<p>Grad school is more like a job than it is school. A high hours, low pay job with classes on the side.</p>
<p>And you shouldn’t have to work to get girls. You just shouldn’t. If you find someone that really is interested in you, then you shouldn’t have to do any work or pull any gimmicks to do it. The trick is just attracting her interest in the first place.</p>
<p>I had a blast in grad school. The partying didn’t slow down! We studied hard and then went out. I took flying lessons and met my future husband. And got paid enough that I had extra money to spend. The only part I didn’t like was freezing and thawing polymer concrete beams over and over and over again!</p>
<p>Geez, UT pays that well, huh? Now I am jealous. I get paid enough, but only enough, haha.</p>
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<p>okay, I’m pretty sure thats my problem. The fact that I’m a 4th year student and I’ve never had a girlfriend makes me extremely insecure. </p>
<p>So in order to get confidence, I’d need to get a girlfriend but in order to get a girlfriend I’ll need confidence…gah…</p>
<p>You do not need a girl to be confident. The only guys who are 100% confident of themselves around women they are interested in are the d-bags who just go through like 20 women a year… not the kind of guy you want to be (or maybe it is).</p>
<p>Any NORMAL guy is probably only 90% confident at any point in time AT BEST. After all, women are an enigma. The key is even though you don’t have that 100% confidence, you still have to go out on a limb sometimes and risk getting rejected. Seriously, it is not that bad. The worst that can happen is a girl says no. Big deal. If you take that chance, you can pretty much fake having that super high confidence, and then if it works, then next time you talk to her you really WILL have that confidence.</p>
<p>How did you quantify confidence?</p>
<p>Yeah, I know, I’m a jackass. Just a pet peeve when people use that. I still remember my 9th grade civics teacher trying to tell me that you have beyond 99% of all doubt to vote guilty when sitting on a jury…</p>
<p>Stupid… So stupid…</p>
<p>boneh3dad - one thing that helped was that I didn’t have to pay any taxes on my earnings back then. You do now, right? It was a long time ago, too - 1985! I was paid $10,000 per year, and I didn’t have to pay any tuition. I shared an apartment, so I didn’t have many living expenses.</p>
<p>MaineLonghorn,</p>
<p>Texas still has no state income tax, so it is definitely nice only having like $50 a month taken out for the federal tax. It seems like sales tax is higher here than back home in St. Louis though, so that kind of helps make up for it, but not completely.</p>
<p>QwertyKey,</p>
<p>Give me a break. Of course you can quantify confidence. You can’t necessarily measure it, but there are very few things in life where you are completely, without a doubt sure that it will work. There is always that voice in the back of your mind saying “I have some doubts about that.” I am merely attaching a semi-arbitrary number to just how strong or loud that voice is.</p>
<p>You can shadow me for a day, I’ll show ya the ropes. PM for my location.</p>
<p>from your user name I’d guess you’re at University of Alberta. Will you consider Toronto for grad school? I could use your help…</p>
<p>aha I’d imagine you’d be long gone by the time I got to grad school.</p>
<p>Finding a girlfriend is easy; if you can’t find one directly, find one over the internet… There are tons of websites that help find local singles…</p>
<p>That is a depressing outlook you have on life there Davey.</p>
<p>That would imply that anyone who gets married after 27 is settling. There are TONS of people getting married at 27 or later these days, which is why they say that “30 is the new 20.” A lot of people get married later not because they are settling, but because they spend their early 20’s running after the hottest person they could regardless of personality, then only came to their senses later and stopped dating bi<em>**es/d</em>*chebags and started dating actual people. There is a lot more to it than older women are forced to settle.</p>
<p>The world isn’t so black and white…I think any idiot knows that.</p>
<p>Yeah, wow. What boneh3ad said-- far smarter than his screenname implies.</p>
<p>I’m 27. My friends are all 27. My best friend, for example, maid of honor at my wedding, is smokin’ hot, smart, and funny. Harvard graduate, fluent in Spanish and Italian aside from English, is undeniably the life of the party, has an amazing job and an MBA and makes about 50% more than I do. She is gorgeous and charming and she’s incredibly career driven. She’s stubborn, so she’s not going to settle for a handsome jackass who treats her like crap (unfortunately, because she’s smokin’ hot, she tends to attract the pretty jackasses). So since she’s so busy working on paying off her incredible house and her new car and hanging out with her friends and advancing at her job, she’s not really interested in settling down, getting married, and babymakin’. (Though she really dove for my toss bouquet, bless her heart. She’s a good friend.)</p>
<p>She pays for her own toys. I pay for my own toys; I make $20K more than my husband does. Neither of us needs a man for money. How insulting that you think all women would want a man for monetary purposes. How insulting that you compare all women to toddlers. I’d say most of the women worth marrying (or even worth holding a conversation with) can take care of themselves financially… “Mediocre job.” Please. It’s dating, not a professional interview. Real women are looking for someone to be in a relationship with; they’re not hiring someone to support them while they sit around at home and file their nails. Being a “kept woman” sounds unspeakably boring.</p>
<p>My friend’s not lowering her standards now that she’s 27, and she never will lower her standards. But if she wants to, she will find an amazing man who understands her and treats her well, and maybe she’ll get married, maybe to a guy several years younger than she is. She’s got a full agenda right now, though. But no, everything’s not quite so cut-and-dried.</p>
<p>Here’s hoping that you do a little more growing up before you graduate.</p>
<p>There are some. They’re not worth it, though, so don’t date 'em. Let the jerks who want a trophy wife keep the crapload of airheads out of the way so the rest of us don’t have to deal with 'em!</p>
<p>haha, if there was the ability to have signatures on this forum, mine would quote your first line their aibarr. When I use the term “lol” here, I mean it literally. I did laugh out loud a little bit. I am sure had anyone else been in my apartment at the time, they would have been confused. If I was in Houston more often, I would offer to buy you a beer or something during the next televised Illini game (seeing as how you have to have a couple drinks to get over the sad state of affairs that are our football team right now) to thank you for that compliment. =D Your husband might not approve though, haha.</p>
<p>I guess to be fair, I do have a lot of female friend who are, or were at one point interested mostly in money and having a guy buy all their stuff for them. Most of them grew out of that stage after they got to their early 20s, and the ones that still act like that are very uninteresting people.</p>
<p>Hence “airheaded trophy wives”.</p>
<p>Reminds me of how confused I was by women in high school. Looking back, the only conclusion I can come to is that they themselves weren’t sure about what they wanted at the time <_></p>
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<p>To be fair, I don’t think many guys knew what they wanted back then either, haha. I sure didn’t. I had a penchant for dating (or trying to date) cheerleaders. They I realized that they seemed to have a higher likelihood of just being total jerks to me eventually, so I quickly grew out of that trend. It was odd, though, that when I met a girl sophomore year of college that it turned out she used to be a cheerleader, which scared me a little bit. Lo and behold, 3 year later we are still dating… go figure, haha.</p>
<p>Well, it doesn’t matter now. I’m an engineering student. I see unicorns and basilisks more often than I see women.</p>