/lit/ - Literature

>>14805525
>literary lifestyle
>attending a liberal brainwashing camp
>(((prestigious)))

>>14805525
Soundy /comfy/. I'm on an athletic scholarship hoping to play professionally, but if the million dollar lifestyle doesn't work out I'm going full hermit.

>>14805533
>>14805533
It's actually quite hard to force politics into languages. It's not as if I'm an English major, hahahaha.

What does /lit/ define as a prestigious uni?

I haven't made a single friend in 3 years of uni and attend only the necessary classes. My uni may be considered prestigious in my country but not my underpaid language department.

>>14805552
Ivy League, elite-affiliated (e.g. Fordham), or renowned liberal arts school (e.g. Reed, St John's).

>>14805571
wtf is ivy league? sounds gay and American (also gay and fat)

>>14805571
>Fordham
>Reed
Lmao, may as well go to community college, sucker

>>14805525
Can you do anything useful or do you jerk off to letters all day and just hyper-specialize on a subject nobody cares about and is another drop of useless, only applicable in very obscure and trivial situations, piece of knowledge that will be known about (even less read) only by the most autistic people on earth?

>>14805592
Yes.

>>14805598
What is it? And did you learn it in college?

>>14805571
>Fordham, Reed, St John's
Lol. In your dreams.

>>14805571
Big state colleges like Michigan and Penn are better than fucking Fordham lmao

>>14805541
I guess the martial law's bearable if you've got prospects. I got athletic money too but for a sport with almost no post graduate ep. As a reader do you feel a little alienated from your teammates?

>>14805571
how's fordham bro?

same here bro, I'm just wondering though, at what point to I become an alcoholic? I drink every night and I started off pouring the bourbon partway up the ice cube but now I see it's floating. Where am I at?

>>14805885
The only way to know for certain is to take four days off and see if withdrawal occurs

>>14805657
Yes, they're all retarded drinkers who go out and party while I stay nestled in my room reading on my kindle.

>>14805571
Found the Fordham alum/student

>>14805525
You're boasting of your "great life" on a Kazakh Balloon making forum. You should be striving to be a moral person, not trying to proudly display your ability to read books and study different languages at a university. Perhaps if you actually read anything of value, you'd have realized that by now, you clownish amateur.

>>14806669
ok autismo

I just go to a shitty but accredited nursing school, easy money

I cannot stand university. I go to an ivy and feel like an absolute brainlet. I have ruined my gpa taking computer science classes but I won't switch to philosophy since it is all analytic. Literally everything I am learning could be self-taught online for free, but of course the special piece of paper is worth more.

I spend literally all my time working or on some sort of online escapism. I don't understand how people say college should be the best years of your life. If I wasn't constantly lobotimized with music, junk food, and working so much I don't even think about my own life, I would probably go crazy.

>>14806305
Same, pretty much, They were mostly business majors as well. Still, it helped being one of the better players. Had I sucked (or been a four year scrubstitute) it would have been miserable.

>>14806815
I hated college. I studied a bug major that I didn’t like at a school I probably shouldn’t have went to and and I really just always felt like I was having every ounce of authenticity stomped out of me while just being a resource for them to extract tuition dollars out of. My grades were terrible. I should’ve stepped away to figure shit out but I just pushed on miserable. I spent 5.5 years and a ton of money to get my degree. I made very few friends along the way. It was miserable. You wouldn’t know it at the time though because like you, I engaged in escapism and coped with humor or self-medicated with drugs and alcohol all the time. I pretty much regret it in totality. I think the only thing that would’ve made it somewhat worth it was studying something I had a genuine interest in which is ironically the only thing I felt like I couldn’t even consider.

>>14805646
Penn is neither big nor a state college

>>14805525
I had to drop out because I had a psychotic break

How to go from state uni to elite for grad school?

>>14805571
tfw graduated from a redbrick
At least my subject is employable.

>>14808166
did you make it though? what are you doing now?

To all of you majoring in classics, history, literature, philosophy and whatnot, what do you plan on doing once you're done? Most of you will never become tenured professors, so what's your plan?

>>14808166
Stop wallowing in self-pity, if you had taken the time to lurk at some of the career/uni related threads, you would've seen that practically no anons got what they expected in philosophy/literature departments. It's either rampant positivism or analytic phil. In other fields the bar is so low because of this trend of democratization of knowledge. Honestly, I should go for a bussiness/economy degree. Any anon's thought on those?

>>14808271
I graduated if that’s what you mean, but I almost wish I hadn’t. I’m a financial analyst at a non-profit now.
>>14808324
It’s not about self pity and I’m under no delusion that people in literature/philosophy are getting what they want out of their degree. As to my thoughts about going for business/economics, don’t. If you want me to go into detail as to my reasoning I can.

>>14808318
To become a tenured professor, only cowards have a backup plan.

>>14808318
make use of my newly acquired crit thinking skills and spicy tongue in a corporation

>>14808318
i just do it because i got tired of being a neet.

>>14808396
Well sorry about that misunderstanding. Could you please elaborate on why you give a no for business/economics? I would go at it through uni since I enjoy a more theoretical approach. Of course the prime motivation for pursuing such a degree is mainly (I stress mainly, not completely) career related.

>>14808418
Enjoy publishing nonsense articles ad infinitum just to stay relevant for the majority of your career.

>>14808436
>He fell for the meme

>>14808442
So now you are training to be a neet?

>>14808318
Alcoholic high school teacher that writes books on the side

>>14808509
As opposed to what? Coding my life away until my position gets a mercy killing by giving it to some Indian for half the wage? Please.

>>14808559
I symphatise with you. My situation is not very different, but if you are honestly passioned about the field you are studying, a career in academia may be such a perversion of what you truly want to pursue that you might be better of working something unrelated.

>>14808504
I personally take issue with the field from a theoretical and academic side of things but I won’t go into that. As far as career practicality, it’s somewhat difficult and It’s not nearly as practical as people seem to think and statistics on employment/salaries for the field are deceiving and actually much worse because as reported they’re bimodal and contain many confounding variables like entrepreneurship. It’s not even ideal for graduate level study in the same field without also coupling it with maths or stats. The types of jobs it lends itself to are actually some of the worst in my opinion as well.

>>14805525
I've found a relatively unknown /lit/-tier field that I'm pretty much guaranteed to get a job in once I've finished my studies. Feeling pretty good.

>>14808599
Sorry. I realize this is a giant run on sentence so I’ll go into more detail. Employment rates are not great. Salaries look good on the surface but what you don’t realize is they’re heavily skewed by graduates at elite schools going on to work in investment banks, consulting firms, etc where they immediately earn six figures and can earn seven with a decade, a minority of sales people who make huge salaries, and entrepreneurs. All of these people are the exception, not the norm and unrealistic expectations for the average economics student. These people probably would’ve ended up like that regardless of what they studied and at the same time, there’s no easy cross over for Econ students. Engineers work in banking. Bankers don’t work in engineering. In fact, some of the fathers of modern economics started in other fields. Not to mention the jobs it lends itself to are heavily concentrated in the most expensive areas and higher wages mean less. There’s no skill or specialized education involved with an undergraduate econ degree just basic bureaucratic analysis of people and money to tell corporations what to do to improve profit. If you want to go to grad school, you’ll have a hard time with an econ degree because you probably didn’t have nearly enough math or stats. I really wouldn’t recommend it for career benefit at all to be honest and would even steer people intellectually curious about it towards the hard sciences or philosophy instead.

>>14808604
Please explain, it'll be a secret between us.
>Pic unrelated

>>14808635
im guessing linguistics

>>14808622
>>14808599
I see what you mean.I saw in another post that you're a financial analyst atm? Funnily, I am a philosophy student, but as pointed out here>>14808324 nothing of value is really added to the progress I was making, studying phil on my own. The degree I mean is translates to trade-engineer in English and is here valued over eg econ for the reasons you mentioned: mathematics, stats. Problem is that I went through a hippie highschool and I am as a result very uncertain of my capabilities. I'm only 20, but damn, I can't keep running into the surprises.
Overall, I understand that you recommend the most technical/scientifically oriented path over something half-way with more theory mixed in.

>>14808740
Yeah, I don’t know that I could tell you to go one way or another whether humanities or engineering. I think there’s good arguments for or against for either and it depends highly on the person. I just really don’t see any good argument for the middle of the road stuff like business, economics, or social sciences in general at all really. If I’m being honest, I really regret mine and I just don’t want others to also.

>>14808172
What the fuck are you talking about, Penn state is massive and it's obviously a state school. A few of their programs are top-tier and they're certainly better than Fordham.

>>14808559
You could invest or something
Passive income, mate

>>14810202
You said Penn, not Penn State. I go to Penn State lol.

I study hispanoamerican literatures

Going to an elite school is a good litmus test for whether you have a soul, because if you do have a soul, you should immediately begin panicking that everyone around you is literally fucking retarded despite being a pampered rich baby with infinite luxury and infinite encouragement to learn and grow.

The kids here are absolutely fucking worthless, disgusting, boring people. Not even smart, either. Future managers at best. They all have spaced-out looks on their faces because they're all on pills, they all have cushy lifestyles provided by their parents. They're too complacent, too happy, they confuse "being in the best country club" with "having ambition," so as soon as they are officially in whatever is the country club analogue in their field (top university, top internship, whatever it is), they stop aspiring to anything else and start masturbating and preening. Between taking six vacations a year, of course.

I hate these little pieces of shit. At least a few generations ago it was snobby rich people, mixed with some genuine geniuses. Now it's nothing but future managers, interns, "analysts" at fake start-up companies making $120k/yr to answer emails because they had the right connections. The oligarchy has fucked itself by failing to maintain even a bare minimum of cutthroat competence. These overfed wiener hipster queers are going to be mulched into fertilizer by whatever natural shock of history comes next and dethrones them. They'll just slump right into the mass grave and present their boypussy to their executioner out of instinct.

>>14808318
who fucking cares honestly? work sucks no matter what you end up doing. i really can't be bothered about putting the effort in to find a mildly more comfortable and better paying wagie position

>>14808318
>having a plan
i'm here to learn desu

>>14810568
and who is going to dethrone them exactly? There is no one to replace them.

>>14805571
As a reed grad, no one but grad schools care about reed. That being said, my reed education was miles above any Ivy League. My fiancée went to uchicago, best friend went to Harvard, both told me their programs were profoundly disappointing.

>tfw my philological field is so small that most people that even bother graduating are seen as valuable academically

I decided to become a NEET almost ten years ago now and now I've lost my mind. Is this the literary life?

>>14810599
yes

>>14810568
>they're all on pills
I used to have disdain for the SSRI/adderall/ritalin zombie crowd but honestly I'm starting to think it might be better to get on Zoloft because everything is becoming unbearable, my life is going down the fucking shitter. Are pills really so bad?

>>14810556
Opinion on Mulata de Tal

>>14810611

just dont take as prescribed. also writing up what lies to get what you want from the doc is also a good writing exercise.

also if you can't handle your drugs dont do drugs. say this as a former addict that blamed everything on addiction. got my shit together and saw through all that clean living bullshit as a cope

>>14810673
I mentioned Zoloft since the psychiatrist I've been going to for quite some time recommended it, but I always refused up to now. I have no intention to get into self-medication, sounds like a nightmare.

>>14806669
Moralniggers pls go

>>14810710

depends what you're personally comfortable with. for me the idea of taking a pill every day, dealing with a period of side effects only to arrive at a point that when working simply zones you out and if it doesn't do that you repeat the process with another medication. you don't take these things short term. doctors will tell you ideally a couple years on the medication should see fundamental changes to your person. but for me I'd rather struggle as a human than change myself to that degree. but i say this as someone with the luxury to struggle and at this point am I even enough in my right mind to suggest to someone else not to medicate their mental illness.

>>14806815
>analytical
That's the non-meme one

>>14810726
I just want to see things improve. I'm afraid of the zombie stereotype, I don't want to fry my brain with this shit, that's what's stopping me. But allegedly the medication can be very effective for severe anxiety which is the issue right now. It's not like there aren't any stories of people truly getting better with those pharmaceutical crutches, either.

>>14810579
The only real answer in this thread.

>>14810582
The /lit/ intelligentsia of course

>>14810587
I am doing postgrad at UChicago and I talked to a fellow postgrad friend about the quality of the undergraduates, and he said that in the 7~ years he's been here, the undergrads have changed dramatically. He said "they all look like they stepped out of a fashion catalog.. actually, the SAME fashion catalog."

>>14805571
Lmao, none of those are elite. When's the last time a great man came from Fordham or St John's?

>fucked my A-Levels by not showing up or studying
>barely scraped by with a few C grades
>going to some mediocre Bong university for some meme degree that I can't really use
>no friends either
Can we re-do life? This shit sucks

>>14806815
Literally no one says college should be the best years of your life, you dumb slut. Life begins at 30 (quote me on that)

>>14810202
I'm pretty sure saying "Penn" refers to University of Pennsylvania. The university you're referring to is colloquially known as "Penn State."

>>14811287
Fordham is on the map for theology and continental philosophy pretty big right now. Also, their Law school is very well regarded.

>studying IT and probably destined to become a code monkey
save me

>>14808211
Depends on your field. Grades will probably matter less than the proficiency you demonstrate in a sample project or research essay.

>>14811305
>complaining about being a code monkey

would you rather be a burger monkey or a sales monkey?

code monkey is such a stupid term. "oh no, i'm destined to make six figures sitting in front of a computer solving problems and shit, what a gruesome way to spend my unbearably post-modern existence"

>>14811344
>coding
>six figures

ohohohohohohoho

>>14811294
Unfortunately, you brought this upon yourself. Be better. Do better.

>>14811349
i don't get it. are you implying people in software development positions do not command six figures salaries?

>>14811394
Not all of them. Not even most of them.

>>14811409
actual software devs are usually fairly well compensated

are you currently in the profession and being underpaid?

>>14811394
Yes thats exactly what I'm implying, the vast majority of people currently employed in that field will never see six figures

>>14811424
"actual software devs" are outnumbered 10 to 1 by jobs that will be taken by someone from a diploma mill in Mumbai

>>14811466
that's cool. what do you do for a living?

>>14811471
A humanities based field, thankfully. 80% of my friends are in STEM though, but virtually all of them avoided compsci and related fields like the plague because of what direction the field was moving in.

>>14805525
based, but if you continue being smug about it I will take it from you

>>14810662
Haven't read it yet, i'm on second semester, currently reading El Señor Presidente
I'll keep an eye for mulata de tal

>>14811498
>what direction the field was moving in

technology is an absolutely massive industry with many different aspects. most of the other aspects of STEM aren't even 1/2 as lucrative or consisting of as many job opportunities as computer science is. i don't know how you came to the conclusion that computer-related jobs are going south when they're the only area of STEM with an actual economic pulse right now.

as for the humanities career, i hope that works out for you.

>>14811522
It's my favourite Miguel Angel Asturias book desu I would recommend it in a heartbeat; though is mostly for the (godly) aesthetic appeal I am not very good at analyzing literature.

El Señor Presidente is also preddy good, though I don't remember much of it since I read it so long ago, but my god if the first chapter ain't kino. Really sad when the baby dies as well. Did you read Hombres de Maiz already? If so what's your favorite section?

>>14811546
Haven't read that one either hahaha, even though I live in Mexico and I study hispanoamerican I can't keep myself away from Wilde and Camus, so I'm not that knowledgeable in hispanic authors.
I recently read Al Filo Del Agua and El Reino de Este Mundo, both were absolutely amazing, so I'm planning to read more books by Yañez and Carpentier

>>14811562
Read more miguel angel reeeeeeeee

But at least you know him lol

>>14811514
w-what do you mean?!

>>14805525
that's cool, do you have a girlfriend?

>>14812274
No? Of course not. What does being a recluse mean to you?

>>14810587
Shit now I feel like ass for choosing a state school over reed

>>14808177
Why not take a semester off for medical reasons, or try to get disability accommodations? Having a mental illness is hard enough with a college degree to open some doors for you, not having one makes it even harder - assuming you aren't just content with the NEET life that is.

>>14810568
My based detector is off the charts with this one, cap’n

I went to a university ranked among the nation's top 25 to study political science, but little did I know at the time it was a largely career-oriented school, even by the standards of most yuppie private colleges. There were tons of resources and career guidance directed towards business, STEM, and pre-med students whereas our liberal arts departments got shafted. Our business school is one of the best in the country when it comes to placement, and I've had tons of friends who've graduated from there now working in banking, consulting, or other comfy positions with prestigious firms. I know that wasn't my passion, I always planned and still plan on going to law school - but I've given up on finding happiness in my career so I can't help but think I should've swallowed my pride and focused on getting a business degree to find a high-earning job immediately upon graduating instead of studying law when I already know I'll probably be just as much, if not more, miserable as a law student and eventual lawyer. I don't know if I've ever met a happy lawyer who recommended law school to me and had more positive than negative things to say about their experience. Anyways I'll now be spending the next few months studying to take the LSAT this summer, hopefully I get a good score on my first attempt because this exam is a bitch. Fuck me.