Today I’d like to discuss strategies for procuring gainful employment. You might perhaps object that I am, as a recruiter might scribble in the margins of my resume, “not qualified” to dispense advice on this subject. On this score you’d be right. Four years and 17 Lehrmda posts ago (1 Lehrmda post = ~85 days),…
Author: Patrick Calderon
Great Quotes from Academia: A Marxist Reappropriation of Surplus Academic Value
Scholarship, in any field, is a sujet sérieux. It is the noble, dignified enterprise of making the unknown known, of pursuing heights of knowledge and understanding never before attained. While bourgeois oppression of the proletariat and elitist monopolization of peer-reviewed journals prevents some of the best insights from academia from reaching the general public—the demos, as it were—we have…
10 Things We Don’t Like (April)
Pictured: something we do like, simply for the purposes of clickbait. Also things we don’t like: clickbait. 2/10. This is the second in our “series” of posts about things we do not like. “Series” is in “scare quotes,” not only because we have thus far failed to master the complexities of English grammar (TOEFL score: 114, IELTS…
A Cupcake, Revisited: First Reflections as a Graduate Student
Above: If graduate school were a food item, it would be an expired, half-eaten cupcake that you decide to eat because of nostalgic attachment to memories of a previously good, food-standards-compliant cupcake. I recently returned to Notre Dame to take up a master’s degree program, thus remedying my mistake of studying only the humanities as…
American Capitalism, in one image*
I am from Vancouver, Canada, which, aside from being a danger zone for anyone with a sushi addiction, has a reputation of being pretty expensive as far as cities go. Sure, it’s no London or Singapore, but its real estate is crazy expensive — the average price of detached homes in the city is $2.6…
Refugees and Jesus: The Meaninglessness of Christianity without Love
[I]s it not already and in itself alarming that Europe’s Christian culture is barely in a position to uphold Europe’s own Christian values? With these words, Victor Orban justified his government’s resistance to welcoming those refugees presently streaming into Europe on the grounds that the influx of Muslim migrants is a threat to so-called “Christian values.”…
On moving home after college, especially when that home is in another country
Going to a Top-20 university has the tendency to instill in students just a tad bit of arrogance. Right off the bat, on Frosh-O weekend (now “welcome weekend” at Notre Dame, because somehow it is so offensive to say “freshman” these days), first-year students are told, “you’re the most accomplished incoming class this university has…
Memory as the Intersection of Past, Present and Future
If you read Rafa’s “Theories of Time Pt. I: The Fundamental Paradox of Nostalgia & the Perils of the Treasure Chest,” I would just like to commend you for putting up with the type of hyper-intellectualized, abstract discourse with which I have put up for the past four years—the type in which we can take a very simple…
A Creed for a New Year
Above: Seriously, what do we even do with these? A creed for a new year. Well, not really a “year,” I guess, because our academic lives are now (hopefully temporarily) finished and the year now runs from January to December, like it does for normal people, instead of from August to May, like it does for the…
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