informative.
Last Day
NO MORE MARCHING BAND. I just realized that.
I’m going to miss dorking around with you guys at noon. As stressful as being a squad leader to the two most useless squads ever (save Michael and Heather), band was a super stress-reliever, which was necessary, ‘cause all three fall semesters have sucked.
Hopefully wherever I go to grad school shall have a marching band as well.
We can only hope.
RIP future
Follow up to yesterday:
I have also calculated that my getting a B in Nonparametric Stats will lower my cumulative GPA to a 3.969. One goddamn THOUSANDTH below the summa cum laude cutoff. And no, they don’t round up to the hundredth, in case anyone was wondering, so I won’t even get to wear my gold cord.
Can this get any better?
And people never believe me when I tell them I’m a fuck up.
(2-years-later edit: wow, I forgot how much this month just absolutely sucked.)
RIP 4.0
As if the GRE bullshit isn’t enough, today I found out that it’s mathematically impossible for me to get an A in Stat 514. So goodbye to my 4.0 as well.
I have lost all momentum. This is crazy. All I’ve worked for my entire undergrad career has all gone donw the toilet in the past week.
I want death.
That is all.
Are you serious?
GOD DAMMIT. AGAIN.
The company that I have to get into and through graduate school to work for is the very company whose test will probably be reason schools will turn me down. If it didn’t suck so horribly, I’d be laughing at the irony.
I’ve done an average of 26.6 credits per semester, with a couple of those done over the summer. I have a 4.0. I’m graduating in 37 days with my psychology degree. I have almost enough statistics background for a minor and almost enough philosophy background for a major, both of which I’m getting next semester. I have research experience. I’m co-author of an article that’s under review for publication. I have worked my ass off for the past year and a half, cramming eight semester’s worth of work into five. Why? Because I am so ready to go into the career I want that I’m willing to sacrifice everything—down time, time to hang out with friends, non-school related extracurricular activities, even my sanity (flashbacks to last semester’s finals week)—to get to a point where they’ll finally let me to the job I want to do so badly.
So what will my GRE scores tell the grad schools to which I’m applying?
They’ll tell them that I don’t know what 9 raised to the 14th power is (this was an actual question. Seriously. What is the practicality of knowing this??).
They’ll tell them that I can’t find an antonym of the word “panegyric” given a list of five words.
They’ll tell them that I can’t remember the formula for the area of a cylinder.
But you know what it won’t tell them?
That standardized tests have never once predicted my performance in academia (with my SAT scores, my undergrad GPA should apparently be about a 2.6).
That I understand statistics and enjoy them.
That I have such a passion for psychometrics that it’s all I can ever see myself doing with my life.
That I am probably the most motivated person they’ll ever meet.
It’s just very, very depressing to think of the fact that regardless of all this hard work I’ve put into my education, regardless of the stress, regardless of how desperately I want to be a psychometrician and carry out what I think is my life calling, no school will give me a second glance because I cannot perform well on a standardized test.
Fuck it.
+900 in Negative Karma!
Good thing to know: waking up 5 minutes before you’re scheduled to take the GRE leads to super crappy GRE scores.
Fuck this, I don’t want to talk about it.
Fun at the Homecoming Parade
Aw, my last Homecoming. Oh well, it was super fun anyway. I got video of the tubas chasing cars, so it was all good.
Also, that was the most insane “controlled” bonfire I’ve ever seen.
Ugh, can I catch a break, please?
Once again, I have another squad member who doesn’t give a shit. This is making my last year of marching band substantially less fun. I hope she shapes up and realizes that just because she’s a plug doesn’t mean she can be a slacker. I do not appreciate people making both me and the whole band look bad.
Best part of the year, assuming it’s not screwed up like last time
WOOOOO SPRING SCHEDULE!
So I guess I can sign up for practically anything I want.
Or nothing.
Finally, some choice.
I think I shall take a crap ton of philosophy and statistics. And…perhaps…the dreaded Linear Algebra.
Schedule to come in a few days.
It’s way too early to be doing philosophy.
So after writing a paper for Philosophy of Science at about 5 AM this morning, I finally feel free enough to blog. So blog I shall.
Our performance is already up on YouTube, for all who are interested:
That’s all. I’m dead.
Seattle insanity
WOO!
So the performance was badass. I’m glad my hat didn’t fall off like I thought it was going to.
And I bought some cool stuff, like a vintage Playboy and some shot glasses for my roomies.
Good times. Much better than yesterday.
Claudia’s 867th Blog: The Blog
So we finally did Bins on the field today.
Thank god.
I’m already super sick of this damn show.
That is all.
Classes: Part II
Classes, day two, review!
Philosophy of Science: God, 8 in the morning…this looks like it may be a challenge.
Philosophy of Mind: IDENTITY. CONSCIOUSNESS. FREE WILL/DETERMINISM. DR. O’ROURKE. YES.
Ethics: Meh, I don’t think this will be too bad. It’s kind of weird taking a 101 class my senior semester, though.
Classes: Part I
Alrighty people, classes, day one, review!
Marching Band: Nothing new here. Same old badassery.
Nonparametric Statistics: Um…not sure if this is going to be easy or difficult. We talked about probability density functions today, and I think that’s something I’m going to have to know a little bit more about. But other than that, we’ll see…
Cognitive Development: So there are only seven of us in this class…the tests are five open-ended questions…there is one paper…and this is a 400-level class. Yeah.
And I have to start Psychology of Learning at some point, too, but that’s later. I’m lazy.
ALSO.
Do you see anything wrong with this?
Answer: the axes!!!! They’re WRONG! If “girls” is the x-axis and “cups” is the y-axis, they should be reversed on the graph.
Sorry, but I’ve never seen a mistake in xkcd before.
Eigenblogger 