In a Good Place

As I read the online forums of people discussing applying to graduate school, and see people freaking out / slowly dying of despair that they keep getting rejections and no nibbles of interest from any of their programs, I sometimes have this sudden feeling of "But I already got an admission from a well-respected program that I'm interested in, that will set me up well for a variety of options post-masters, and that can afford to go to (without loans) even if I don't get any funding. It's even located someplace where Robert can probably get a job, even in the down economy." It's a good feeling. I'm a lot more relaxed in general than I was 6 months ago.

I have also been working on my PhD marketing list and have narrowed it down to about 20 schools that I am seriously thinking about right now (though this may change, esp. if I blow away the GMAT - particularly on the quant side - and decide to attack more top 10/20 programs). Here is how the programs seem to fall out in terms of "tiers," though since there isn't any single accepted ranking of marketing PhD programs, I used a couple different sources and came up with my own:

Top 10-ish programs - 3
Top 20-ish - 0 (hmmm)
Top 30-ish - 7
Top 40-ish - 5
Top 60-ish - 2
Below top 60 - 3

One thing that's interesting about marketing PhD programs is that since they take so few students (typically 1-2), getting into a top 50 program means that you are somewhere in the top 50-100 applicants each year. That's not a small feat. As Robert points out, the top 3 programs in economics alone enroll nearly 100 students per year.

Last week, I was reading a bit from psychologist Martin Seligman's book Learned Optimism and I discovered that on his very first day of graduate school, he showed up in his advisor's lab, where everybody was going crazy because the dogs were refusing to participate in their next experiment. (This was during the heydey of behaviorism, when psychology was about putting rats, pigeons, etc., into boxes, conditioning them to push buttons to avoid shocks and that sort of thing.) When one of the other students explained the situation to him, he came up with, on the spot, the central idea that he quickly developed into the theory of learned helplessness. On his very first day. (At least, that's how his narrative presents it.) That rather sets a standard, doesn't it?

"Seligman described learned helplessness as a process in which animals, including people, learn that their behavior and the outcome of a situation are independent of each other; this learning results in a sense of uncontrollability with motivational, cognitive, and emotion effects. Specifically important to learned helplessness theory is the concept of expectation. The incentive for responding in an aversive situation is the expectation that one's behavior can result in relief; without this expectation, there is little motivation for responding and responding will be reduced. Since the optimal escape/avoidance behavior is learned through action-response contingencies, an animal which already expects that the outcomes are independent of his behavior (from prior experience) will have trouble learning to act when placed in a situation in which behavior does influence outcome.

Seligman defined 'uncontrollable' situations as ones in which the probability of a reinforcement given a response is no different from the probability of a reinforcement without a response; more formally, when p(RF/R) = p(RF/R*), where R is the response and R* is no response. During learned helplessness experiments, subjects learn about p(RF/R) and p(RF/R*) conjointly. Thus, subjects receive information about the response-outcome contingency in the form of learning/expectation, and then behave in accordance with this representation.

Learned helplessness theory also diverges from classical S-R theories of conditioning by eliminating the role of fear as a motivation of behavior; subjects in a shuttle-box make the avoidance response because they prefer the outcome of jumping (no shock) to the outcome of not jumping (shock)."
--Sally Porter, "Learned Helplessness: A New Approach to Avoidance Learning," 1994

(Note: those shouldn't be slashes in the conditional probabilities up there, but if I use the proper symbol, it doesn't show up when I preview the post. Whatever.)

In other news, Leo was sick this morning (runny eyes, loose stool, lethargic) but did not have a fever. He didn't eat this morning but started eating again this afternoon and seems to be doing much better. I hope it's nothing more serious than a bunny cold/flu. Robert kept in contact with one of the bunny experts from the local rabbit group over the course of the day, and she is apparently not terribly concerned about these symptoms.