Blogs

As noted in my last post, I wasn't overwhelmed by last week's AASHE conference. But that's not to say that there weren't high points, that there weren't positive notes. There were.

One of the most important aspects of graduate school is choosing a good mentor. Who you choose can dramatically impact your experience in both graduate school and your ensuing hunt for employment or postdoctoral positions. How do students new to a department find those faculty members who will be good mentors? What makes a good mentor in the first place? These are important questions to have in mind before choosing laboratories for research rotations and your eventual thesis.

Last year’s NASPA Technology Conference was a turning point in Student Affairs. In many ways, the event was an experiment. NASPA had never put on a conference that was dedicated to technology. We didn’t know who would attend. Would #NASPAtech be too techie? Would social media dominate most of our conversations? There were a lot of questions.

College Ready Writing (IHE Edition) is now one year old.

Some movies don’t impress me much in the moment I’m watching them, but age well in the recollection. (“Fargo” was like that.) They typically have more going on than meets the eye, and the first impression doesn’t do them justice. The CASE conference was like that for me. I enjoyed the conference, but one lesson from it has stubbornly stuck in my mind ever since. I don’t think I fully appreciated it in the moment.

If I ran an edtech company the first thing that I'd do is move all of our infrastructure to Amazon's Web Services (AWS).

I’m just back from my last “family weekend” ever at my daughter’s college. I can’t recall my parents ever attending one of these weekends while I was in college — nor can I remember wanting them to — but my husband and I have alternated trips up to my daughter’s campus every year. Part of the reason is that we simply like Boston; part of it is that she’s in an a cappella group that always performs that weekend; part of it is of course our pleasure in seeing her in her other context.

Quantity without quality, particularly in the context of higher education, is simply meaningless and wasteful—perhaps dangerous. The ongoing phenomenon of mergers and consolidations taking place in South Africa, as controversial as it may be, has some lessons for Africa in an expansion mode.