PSA for incoming grad students:
You’re about to enter into an abusive, dysfunctional relationship with your field. You will be managed and supervised by people who have no business interacting with other humans. Your academic future may end up in the hands of someone who hates you and will never tell you why.
Some advice:
-have friends and a support system or prioritize having friends and a support system outside of your department. It’s way too easy to get sucked into departmental gossip and drama and before you know it you’re gossiping about how N fucked A’s husband on the couch in the grad lounge and celebrating your thesis defense by shotgunning beer with the guy you’re in a situationship with and some of the “cool kids” while listening to Green Day (I love Green Day)
-yes there are “cool kids” and cliques and social hierarchies in grad school. That shit never goes away
-don’t have casual sex with people in your program for the love of god. Or at least, only do it if both partners are mature humans with good communication skills.
-these people will be your colleagues forever and academics hold GRUDGES
Don’t go in without SEVERAL plans for:
-what you will do when there’s no stable job market after graduation
-what you will do if the program destroys your mental health
-what you will do next if you decide that academia is not the right path for you
List brought to you by: my mistakes, mistakes I’ve watched people make, the fact that Bestie and I spent grad school behaving like the cranky old muppet guys while minding everyone’s business (but still being bad enough bitches to pass our thesis defense[s] with no revisions). My hair WAS full of secrets, man. I knew about aaaallllll of J’s sordid hookups and the deep revenge S took on J2 after she caught him sexting with M.
If you know me irl plz don’t respond with names details or questions about who did what. Text me for that shit I may be older and wiser but I’m still messy.
ETA: all of this said, don’t eschew ALL gossip. Academia trauma bonding is real and sometimes necessary to making it through; and, if you identify as a woman, you NEED access to the whisper network before you end up in the elevator alone with the Department Creep.
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I just had a moment where i thought to myself “if i met myself when i was younger i would be kind to her. Hug her and keep her safe at all costs and try and cheer her up.”
Then another thought hit me: “why don’t i do that for myself now? Why do i have such disdain for the person i am now, but nothing but love and patience for the person i was? What is the difference?”
And i feel like i should continue reminding myself that until i realize, truly, that there is no difference between the two. I should have just as much patience and acceptance for the me sitting here today as i do for that little girl.
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Flint, Michigan, has one of the [United States]'s highest rates of child poverty — something that got a lot of attention during the city's lead water crisis a decade ago. And a pediatrician who helped expose that lead problem has now launched a first-of-its-kind move to tackle poverty: giving every new mother $7,500 in cash aid over a year.
A baby's first year is crucial for development. It's also a time of peak poverty.
Flint's new cash transfer program, Rx Kids, starts during pregnancy. The first payment is $1,500 to encourage prenatal care. After delivery, mothers will get $500 a month over the baby's first year.
"What happens in that first year of life can really portend your entire life course trajectory. Your brain literally doubles in size in the first 12 months," says Hanna-Attisha, who's also a public health professor at Michigan State University.
A baby's birth is also a peak time for poverty. Being pregnant can force women to cut back hours or even lose a job. Then comes the double whammy cost of child care.
Research has found that stress from childhood poverty can harm a person's physical and mental health, brain development and performance in school. Infants and toddlers are more likely than older children to be put into foster care, for reasons that advocates say conflate neglect with poverty.
In Flint, where the child poverty rate is more than 50%, Hanna-Attisha says new moms are in a bind. "We just had a baby miss their 4-day-old appointment because mom had to go back to work at four days," she says...
Benefits of Cash Aid
Studies have found such payments reduce financial hardship and food insecurity and improve mental and physical health for both mothers and children.
The U.S. got a short-lived taste of that in 2021. Congress temporarily expanded the child tax credit, boosting payments and also sending them to the poorest families who had been excluded because they didn't make enough to qualify for the credit. Research found that families mostly spent the money on basic needs. The bigger tax credit improved families' finances and briefly cut the country's child poverty rate nearly in half.
"We saw food hardship dropped to the lowest level ever," Shaefer says. "And we saw credit scores actually go to the highest that they'd ever been in at the end of 2021."
Critics worried that the expanded credit would lead people to work less, but there was little evidence of that. Some said they used the extra money for child care so they could go to work.
As cash assistance in Flint ramps up, Shaefer will be tracking not just its impact on financial well-being, but how it affects the roughly 1,200 babies born in the city each year.
"We're going to see if expectant moms route into prenatal care earlier," he says. "Are they able to go more? And then we'll be able to look at birth outcomes," including birth weight and neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) admissions.
Since the pandemic, dozens of cash aid pilots have popped up across the nation. But unlike them, Rx Kids is not limited to lower-income households. It's universal, which means every new mom will get the same amount of money. "You pit people against each other when you draw that line in the sand and say, 'You don't need this, and you do,' " Shaefer says. It can also stigmatize families who get the aid, he says, as happened with traditional welfare...
So far, there's more than $43 million to keep the program going for three years. Funders include foundations, health insurance companies and the state of Michigan, which allocated a small part of its federal cash aid, known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
Money can buy more time for bonding with a baby
Alana Turner can't believe her luck with Flint's new cash benefits. "I was just shocked because of the timing of it all," she says.
Turner is due soon with her second child, a girl. She lives with her aunt and her 4-year-old son, Ace. After he was born, her car broke down and she was seriously cash-strapped, negotiating over bill payments. This time, she hopes she won't have to choose between basic needs.
"Like, I shouldn't have to think about choosing between are the lights going to be on or am I going to make sure the car brakes are good," she says...
But since she'll be getting an unexpected $7,500 over the next year, Turner has a new goal. With her first child, she was back on the job in less than six weeks. Now, she hopes she'll be able to slow down and spend more time with her daughter.
"I don't want to sacrifice the time with my newborn like I had to for my son, if I don't have to," she says."
-via NPR, March 12, 2024
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Fun fact: Abortion is ALWAYS justified and IS healthcare. You don’t need a reason to have an abortion. It’s your body. Even if you were healthy and perfectly happy with a faithful partner and financial stability, you could and you should still be able to get an abortion if you didn’t want to have a child, and no one, not even your partner, had any right to shame you for choosing to take care of yourself and YOUR body. A reason should NEVER be required in order for someone to receive proper healthcare for their body, and abortion IS healthcare.
— X
ABORTION IS BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS
"But what about the baby?" That's not a baby, babe. It's a chunk of meat in your body conceived by cum.
By your "abortion is killing an innocent baby" logic, everybody who has swallowed their partner's cum is a cannibal and every innocent child has died every time someone cum outside of their partner's hole. Also children died if you jerked off without putting your cum inside someone's hole. That's your logic.
So how about, instead of trying to protect someone's cum that hasn't developed into a human being with a soul, we protect actual human beings whose unwanted meats are growing inside of their bodies?
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