Coming from a broken program: ouch. You hit the nail on the head with a lot of these.
If I could add one that plagued our program, somewhere between underrepresented minority and wrong undergrad, it would be: come from a working-class background. It's pretty amazing -- and alarming -- to watch "not socialized to wealth" translate to "incompetent" in the minds of faculty. Anecdata suggest you risk success if you distance yourself as much as possible from your blue-collar past, family, interests, etc; but if you profess to continue to like or respect those people, or enjoy the same activities as them, it's Failure City.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-14 05:09 pm (UTC)If I could add one that plagued our program, somewhere between underrepresented minority and wrong undergrad, it would be: come from a working-class background. It's pretty amazing -- and alarming -- to watch "not socialized to wealth" translate to "incompetent" in the minds of faculty. Anecdata suggest you risk success if you distance yourself as much as possible from your blue-collar past, family, interests, etc; but if you profess to continue to like or respect those people, or enjoy the same activities as them, it's Failure City.