Graduate School Taxes

Education taxes in the United States can seem complicated, especially since the standard tax forms and publications aren't the easiest to navigate, and often schools and employers don’t provide general help even when the majority of their students will have very similar situations.

If you keep the basic concept of an income tax in mind, though, it should become easier to figure out:

Any and all money you receive from someone else is taxable and must be reported as such unless otherwise specified¹.

I will go through the 4 most common income categories for a graduate student, with the assumption that that the reader has never filed taxes before, and provide information on free tax filing programs.

Disclaimer: I have no formal tax training. I’m just a moderately intelligent graduate student who has dealt with this for a few years and read the relevant documents.

Constructing a ‘Fair’ Income Tax

When it comes to taxation, what is fair? What is not? In thinking about economics, it occurred to me that a simple discussion of how we got the income tax system we have today would be pertinent.

Why I Don’t Believe in Gods

Please note the title of this post. In writing this, it is not my intention to convince anyone to “deconvert”. Though I do hope that what I say here might provoke readers to think more deeply about what they believe and why they believe it, my main goal is simply to outline my reasons for becoming an atheist so that people close to me who are interested might understand why.

If You Absolutely Have to Run Linux...

When you are in the world of science, every now and then you will run across a piece of code that only runs on Linux. If you don’t know what Linux is or ever have to use it, be grateful. The only good thing about Linux, as far as end-users are concerned, is that there are versions of it that are free and works fairly well in general. Beyond that, it is an overcomplicated, confusing, and poorly documented system where anything beyond the basic usage requires intimate knowledge of command lines, configuration files, and environment variables. Further, I think it encourages those who write Linux-specific code to also adopt these non-intuitive practices, which can bleed into Windows ports of these programs.

This post is dedicated to those like me who would like to be able to run Linux programs when we need to, but otherwise to shove it in a dark corner of our computers where we never need to see it again. I will introduce the basics of Linux and describe how to install it inside a virtual machine on Windows 7.

The Value and Danger of Anecdotal Experiences

Why anecdotes shouldn't be trusted. (xkcd #842: Mark)

I would like to share with you an anecdote.

For a long time, I kept my cell phone in my left pants pocket. After some time, I began noticing that the muscle just underneath it would occasionally twitch.

Feeling curious, I moved my phone to my right pocket. After a while, I noticed that the twitches in the left muscle weren’t happening anymore. And just recently (about 6 months later) I noticed some twitches occurring under my right pocket.

Ah-ha! you might think. Long-term exposure to cell phone radiation has some effect on muscles!

Well… no. It’s a curious correlation at best, but there are a number of problems with making any sort of conclusion from this single experience:

Logic

Inspired by a friend's Facebook status, using the Parody Motivator Generator from Despair, Inc.

A Young Girl Walking

Scene: A sidewalk along a busy Atlanta street. The sun is out, and the heat and humidity prowls the mid-morning air, biding its time. A seemingly young, petite girl with long, light brown hair is casually walking. She wears a form-fitting striped light green-and-white dress just barely long enough to serve its purpose. A silver stud sits above her right upper lip, and a large, intricate tattoo rests on her outer left thigh, partially occluded by the fabric of her dress. Held up in her left hand is an iPhone, playing music from its speakers, and in her right hand dangles a half-spent cigarette. People pass her from behind and she just turns her head, smiles at them slightly, and continues on walking, unperturbed.

(This is a scene I observed while walking by Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, on Clifton Rd., on Friday, August 20th. I felt it deserved a narrative treatment because though no single element was particularly unique, the juxtaposition was simply too intriguing.)