Though I am currently re-applying to US universities for their combined master’s degree-and-PhD programmes, I am not particularly hopeful about being accepted. I was rejected everywhere last year, and I think that one reason for this is not being philosophically mature. I don’t know what I’m most interested in and I haven’t done any real research. I’m not sure that I can commit to seven years study. Additionally, I’m no longer so keen to go directly to the US, after experiencing life in a completely alien culture here in Korea. This leads me to take seriously the prospect of doing a MPhil degree or equivalent in the UK. There are five or six good universities where it’d be a serious research master’s. I think I should avoid one year MA degrees as that would probably be a step sideways or at worst down from my four-year undergraduate.
There are three knowns and one unknown that make it incredibly difficult for me to decide whether to go ahead with this. So of course I’m writing a blog post on these factors to help me move closer to making the decision.
No Country for Old People | Korea Exposé
South Korea’s Angry Young Men | Korea Exposé
… the situation of South Korea in which everyone is conditioned to see him- or herself as a “have” at all cost, even going to the length of stepping on anyone perceived to have less power just to demonstrate one’s own powerfulness …
Ilbe is another incarnation of the have-nots who pretend to have. Refusing to accept the truth of not being a somebody in a country where being a nobody is a fate worse than death, these young people lash out, unaware of their own moral degeneration into “hungry ghosts” - agwi - to borrow Park’s description: twisted creatures whose hunger is so intense they try to devour anything but can never fill that void inside. …
South Korea’s young people are dealing with a miserable reality. They undergo onerous education for a promise that their future will amount to something. But when they graduate, landing a covetable job is fiercely competitive. Costs of living are high, and renting a place of your own, much less homeownership, is near impossible for a single person without the help of well-to-do parents. Everyone says one should get married and have children, but the expense of establishing a family is daunting. Consumption is endlessly encouraged. Debts pile up. There appears to be no hope on the horizon.
Are Élite Colleges Bad for the Soul? | New Yorker
Learning is supposed to be about falling down and getting up again until you do it right. But, in an academic culture that demands constant achievement, failures seem so perilous that the best and the brightest often spend their young years in terrariums of excellence. The result is what Deresiewicz calls “a violent aversion to risk.” Even after graduation, élite students show a taste for track-based, well-paid industries like finance and consulting (which in 2010 together claimed more than a third of the jobs taken by the graduating classes of Harvard, Cornell, and Princeton). And no wonder. A striver can “get into” Goldman Sachs the way that she got into Harvard. There is no résumé submission or recruiting booth if you want to make a career as a novelist.
Reading for self-recognition is the default factory setting in most people’s minds. It is precisely the approach to literature that you don’t need to attend college to learn.
People had a tendency to want too much from a college degree, Nisbet warned:
Far more deadly to the character of the university than its exploitation in economic terms is its exploitation in psychological terms. That is, cultivation of the pernicious idea that by sending young people to universities one is teaching them to be human beings, to become citizens, to become leaders, or to find peace of mind, individuality, liberal arts, “soul,” or whatever may be in the public mind at the moment.
In other words: we’re here to tell you everything you should know about Chaucer, not to fix your life.
A chief terror of higher education for a lot of students isn’t the exams, or the term papers, or even the terribly narrow but weirdly long bunk beds. It is the choice involved in working through an uncharted terrain whose potential is reported to be limitless. That task is a microcosm of life.
I’ve found that I’ve no real interest in eating any meat. It’s either tasteless or just unappealing. I didn’t expect this; I assumed that my body would really jump at the chance to eat some meat. By contrast if I’m faced with a some green vegetables I want to just eat and eat.
I used vim for I think some of 2009, and most of 2009 and 2010. Then there was a brief period of Emacs with poor vim emulation, which ended in January 2011 when I begin using Emacs bindings full time. I’ve been doing that ever since, for almost three years. Nowadays a lot of vim users are switching to Emacs because of the rise of Evil, a really solid vim emulation layer in Emacs that is much more satisfying than its predecessors.
I’m considering following in the footsteps of those vim users, by returning to vim keybindings in Emacs. continue reading this entry
On Friday we had no lessons and I had some free time. I decided to go ahead and wrestle the Emacs vim emulation layer Evil into my Emacs configuration due to having two ideas.
A couple, obviously bored out of their minds, stare intently at their smartphones in a Seoul coffee shop. The small talk, if there is any, is painful to eavesdrop on. Despite their matching clothes, ubiquitous couple rings, and obligatory selfies together, they seem to have little in common.