She seems to choose such unflattering pictures of herself for her thumbnails. I can’t work out if it’s deliberate or just that she’s being slapdash and thinks that *any* picture of herself will do. Or whether she thinks a picture of herself looking stressed is somehow relatable to people? Or she just doesn’t really have much of an eye for picking pictures … Who knows, but like you say it doesn’t really go with her branding of super-duper study queen and academic who loves studying.
Ruby Granger #23 Her workload‘s pure spuddle, let’s all twirl in a puddle!
- Start date
-
- Tags
- Ruby Granger Threads Wiki
- Status
New to Tattle Life? Click "Order Thread by Most Liked Posts" button below to get an idea of what the site is about:
Throwback to two years ago, when she was still annoying but looked much healthier and happier
She looked so much healthier
I can't help but wonder how things could've been different if she had have stayed in Exeter during COVID instead of going home. In uni you're forced out of your comfort zone a little. Going home just allowed her to engage in her most maladaptive behaviours... and in turn promote them to her audience.
Also, sorry if this is off topic but I have been thinking and I can't help but feel that Ruby's longing for childhood is out of a misplaced desire to feel "safe." She avoids things that seem too adult or frightening, engages in these regimented routines and shys away from all "adult" types of media (sex, relationships, teen drama, whatever). Of course there are some people who are calmed by routines, who don't like romance novels and who don't enjoy parties or drinking. That's fine. But with Ruby I feel like it isn't that she just doesn't like these things, but that they frighten her.
she looks so happy and cute on that third picture, it's really sad she has no joy in her eyes anymore
She looks really cute with her curly hair on the fourth picture. She looks like a totally different person now and not in a good way.
I love Elena Handtrack's thumbnails for her Study with Mes. They feel... fuzzy and motivational?
It's like a different person
Couldn't have put it better myself.
She actually looks a bit like Mary Mouser in the bottom right
She was at her best right when she started university at 18, imo.
With regards to Ruby’s grades, I remember watching a video at the end of her first year studying English and she gave the percentages for her modules and achieved a low first overall. As the difficulty increases in subsequent years, it seems counter-intuitive to think her grades would increase so dramatically.
I have an Arts degree and I think 75 or above is excellent and 80 or above is regarded as being of publishable standard. In reality a mark in the low to mid 70s is a job well done.
I was trying to figure out why it would be advantageous to lie to the world, but it is clearly to present herself as a great student.
if these grades are accurate, I think they are achieved almost by dishonest means - a heavy reliance on secondary literature and the ideas of others. You are supposed to reference when referring to the ideas of others, not just direct quotes, in which case most of Ruby’s essays should be attributed to Blakey and lecturers in the English Department.
I have an Arts degree and I think 75 or above is excellent and 80 or above is regarded as being of publishable standard. In reality a mark in the low to mid 70s is a job well done.
I was trying to figure out why it would be advantageous to lie to the world, but it is clearly to present herself as a great student.
if these grades are accurate, I think they are achieved almost by dishonest means - a heavy reliance on secondary literature and the ideas of others. You are supposed to reference when referring to the ideas of others, not just direct quotes, in which case most of Ruby’s essays should be attributed to Blakey and lecturers in the English Department.
All this talk about grades seems so snobbish and superficial to me lol - maybe cause I'm in the medical field and good grades on an essay won't cure patients.
I don't quite understand what your point is to be honest - is Ruby superficial because she potentially lied about her grades or are we superficial because we're discussing it?
I don’t think it’s inconceivable that Ruby is getting good grades. It seems like such a stupid thing to lie about and is something that’d bite her hard on the backside at some point anyway - she’s going to have to announce her final grade at some point and we know it’ll end up on her LinkedIn, and you can’t keep a lie like that up forever. Also we can’t say that on the one had that she’s not a good actress but in the other she’s showing genuine glee at a good grade, I think it’d be very obvious if she was making that up.
She seems to spend a short time actually writing her essays and a hell of a lot of time tinkering and seeking feedback from tutors, and it’d be crazy if that wasn’t impacting her grades positively - and it does suggest that there are some people that Ruby will listen to! I suspect that she’s very much writing about what she knows will get her the grades, rather than taking any kind of risk. I also think we need to remember that this is undergrad level and even being at a RG uni you’re unlikley to get someone writing essays of stunning originality and insight, even in their third year. You can get a solid first without being brilliant.
She seems to spend a short time actually writing her essays and a hell of a lot of time tinkering and seeking feedback from tutors, and it’d be crazy if that wasn’t impacting her grades positively - and it does suggest that there are some people that Ruby will listen to! I suspect that she’s very much writing about what she knows will get her the grades, rather than taking any kind of risk. I also think we need to remember that this is undergrad level and even being at a RG uni you’re unlikley to get someone writing essays of stunning originality and insight, even in their third year. You can get a solid first without being brilliant.
True but a good grade would suggest you know enough not to actively harm someone …
I just can't reconcile her getting good grades with the way she talks about books on her channel and in her Goodreads reviews. If she were studying any other subject that would be one thing, but she's studying Eng Lit. Surely if your essays about literary works are so great you'd be able to talk about the books you read for pleasure with a little more depth than "it was so good, I especially liked the lyrical writing" or just describing what the book is about.
Yeah but she isn’t having her hand held there. We know that for her uni work she’s leaning hard on other people and her tutors, and is asking them how to improve her essays and is probably quoting from the books and papers they’ve recommended. She’s being guided though her essays, in a way that she isn’t for her Goodreads and so on. She’s very much an exemplar of that kind of private school kid who is used to being absolutely walked through anything academic, and has been taught how to get a good grade. Whatever people say, you can still do that at undergrad level. Write a decently structured essay, seek feedback, get someone to proofread for you and you can get a good grade. She’ll struggle like hell at a higher level but I can see how she’s getting a decent grade at undergrad - let’s face it, with the hours she’s putting in it’d be more surprising if she wasn’t. It’s not like she’s having to hold down a job to support herself either.
Last edited:
Yeah I completely agree - I don't think she's lying about her grades. I think she really gets these high grades, but she achieves them through brute force instead of through origininality or creative thought. She's basically gaming the system by putting in an insane amount of hours, using her tutors (and poor Blakeney) as resources, and spending A LOT of time and effort on revising, proofreading, and getting feedback. If she had to write an essay within a normal amount of time/with the normal amount of hours, or without external help, she'd be fucked.
But like you said, sooner or later she won't get far with that approach because I firmly believe that at some point, original thought/analysis/ideas will be required of her to succeed, and then she'll crash and burn like she did in her Oxford interview back in the day. Give Ruby a time limit and take away her access to external help and she'll fail, essentially.
Maybe that point will come during her Master's, or maybe later when defending her PhD (if she does one, god help us if she does). Or maybe it'll even come later down the line, in a job interview or when applying for a professorship or sth. But that point will come, and then she'll struggle mightily.
Cause she doesn't have originial insights cause at the end of the day, she doesn't have a genuine love for literature imho. What she does have, however, is a genuine love for being praised and being told she's smart. And that's why for her, it makes sense psychologically to continue down the acaemic path at all costs even though she's really not well suited for it, and lacks talent.
Yeah, she's also been almost entirely assigned essays that give her a clear, predefined essay question to work with and a list of reading to work from, which narrows the scope of what she needs to do.
She's already unintentionally tipped her hand several times in her videos as to how she crafts her essays from there:
- Takes copious notes from other students in seminars and harangues Blakeney into a post-seminar "debrief" after every lecture and seminar to compile Blakeney's thoughts for later.
- Syncs up her Notion with Blakeney's to easily copy all her notes.
- Goads her tutor's thoughts out with emails full of leading questions, so she knows the kind of ideas the tutor grading wants to hear.
- Does not read the main text. Reads summaries/character sheets from Sparknotes and study guides instead to save time.
- She focuses that reclaimed time on doing ridiculous amounts of critical/secondary reading above and beyond the recommended reading - these will be relatively short essays, and anything longer she will skim for general ideas and quotes, but skipping a 200-300 page+ main text affords her a lot of additional time for critical reading that other students won't have.
- Finds an argument she likes amongst the critical reading that fits the essay thesis provided and she feels her tutor will agree with.
- Outlines a rough essay in Notion made up of heavily reworded, borrowed ideas from Blakeney, her tutor/s, other students and critical material.
- Adds in a metric tit-tonne of critical quotes to support and contrast her borrowed ideas.
- Further ropes Blakeney into proofreading and providing notes and suggestions.
- Likely runs this revised essay by her tutor for pre-submission feedback to tweak things further in the right direction.
This clearly works well for her when given a couple of predefined essay questions to choose from, but she won't have the same luxury with her dissertation or a creative writing project (if she's still doing one).
Blakeney isn't going to hold her hand through 10,000 words of Victorian letter-writing etiquette bullshit. She's on her own, and she rarely does well when relying on her own brain for thoughts and ideas. It'll be a disaster, so it's no surprise she's been floundering so much with her dissertation.
And even if by some miracle she does graduate with a First overall, it's not going to have any real value for her in the real world. A degree doesn't count for as much as it used to, especially in the UK, and a humanities degree especially won't be regarded with the same value career-wise as if she were studying law or medicine.
The reaction from employers when she brags about a First in English will be "Oh, cool. Let's talk about your work experience..." At which point, this will be her reaction:
She's put all her eggs in the study basket, never growing as a person, never putting any effort into her business or YouTube, not expanding her experience or interests in any real way and getting zero practical job skills.
That might've been worth it if she actually took pride in the academic work she did and the knowledge she learned at university, but she put more work into cutting corners and avoiding actually learning anything. So all she has after graduation is no experience, no knowledge and grades she didn't earn.
Yes but you forget that she's a very smart, very special girl who's so kind and mature and ahead of her age so surely every employer will be thrilled to have her! /s
I think her parents are reminding her of this very thing as we speak during her weekly getaway to her mouldy childhood bedroom.
- Status