hashmos said:
First of all, my interest in Graduate school is because of this “massive economic and social structure”. There are rules that dictate the importance of a graduate degree beside your bachelor one, as there are ones which established, to begin with, the educational system.
One reason you have to understand the rules of the game is that they are often not in your favor. If you just do what the "power elite" wants you to do, you are just helping them stay in power. This may be good for you, or not. But you really have to think about what is going on, or else you'll end up in a treadmill that you can't get off of.
The other thing is that you often can't get what you want, so you are going to have to figure out something else.
Carriers of a Mater Degree have advantages over those who don’t, and as you climb the ladder, your pay check accompanies you.
What advantages? Why do you want to climb the ladder? Why do you want a bigger paycheck?
[q]If you look at a classroom, you witness the same distribution of grades. I always thought of it this way. Isn’t it possible to get the entire classroom to get A’s without being lenient in grading? Are those who get Bs and Cs in MIT and Harvard not up to the challenge, or not qualified enough to study at this level of difficulty?[/q]
MIT and Harvard massively inflate their grades so this isn't an issue. The MIT physics departments knows that there is a magic cut off at 3.0 for most physics graduate schools, so they set up the grading so that pretty much everyone that graduates with an acceptable GPA. Physics classes tend to be A/B centered. Engineering classes tend to be B/C centered, and there are tons of things that you can do to raise your GPA.
[q]For me, it was the lack of an immediate example of an application. If they gave me a project that required me to know each and every aspect of the course and gave me four months to do it, I would have understood it more than if I had to stay in a lecture and listen to it twice a week for the same period.[/q]
One thing that I've learned is that you just can't be passive with your education. If you can't pass the class because you don't see applications, then it's your responsibility to go out and do outside reading so that you find applications. A lot of times the professor really doesn't care about you, but often it's not his responsibility to care about you.
The reason this matters is that, yes, you can get a graduate degree with a bad start, but it requires a lot of initiative on your part. You can get a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Phoenix or a dozen other places, but you have to keep in mind that their primary interest is to make money off of you, and if you fail, they aren't going to care.
I think that the educational system not intentionally became a monopoly, sensing that individuals all round the world needs education to have a decent life. This made it adopt this grading system, where judgments are made every end of a semester and little effort, if not none, is put to enhance the grades of the underachievers.
Well yes. The problem is that if you think of the world as a ladder, then someone has got to be a loser. That's why I'm interesting in why you are intent on "climbing the ladder". Once you think in terms of ladders, someone has got to be at the bottom, and unfortunately that happens to include both you and me.
You have to realize that it's a cold world out there, and most people don't care about you, and that's not really surprising. There are 6 billion people in the world. How many of them to you really care about? How many of them *can* you care about?
If you are willing to take the initiative then there are lots and lots of possibilities for getting a graduate degree. The trouble is that if you expect people to *help* you get the graduate degree, you are in for a rude shock. This is why you really, really have to be clear why you want the graduate degree.
[I understand that I should have “academically” conformed earlier to the educational system and its requirements, and it is not that easy now to get into a prestigious Grad school …..
Whether you should conform or not depends on what you want. Personally, I hate conforming, which is why I ended up ten steps lower on the ladder than I would have if I did everything people wanted. So what? Someone has to be a loser. It might as well be me.
At this point, I don't think you have any chance of getting into a prestigious grad school. But my philosophy is to screw prestige. I just want to learn stuff, and I don't care if I learn quantum field theory at Harvard or some back alley somewhere. I don't even care if I get credits or a degree. But that's me, and what I want. You have to be clear about what you want.
If you want *them* to like you, then you are going to have to put the dog collar around your neck. Sometimes it's worth it. Sometimes it isn't.
Man I should have known that considering I have a few friends who got kicked out of the grad school and had to do open university until they were re-admitted. Then again they'r eonly allowed to do that for 1 semester and then they have to get re-admitted or have an exemption. It's a bit confusing because they weren't allowed to take grad classes though... hmmm..