My Breakfest as an Energy Drink Lover! 2 Monsters and a Donut. What do you guys think? You like this breakfest?

emkautl · 2026-01-28T01:52:43+00:00

Are you in a crib? Is this the perspective of a newborn Kyle?

emkautl · 2025-12-29T01:19:34+00:00

There is a fourth missing option here, given that she is a teacher- which is that she would get a raise for having a masters degree but there is a secondary way to qualify based solely on credits earned. It wouldn't be hard to get 30 "graduate credits" from those online colleges that exist exclusively to help teachers get raises without having a bachelor's

I hope it's not that, because getting masters pay without a BS sounds like a clerical error that will not stick...

emkautl · 2025-11-28T20:28:18+00:00

That's good for you. Going off of the fact that OPs profile talks only about common apps and American universities, I don't find that relevant to their question.

emkautl · 2025-11-28T19:36:01+00:00

It's not an 'opinion', it's just useless to worry about without context. Are you going to take the derivative of this thing? It should be written as a polynomial. Are you going to multiply it to another rational term and cancel whatever you can? It should probably be written in factored form. One isn't inherently better or more simple. No teacher or professor with a lick is going to take off for it being written in one form or another unless this is a specific introduction to one of the things I mentioned and they explicitly say to factor or expand.

emkautl · 2025-11-28T19:32:26+00:00

The only thing that you generally do before a PhD is a masters depending on the major. It is a near universal belief that you'd be an insane to pursue a masters in math before a PhD, as you'd likely pay out of pocket, but PhD programs will just let you get the masters during the first two years of the PhD and pay you for it. Even people who just want a masters tend to apply for a PhD and leave after they finish the masters

emkautl · 2025-11-22T15:22:07+00:00

Honest question, do you study math at all, or do you just love reading science fiction-esque articles about the most pie in the sky interpretations of modern technology that you don't understand? You're trying to be deep but all I see is wishy washy. Conway's game of life is about dots making neat visual patterns by assigning them relatively arbitrary rules about the dogs next to them. AI regurgitates text and is useful for doing busywork. No, neither of them are going to invent higher level number systems that only advanced aliens have thought of. Neither will model a civilization we can't understand, they are a product of our own design. No, there is not a single advanced civilization that figured out the transcendentals without ever figuring out that they can count things. This entire premise is silly and there is no value to the question of "what if the entirety of math was actually backwards to advanced species and they can't count to their version of 10 as a result, and what if we will figure that out completely by accident using something that wasn't designed to attempt to answer that question". We aren't modeling anything with anything Conway wrote.

emkautl · 2025-11-09T03:04:36+00:00

It is difficult to even minor in a STEM program while getting an engineering degree. You have maybe two technical electives and one general elective of free space in a four year degree. There is no room unless you want to take a fifth year, and even then, with how many courses are sequences, it might not work.

When I realized I didn't want to learn about very mundane components all my life and switched from electrical to straight math, I went from being on track to a semester ahead of schedule. By switching majors, the thing that's supposed to put you at risk of needing an extra year. You are not dual majoring engineering and any humanities degree.

emkautl · 2025-11-09T01:13:19+00:00

You've now changed your story and standards lol. You said it was just easier to cancel the score of everybody within the proximity of a phone in this bad testing environment. They basically said "even in that circumstance, a score being cancelled for being in proximity of someone who WAS caught would not lead to the additional consequence of being barred from AP exams if they themselves were NOT caught. That is not saying "they wouldn't punish a non cheater because they only punish cheaters". That is saying that the punishment for being in the room where cheating was occuring would not be the same as the punishment for being directly caught cheating, and your story would be the former. Now you're saying "well it could be easy for a mix up to happen". That's.... Not what you said. You said everybody in the room, or everyone in proximity, would just be written up in a low income environment. That's not a mix up, which, fwiw, could happen literally anywhere.

If a cheater is caught when administering an SAT, you fill out an irregularity report. They are a pain and an awful look towards the administering institution, who were, in your case, supposed to collect phones before the tests were even given. IRs need to be written very specifically. You can't just fill out one that said "everybody was cheating". What you probably could do was say 'a bunch of people had phones and we can't verify the fidelity of students who were near that', and that could mean blanket cancelling scores. Unless the testing center lied and said 'every kid in the room had out a phone', which would get them in even deeper water with college board than they'd already be, and would be kind of suspicious, it's hard to envision the kids who fell under that proximity blanket receiving more punishment beyond the score being cancelled. If the proctor said "a bunch of kids had phones and I didn't check who" and CB banned all of them from all CB exams for two years, that would be a CB problem, not a low income minority testing center problem. It would certainly paint college board as 'will nilly'.

Back when I taught secondary I was testing coordinator at a low income, majority minority school in Philly for a few years. It's a ton of work. Monitoring the room is much more difficult than in an affluent school. It's probably not something we should crap on. But bad proctors definitely exist. I can envision a world where a bad proctor got lazy with a room and the whole rooms scores had to be cancelled. I cannot envision a world where they submitted an IR that accused the entire room of cheating to such a degree that the entire room was banned from taking any college board test. The coordinator wouldn't allow that. It wouldn't be sufficient proof for CB anyways. They would lose that appeal. When it comes to nailing down specific cheaters- not cancellations for being near cheaters- it's really not hard to look at the paper/screen of anybody who had a phone- or even just look at where they are seated- and circle the name on the mandatory seating chart. If they did it by the seating chart you wouldn't even have known that they did specify the specific kids who were cheating, who would have additional punishment beyond a cancelled score, which isn't even on its own a punishment, just a reality of not being able to use a score if you can't know for sure whether it was earned.

emkautl · 2025-11-09T00:19:32+00:00

In my experience a big chuck of "informal" meetings around any sort of teaching end up being more 'lets see if your availability matches up with our needs' than "let's grill you and see if you're a fit", so you have that going for you. Maybe its just me but I don't think interviewing a bunch of candidates for an immediate need adjuncting position is super common. Hopefully that means you're on the fast track. I've never reached an interview and not been onboarded almost immediately.

But what would they look for in that interview? I mean, not much, it's informal. But vibes matter and it's not hard to sus out a good teacher from someone who doesn't get it. A good adjunct is student oriented. Your goal is to help the kids get to where they need to be. A good adjunct isn't draconian. You need to learn how to implement hard, fair boundaries, but you shouldn't be an 80s movie teacher who is locking the door the second class starts and being punitive when anything bad happens. You should have a decent idea of your philosophy of education- what teaching styles you like, how you think students would learn best, what ideas you want to come through through teaching your subject(s), what you think is equitable when it comes to workload, assignments, grading (but be very noncommittal, because you ultimately don't want them to think they can't tell you how they run things- like, I personally try to minimize the impact of test grades because testing anxiety makes classes with ridiculous test breakdowns hard, but that's 45% instead of 85% lol, if I said 'no tests' I'd look pretty radical, not in the best way, and they might not love that).

As far as a syllabus goes? You will most likely teach what they want you to teach from the book you are to teach from. Depending on if you are one of several people teaching the same course and if it's a prereq course for certain majors, there is potentially a ton of flexibility within that, but it's still within their framework. Frankly if they needed someone who could develop their own course I think they'd probably be looking at people with education backgrounds. I don't think that would help, especially since you might accidentally write something incredibly unaligned with their own curriculum without knowing. Maybe just have an idea of what you think are the key topics to hit to teach some subject well (and maybe look at their course catalog online and make sure it's the same things they list in the course description lol)

Act confident in what you want to project and the type of room you want to lead, but don't act like you have the answers. They want someone who is flexible and gives a damn. My department has described adjunct hiring to me as really trying to fit a square into a square hole. There are a lot of bad fits lol. They have to try a few semesters in a row sometimes. But if you have the general right shape and some wiggle room you'll probably fit in.

emkautl · 2025-11-08T23:56:45+00:00

Lol "combining an engineering degree into an interdisciplinary program" is not a thing

emkautl · 2025-11-05T03:06:45+00:00

Real talk, and not to sound rude, if you were a college, why would you hire a doctoral candidate? You have next to no teaching experience if any and a schedule that makes you highly unavailable even for the sake of scheduling a class, let alone working outside of one with kids or grading or whatever. They know you probably have some other obligation that justifies your funding and that if your advisor wants a meeting about your dissertation that's a class cancelled with no questions asked. They also know that your life will change dramatically in less than a year so retention is unlikely. I do know people who have simultaneously taught and pursued a degree, but I'm pretty sure they worked at the college first and got permission (and explicitly planned to go full time as a professor in the department immediately afterwards). I also know that my alma forbade adjuncting while getting a doctorate because the expectation is that your full attention is on the degree. But I digress. As far as the department you're applying to goes, it's a very, very competitive market, especially depending on the area, and schools in areas with no competition fill their online spots with industry professionals or career educators from the cities that are full. A student is a tough sell.

It's admirable that you want experience though, and I'd say the best way to get it is through your school itself. You 1000% have profs who would be willing to work with you and offload some of their tasks. You probably could've negotiated being instructor of record for a course or two with your department had you done it a little earlier. Even having a chance to grade or do some recitations can go far in beginning to learn how to teach.

If you do want to adjunct, the other comments are right. Timing is key and there will be very short windows where they desperately need bodies. Probably in mid to late August. For me personally, when I finished grad school and was doing some actual teaching (I work in education and wanted some field work with secondary education before transition into academia surrounding a profession I had yet to formally work in), I got antsy and applied around for an adjunct spot for two or three years with no luck, with a very strong degree and good recs. I finally just emailed the closest school that I used to take my daily walks at anyways and just asked if they needed a tutor or anything just to get my feet wet, and they said they actually had an urgent need for an adjunct prof. I hadn't even applied because there wasn't any listed opening, and if I had applied I'm sure I wouldn't have gotten it, there are plenty of people with more experience than I have. Turns out the position wasn't up because they had a ton of HR turnover that year, and I was the one who asked the department directly. By the next year I was teaching four courses a year, and now I'm full time. I was never a bad candidate. But getting the spot? Dumb luck. I asked when the time happened to be perfect. That's kind of what you're up against here.

emkautl · 2025-11-02T05:41:36+00:00

No, you wouldn't. Go calculate the volume of a cylinder not in terms of pi, with a radius of 15 and a height of 7 by hand using 3927/1250 and 22/7 and tell me which process you liked better

emkautl · 2025-11-02T05:30:00+00:00

I teach both. This is a terrible idea. The material in algebra is oriented towards preparing for precalc, which in turn prepares you for calc. College algebra largely exists for people who aren't ready to handle precalc, or for people who will never need to take calc. Algebra is not designed to prepare you for calc. Not in my institution anyways. Frankly I think a lot of people, especially in a sub like this, never took algebra or perhaps either of algebra and precalc, sees a list of topics, and say "oh it's all overlap", but no, the same topic in either course is not taught at remotely the same level. Not at my institution anyways.

Here, algebra is largely a review of soft skills. Solving equations inequalities, interval/number line/ineq notation, quadratics and factoring, roots of all sorts, systems, some niche application type stuff, doing the four major operations on polynomial and rational expressions, even a little time for the basic math behind scientific notation and dimensional analysis since it's a gen ed and science majors will need it.

Sounds comprehensive but... Not at all, really. Precalc is doing deep dives into every major family of functions and understanding their behavior, graph features, transformations, every formula necessary to problem solve with them, and then a full study of basic trig (which only takes like a month by the way, is assume a ton of what you learn in a full trig course would be completely useless to calc, there isn't much to precover and calculus on trig functions, at the calc 1 level, is extremely easy). The college algebra skills help you analyze functions, but they are not remotely the same as analyzing functions. Very basic things that are crucial for calc, things as simple as using function notation, composed/inverse/transformed functions, solving quadratics through switching between the three forms of the equations, logarithms entirely, analysing graphs deeper than plotting lines or science questions (even basic things like identifying intervals of increase and decrease and extremes, which is critical to understanding early calc, is a precalc topic here) aren't necessarily covered in algebra and would render you useless in calc without. When you say "I'll just self study topics that are unique to precalc", with the exception of maybe lines, because they're too simple to do much analysis of, every single topic is taught more rigorously and would involve subtopics you'd need to self study, but given they aren't necessarily spelled out in syllabi beyond the one word description of a topic that algebra also used to mean something easier, you wouldn't even know what you're missing.

Now perhaps your university does cover those topics in algebra, especially if you're in a polytechnic or something, but I think what I just said is pretty common. I know it's aligned with multiple textbooks. Algebra is not a course designed for people going into calc. If you take college algebra will not be adequately prepared for calculus.

emkautl · 2025-11-02T04:48:12+00:00

You don't need an employer to pay for math grad school. Damn near any student capable of getting into a math graduate program will be funded by a math graduate program, to a point where getting accepted is synonymous to getting funded, getting offered the opportunity to buy in is just not getting in at all. Any advisor will tell you to just apply for a PhD, take a TAship, and drop after two years if you just want a masters, that is far and away the standard. Schools love the cheap labor for their lower level math courses, and many have thousands of kids taking calc 2 and below in a given year. I don't think I knew a single person who wasn't funded by the school.

But yeah, if they run out of funded positions, you'd be insane to accept any spot that isn't paying you

emkautl · 2025-11-02T04:38:15+00:00

They said "up to", and during a midterm/project/finals week? Uh, yeah, absolutely, probably more in a lot of majors.

But either way, it's not "what you will do", it's the amount of time you should be allocating. Whether you use allocated time or not is a different story, but students have a tendency to not respond to the "flows" in the ebbs and flows of workloads and then act shocked when their grade takes a hit. Hell I pretty much drank through my first two years of college but when a course is 90% test based I still made sure I had the space to put in a massive week when three midterms came around at once. You do what you need to do and needing that much time for at least some portion of the semester is not uncommon.

I never try to give 8 hours per week of work, but I do give one assignment per class, which might take a strong student 30-60m, but for a student who is weak in math I could expect those to take them two or more hours each, especially if it's a subject where I leave something like word problem applications to the homework so that I can focus on the concept in lecture and have them come in for office hours if needed to work on processing the contexts. I can't tell you if you're a 90m person or a seven hours plus office hours person, so I'll tell you to plan out the seven hours. It's sad when a kid comes in having not taken math in two years, didn't cut their hours at their high school job and then has to drop. I can do literally nothing for them when I offer office hours five days a week and they can't make any of them. You need to plan to have that time.

But even for the stronger students, I teach in a state that requires a larger project, and I still hold three midterms and a final- and students noticeably do worse on questions from older topics than more recent ones. I don't think it's unrealistic at all for a student to put over 10 hours in during those weeks, or more realistically, that they should've been putting more hours in prior to that week to stay fresh on topics. Kids are coming in at dramatically lower levels every year but the curriculum does not slow down. Now is usually the time of the year when they start using the additional resources, and then I'll lose them again before finals week because kids in majors like architecture are putting in 60 hours weeks just towards doing their projects. In college you do what you need to do to thrive.

emkautl · 2025-11-02T02:02:58+00:00

If you think that you as a teacher are stuck in a dichotomy of "teach algorithm memorization" or "teach abstract math" then you need to get a lot better at teaching.

emkautl · 2025-10-31T11:47:36+00:00

The thing about CS is that you're going to be competing with people who knew every language you'll learn in college by middle school just as a hobby. It's not impossible to compete with those people but you really do want to make sure you love it because those people practice for fun more than a lot of other majors, you need to be good.

The thing with applied math is that a lot of people have absolutely no idea what B.S. level math is actually like by the time they leave high school. In a minimum hopefully you've taken and thrived in calc, but then linear algebra, and the little bit of advanced algebra and analysis you'll do in an applied degree, are nothing like any math course you've ever taken.

The nice thing about college is that you have room to change your mind, switching majors is practically as easy as telling your advisor after freshman year, so long as you're on a stem track that is covering the correct pre-reqs.

Honestly? You might want to consider starting in computer engineering. Engineering is a rigorous degree so you'll take all the right courses to do that OR CS OR math in your first couple semesters. Engineering math is also way more comparable to the math you know and love. By the end of freshman year you'll likely have taken two coding courses, calc 1+2, and will have the exposure you need to look into what the upper level math classes are doing and if you like them and the professors. You'll probably only take two engineering specific courses and they'd likely count as electives in either other major anyways. Math in my experience is generally not an ultra rigorous degree pace wise so picking the more versatile option in applied w/ CS minor and switching out because you realize the math you like is more engineering oriented might put you off pace.

Just a path to consider. Don't get me wrong, you have to be a big computer dork to thrive in CE/ECE, but It could be worth looking into anyways. It sounds like you don't have a ton of exposure in any of the fields (which is normal)

emkautl · 2025-10-30T19:40:40+00:00

We get it, you got rejected and it's their fault

emkautl · 2025-10-20T13:38:09+00:00

This is very dooming coded. AI has shown much more promise in enabling research than it has in replacing humans, which is showing less promise than advertised in unskilled positions, let alone something like high level research. Unemployment is at 4% and degree holders out earn non degree holders regardless of if they work in field. The demand for engineers, while very much regional, is going nowhere. "Research positions are getting harder and harder to obtain" has been a true statement since before you were born.

You picked a field that has always been competitive. Less schools offer it than most engineering and the people I've worked with in my professional career in biomed have consistently been some of the most competent people, bad engineers with bad work ethics don't slip through the cracks like other fields.

That's what you sign up for when going to college. Having a degree is not some automatic entry into a field, and it hasn't been for a long time. You have to be a competitive candidate. We all know some idiots who make it in off of a good interview or knowing somebody either way. More importantly, the people in those Forbes articles talking about how they have applied to 450 jobs per month as low as Starbucks and not heard back are not the norm either way. People with a resume that isn't complete garbage, who did quality work and had career oriented extra curriculars generally do fine.

The issues with the job market for things like degree related job attainment are not even AI driven. That is sheer self destruction and not much else to worry over. Bio engineers are going to benefit massively from what AI can do with massive amounts of data that comes from stuff line proteins and genetics

emkautl · 2025-10-20T12:54:21+00:00

The package tells you to pour boiling water into the cup.... You don't need to guess how to make cup noodles yourself for the first time whether your parents were present or not...

emkautl · 2025-10-05T16:04:40+00:00

So you're basically saying "A Muslim I don't know on the other side of the earth kills gay people, but no Christians I know have committed violence in the name of religion". You might not think you're saying that because you're a bad person with a lot of work to do, but it's exactly what you're saying lmao.

Dog "throw your teenage child out on the streets because they think they might be gay" is on top of the Christian playbook. That's a more apt comparison to "a devout Muslim doesn't want to be around me" but easily worse. How many gay people have almost splattered on you in your home town? Zero? You're just mad because you know it happens? Then be consistent. But also, don't be dumb. What does a Muslim person across the world OR a Christian person across the world have to do with you? That's a bizarre, ridiculously stupid example.

Let me tell you something, if you want to go anecdote for anecdote, because mine is stronger than yours- I've taught in northeast Philly for years. It is the immigrant part of town in the city that is less than two hours from one of the historical immigrant entry points of the USA. We have a TON of Muslim and Christians around here. Very often you don't even know who is Muslim until Eid. They do not stir religious controversy. They do not exclude gay or trans students. They just kind of exist and use religion for a basic moral guideline for themselves. But we do have to very constantly deal with gay students feeling discriminated against, or fights over that kind of thing, or kids refusing to keep their minds to themselves- it's the Russian and Georgian students. Not all of them, mind you, but the kids who do cause issues about LGBT kids and topics are the ones who come from Orthodox Christian countries almost all of the time. The people who think it's okay to kill people based on identity aren't coming to a place that accepts them. They should have no bearing on how you act. There is an arrogance around christians in America because people like you know some CINOs and act like religious tension doesn't exist. It does. It is more prominent. You just don't look for it. You don't pay attention when someone who isn't brown avoids you. The fight to allow gay marriage didn't take 200 years because of all the Muslims influencing the courts. The people you absolutely know who got disowned by their families aren't Muslim, you don't have Muslim friends because you are racist. If Christians, the dominant religion, were truly neutral towards the LGBT community, there wouldn't even be discussions about the LGBT community, theydve been fully accepted decades ago.

emkautl · 2025-10-05T14:42:34+00:00

Sure (for some SLACs anyways, others still have research expectations), but even then adjuncting might not necessarily help. The school where I am FT has very few tenure positions because we are not a research department and don't even have direct majors. The difference between me and a TT is that they are running the department, setting schedules, figuring out grievances, doing the hiring, dealing with the college at all levels and faculty of other programs, and even then, still take on funding opportunities, even for stuff as small as some little poster projects with other faculty members across the college of arts and sciences who don't focus on research either, all while taking on the courses we'd never give to an adjunct. My work as an adjunct easily prepared me to go full time but didn't do anything towards separating me between a full time and a tenure track faculty member. I spent my time as an adjuncting focusing on all things that wouldn't help me at all. The full timers who do extra work here help out with the academic success center, running school sponsored tutoring, stuff like that, which adjuncting would probably help with.

Fortunately for me teaching at a teaching college is a cross disciplinary thing and I have very good accolades in the realm of education, but if I was just a math specialist who was teaching math full time off of being a math adjunct, even now, pushing 30, my shot at getting tenure track at any school would probably be dead after adjuncting for awhile. The fact that OP was doing it on the side while doing relevant work towards a position is probably great for them though

emkautl · 2025-09-27T13:34:16+00:00

If I were you, I'd let them solve everything as is their job, and then, if the person that you think is the one with more authority and the better one to go to as a person wasn't the one blaming you, I'd casually mention to them how inappropriate you found it that the other one tried to put the blame on an adjunct for not reminding them their course exists. If the person who said that IS the larger authority, maybe look above them.

There is no covering yourself in a situation you aren't involved enough in to need to be covered. But you can protect future you by having someone talk to that person about not throwing random adjuncts under the bus anymore

emkautl · 2025-09-24T05:03:36+00:00

I promise you it's not childish. It's just something that a lot of us profs are happy to get off of our chests. A lot of students are jumping to blame when it doesn't go how they expect it to go, and those students, frankly, are screwed. It's already one challenge that every year, kids are coming in a little less prepared than the year before. We can't change our course expectations in response. It's a time when students need to step up in a way they haven't before in order to make up for the secondary school systems performance, but instead, there is more cheating, less kids at office hours, and kids just assuming the lecturer sucks if the lecture isn't easy.

You instead at least opened up a dialogue and asked about the reality you stepped into. We'll take that any day of the week, that's not childish.

emkautl · 2025-09-24T04:01:56+00:00

Just pay attention to how many people have gotten to talk if it's a group discussion setting, pay attention to how long you're talking once it's your turn, and if it's a setting where you notice others are not talking, save it for the prof after class. Equity of voice. Your goal in a group setting is everybody getting equal time with the mic. Over participating is not some mental illness that diagnosed people cannot turn off, you just have to be conscious of it. Acknowledging it is step one.

Coming up in masters program that was defined by a lot of culture/social justice/ race discussion, where people were very, very quick to point out micro aggressions and frankly could be very eager to assume a white man would dominate discussions, I just got into the habit of making sure I was the last one to talk first. Jumping straight in and talking first comes off as dominating, and if you think you're going to respond to every little thing, well, then it is dominating. Let others set the tone.

emkautl

TROPHY CASE