Since I am again a member of the National Dean’s List this year, I knew it was only a matter of time before they sent the letter inviting me to attend a series of lectures in China for $5,000 again. While the program is not nearly as selective as they’d like to make people think, the people who go do seem to genuinely enjoy the experience (essentially, it’s a vacation where you get to talk to interesting people, much like the conference I just came back from). However, it’s far<\/i> too disruptive and too expensive to even consider, especially with my planned dissertation timeline this year, so I usually just stash the letter in my “archive of things I’ll look back on someday and laugh at” (a.k.a. my closet).<\/p>\n
The interesting thing is that this year, they didn’t assign me to a “delegation”, to be shipped off to China. They let me pick both the “delegation” and the country.<\/p>\n
I don’t know if this represents an overall change in the program or if they actually understand the polymath thing I’m aiming for. Either way, it’s an interesting change, if irrelevant (because I’m still not going).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Since I am again a member of the National Dean’s List this year, I knew it was only a matter of time before they sent the letter inviting me to attend a series of lectures in China for $5,000 again. While the program is not nearly as selective as they’d like to make people think, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomideas.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}