Post Academic

Since we’re on a streak of silly right now, I figure it would be a good time for the second installment of “Footnotes.”  Every once in a while, we’ll collect some stories out there on the Interwebs that might be very tangentially pertinent to our interests in academia and jobs, but centrally relevant to our websurfing.

1. We covered the phenomenon of Rate My Professors a few weeks ago, with this link to RMP’s “best” professors of 2009 list.  The Washington Post just tracked down the winner, Kimberly DuVall-Early of James Madison U.

2. This year’s most famous prospective grad student has to be James Franco, who has been accepted to Yale’s English Ph.D. program–have any prospectives crossed his path on any campus visits?  You can recommence with in-class sleeping jokes, which, aside from the admirable novelty factor, is what Franco’s forays into academia are best-known for.  (h/t to reader and amateur gossip blogger Patty)

3. This is an oldie-but-goodie about grad school from Stuff White People Like, which I came across as one of those WordPress randomly generated links.  It might be funny, but it’s also pretty dead on, especially how the cultural capital ascribed to critical theory has very few practical applications.

4. Huffington Post’s “College” section has another one of those fancy photo polls, this one of the most expensive schools in the country.  The “winner”: Sarah Lawrence College at $54,410(!)/year.

5. The music blog Stereogum has this great ongoing feature called “Quit Your Day Job”, which checks in with up-and-coming bands to see what they do to get by on the way to (hopefully) making it big.  Actually, the indie rock life doesn’t sound so different from grad school, in that aspiring rockers and students hafta work extra jobs to get to the big payoff that might never come.

“Palo Alto High School, CA, graduate James Franco visits Paly for a day of observation” by Amin Ronaghi from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons

“Sign at Sarah Lawrence” by SadieLou from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons