Ok, here is something I need an LLM to do for me: I want a program where, when I look at the CV of an Ivy-League PhD, it just strips out all the research grants, fellowships, etc. they got writing their diss. I don't want to know, it doesn't help, it just makes me angry. - ThreadSky

bretdevereaux.bsky.social • 104 days ago

Ok, here is something I need an LLM to do for me: I want a program where, when I look at the CV of an Ivy-League PhD, it just strips out all the research grants, fellowships, etc. they got writing their diss.

I don't want to know, it doesn't help, it just makes me angry.

Comments

drmichaeljtaylor.bsky.social•104 days ago

These are actually things one shouldn't really even put on your CV---I consider it a rookie mistake. No one really cares if you got a routine or even semi-competitive grant in Grad School.

Only big things, hyper-competative grants like "Rome Prize" or "ASCSA Fellow" really matter.

drmichaeljtaylor.bsky.social•104 days ago

I've seen CVs where people list every routine funding grant they got in grad school on *page 1* and don't bother with publications until page 2!

Do not list that you got the Chatham Edwards Whomper IV Doctoral Completion fellowship. No one cares!

viscousboredom.bsky.social•104 days ago

These absolutely should leave your CV fairly quickly, but for candidates that are just entering the market, it can be helpful to have anything that signals "the professors in my program like me and think I'm worth investing in", which is all that a lot of those grants actually means

bretdevereaux.bsky.social•104 days ago

The thing is, I don't know that it is a rookie mistake. "Look, I was in the club of people that Princeton/Harvard/Stanford/etc. decided were Special" may be the single most important thing you can be able to signal on a job application in our field.

sappo7.bsky.social•104 days ago

I think this is true in a lot of fields well beyond academia too. "I may seem kind of thick in interviews, but look who I'm Connected to!"

cwjones.bsky.social•104 days ago

I will confess that my CV is organized exactly like this and that's because my adviser told me to do it this way.

bretdevereaux.bsky.social•104 days ago

I am Degrees-> Book -> Journal Articles -> Chapters -> Talks/Papers -> Reviews -> Honors -> 'Traditional Media' -> Public Engagement

But of course I don't have any prestigious funding to report, just the funding apparatus I built through the blog and patreon.

bretdevereaux.bsky.social•104 days ago

The problem, of course, with building your own funding is that this both excites and disgusts academics in equal measures and unfortunately if half of a hiring committee is impressed and the other half thinks you represent the disintegration of the academy, you aren't getting hired.

loukas.bsky.social•104 days ago

I want to believe no one cares, but I fear many university employers see potential researchers also in terms of potential fundraisers. So your ability to attract gold like a magnet is under the spotlight.

dankuser2020.bsky.social•104 days ago

I think you might have found one of the first actually good uses for a LLM in the academic world

delicious-carbs.bsky.social•104 days ago

And as with most other things people propose using LLMs for, it’s probably better solved with a non-LLM solution…

bretdevereaux.bsky.social•104 days ago

I applied for the various research awards when I was a grad student, I got one (1) funded research semester. Everything else was a 'no.'

I applied for research post-docs as a fresh PhD - never even interviewed.

My book is under contract at OUP.

This system is absurdly broken.

orman.bsky.social•104 days ago

I expect you've explained this before but I simply can't wrap my head around the logic at the individual committee level of preferring new grads over experienced teachers.

markofcalth.bsky.social•104 days ago

My cynical assumption is that the 'logic' is something like "Good heavens, we don't want to encourage TEACHING! That's not where the prestige comes from"

orman.bsky.social•104 days ago

I mean, teachers and/or researchers, I know the balance varies depending where you are. Candidates in general.

bretdevereaux.bsky.social•104 days ago

I can't shake the sense that something has gone quite wrong with the way we support research if *no one* was interested in funding or supporting a project that generates an OUP monograph.

surcomplicated.bsky.social•104 days ago

It's literally because the donors who fund this stuff see prestige as "Harvard" or whatever other super-elite university's name brand, and not as a book from a super-prestigious press, because they attend dinners at elite universities but seldom actually read the work produced.

surcomplicated.bsky.social•104 days ago

University donors are no more sophisticated in their consumption than people who decide to buy Coca-Cola because the ad on TV tells them it's refreshing.

surcomplicated.bsky.social•104 days ago

Which is, of course, a roundabout way of saying that we need governments to allocate these resources because charitable donors are so easily won over with advertising gimmicks from preexisting prestigious brands, something sadly true across the entire NGO sector, not just academia.

robertstadler.bsky.social•104 days ago

I don't think governments are immune to these dynamics either.

It's humans all the way down (except when it's computers trained on humans' biased decisions).

palecur.bsky.social•104 days ago

i confess i have no idea what mechanism it is that you think exists that makes a government official impervious to what you describe as "advertising gimmicks".

Is the principle here basically "government is fair and private orgs aren't"? because I'm afraid I'd need you to show your work there.

bretdevereaux.bsky.social•104 days ago

And to be clear, this isn't any sort of slight against whatever scholar's CV I'm looking at. Their work is invariably interesting and worthwhile!

But I like to think my book contract suggests my work has been worthwhile too. And yet I've been left to fund it myself.

struthious.bsky.social•104 days ago

also most of the fellowships , grants etc that my American fellow students in my program got were not open for foreigners like me to apply to

noctouyan.bsky.social•104 days ago

sounds a bit interesting

Do you have access to, or know where to find some CVs to start messing around with?

Ideally some Ivies and non-Ivies both in the group

bretdevereaux.bsky.social•104 days ago

Most professors provide a link to their CV on a faculty page, so you could start harvesting them pretty easily by going through department faculty pages.

johannesnagel.bsky.social•104 days ago

I want the reverse: a LLM to look at my life/ career and produce a perfect academic CV... and maybe an entire stack of applications while they're at it

isaiahbishop.bsky.social•104 days ago

You could probably cook this up pretty quick tbh

kitesva.bsky.social•104 days ago

Sure Alan Turing may have been instrumental in winning a war against fascism but his real accomplishment was creating a national security justification for governments to shovel money into basic mathematics research

kitesva.bsky.social•104 days ago

I know U Michigan is still an elite institution by any reasonable metric but as a mathematician I’m eternally grateful that it’s possible to get funding for work outside a tiny circle of departments

neotiamat99.bsky.social•104 days ago

I'm pretty sure all the research funding I got back in the day worked out to somewhat under $10k USD.

I got a couple of thousand dollar (as in, you got $1k) grants from my university, and one Balkan research center gave me a $600 a month stipend and a room in a basement apartment for three months.

neotiamat99.bsky.social•104 days ago

I don't think I realized that "funded semesters" was even a thing until I had just about graduated. It was not for the likes of us.

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