One of the most interesting sessions at the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting was a panel of men and women who participated in the IGERT program as students and are now working in a variety of different careers. The point of the panel was to hear about the ways that they felt their experiences as IGERT trainees prepared them for their current positions, as well as to identify aspects of their current jobs where more preparation might have been helpful.
The session was moderated by Judy Giordan (President and Co-Founder, Visions in Education, Inc.). The IGERT alums who participated in the panel were:
Fabrisia Ambrosio (University of Pittsburgh)
Abigail Anthony (Environment Northeast, a non-profit)
Edward Hederick (Congressional Fellow)
Lisa Kemp (Co-founder, Ablitech, Inc.)
Henry Lin (Amgen, Inc.)
Yaniria Sanchez de Leon (University of Puerto Rico)
Andrew Todd (U.S. Geological Survey)
Marie Tripp (Intel)
What helped you prepare for your current role?
Category Archives: Academia
Corrupting the youth at freshman orientation.
The funding situation in the California State University system being what it is (scary-bad), departments at my fair university are also scrambling to adjust to a shift in the logic governing resource distribution. It used to be that resources followed enrollments — that the more students you could pack into your classes, the more money your department would be given to educate students.
Now, in the era of enrollment caps (because the state can’t put up its share of the cost for as many students as it used to), it’s looking like resources will be driven by how many majors a department can enroll (without violating caps on total enrollment for that department’s course offerings — this is a seriously complicated optimization problem).
Plus, because we (i.e., the bean-counters and the tax-payers) don’t want students frittering away tax-payer subsidized coursework (i.e., taking a single unit in excess of the minimum number of units needed to earn a degree), there is an imperative for incoming frosh to declare a major within two semesters, and for incoming transfer students to declare a major within one semester — and then, once the major has been declared, it is permanent. Like a tattoo. (Because, see, changing majors often requires doubling back to complete the requirements of the new major to which you have switched, which pushed you beyond the minimum number of units needed to earn a degree.)
Among other things, this means my department is working hard at this summer’s weekly freshman orientation events to drum up prospective majors. To that end, my colleagues Anand Vaidya and Jim Lindahl put together something of a top 10 list:
IGERT meeting: the Digital Science panel.
As mentioned in an earlier post, I was recently part of a panel on Digital Science at the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting in Washington, D.C. The meeting itself brought together PIs, trainees, and project coordinators who are involved in a stunning array of interdisciplinary research programs. Since the IGERT program embraces mottos like “get out of the silos” and “think outside the box”, my sense is that the Digital Science panel was meant to offer up some new-ish tools for accomplishing tasks that scientists might want to accomplish.
Teaching, learning, grades, and student evaluations.
Chad has posted an interesting discussion of a study of students’ academic performance and how it is correlated to their evaluations of the faculty teaching them. The study in question is Carrell, S., & West, J. (2010). Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors Journal of Political Economy, 118 (3), 409-432 (DOI 10.1086/653808) . Go read Chad’s post for a detailed discussion of the methodology of the study, since it will likely answer your questions about my quick overview here. After the overview, I’m going to offer a few more thoughts on the explanations the study authors propose for their findings.
The study, done with data from the U.S. Air Force Academy (where there is a large-ish set of courses all students are required to take, to which students are assigned at random, and which are evaluated on the basis of common exams in which faculty are not necessarily grading their own students, etc.), found that:
The blogger’s hypothetical imperatives.
In the midst of the ongoing conversation about managing career and housework and who knows what else (happening here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and likely some places I’ve missed), ScientistMother wondered about one of the blogospheric voices that wasn’t taking an active role in the discussion. She mused in a comment at Isis’s blog:
Do we ever get a post from DrugMonkey about how he does it? He has kids and a wife (who I think is a scientist) but he rarely talks about balance issues. I’m sure its been an issue. Until the MEN start talking about its not going to change.
When DrugMonkey demurred, she followed up with a post at her own blog:
You have stated on your blog that you believe that gender equality in science is a good thing. Yet you rarely talk about some of the balancing issues or the parental issues. I have the link up that shows you think its important. Yet outside of that post originally done 2 years ago, you don’t talk about fatherhood or balancing fatherhood and partnerhood with science.
In the discussion in the comments following her post, ScientistMother quotes from the post from the DrugMonkey vault she has in mind:
IGERT meeting: some general thoughts.
About three weeks ago, I was in Washington, D.C. for the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting. I was invited to speak on a panel on Digital Science (with co-panelists Chris Impey, Moshe Pritzker, and Jean-Claude Bradley, who blogged about it), and later in the meeting I helped to facilitate some discussions of ethics case studies.
I’ll have more to say about our panel in the next post, but first I wanted to share some broad observations about the meeting.
IGERT stands for “Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship”, and the program is described thusly:
Friday frivolity: what’s that in my office?
This week I had one of those rare moments between work projects to pause and take a look around. I mean that literally — I actually took a look around in my office and noticed that I have accumulated some stuff in it that one might not be able to count on finding in your typical faculty office.
For example:
Shrinking budgets + skyrocketing subscription fees = UC boycott of NPG.
Economic recovery has not yet made its presence felt at public universities in California. (Indeed, at least in the California State University system, all things budgetary are going to be significantly worse in the next academic year, not better.)
This means it’s not a great time for purveyors of electronic journals to present academic libraries in public university systems with big increases in subscription prices. Yet Nature Publishing Group has, apparently, done just that by some 400%. And, as noted by Christina Pikas and Dorothea Salo and Jennifer Howard in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the University of California system has decided that what NPG is offering is not worth the asking price.
Which means a system-wide boycott of NPG journals is being organized, as outlined in this letter (PDF) from the executive director of the California Digital Library, the chair of the University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, and the convener of the University Librarians Council.
Interestingly, the boycott goes further than just encouraging UC libraries to drop their costly subscriptions to NPG journals. From the letter:
Final grades and missing student work: what to do?
Even though I got my grades filed last Friday (hours before the midnight deadline), this week I kept encountering colleagues for whom the grading drama Would. Not. End. As you might imagine, this led to some discussions about what one should do when the grade-filing deadline approaches and you are still waiting for students to cough up the work that needs grading.
I’d like to tell you that this is a rare occurrence. Sadly, it is not. Before we get into speculation about why students may be failing to deliver the deliverables, a quick poll on your preferred professorial response:
Final grades are nearly due when you discover that a student who’s done well on most of the assignments hasn’t handed in one of the major ones. What do you do?online surveys
Teaching and testing (or, your philosophy on final exams).
Since finals are nearly upon us here (and since I’m not quite ready to face the next stack of papers that needs grading), I got to wondering how other academics feel about when the final exam ought to be written and why.
So, a quick poll: