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.
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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.