Blogs

A new startup launches today to help make it easier for professors to create digital course packets for their students.

... the University of Hawaii system; and UD has spent as little time as possible scrutinizing its zillion-dollar-and-rising-by-the-minute athletic deficit, its pilfering administrators, the shady politicians who oversee the joint, etc., etc.

The Atlantic is doing a month-long series on teaching and learning writing in primary and secondary schools. Naturally, I have some thoughts.

If you read only one book about higher education this year, read The Cost Disease, by William Baumol. It’s essential, brilliant, and even readable. And it answers an important question – why the costs of health care and education keep going up – more intelligently than anything else I’ve seen.

I Will Now Stop Resenting the B+ I Earned Last Fall Quite So Much... I was offered a position as a marking assistant in the Women and Gender Studies department, and offer that made my day/week/month. I felt like I had finally “arrived” to be tapped on the shoulder like that. In my undergrad years I always envied the students who were asked to RA or TA for faculty members. They always seemed somehow smarter, or more together than I was. So to be asked now brought me back to my twenty-one year old self, validating my worthiness as a student. Silly, I know.

So you’ve found a lab that you like- wonderful! Hopefully you are interested in the research and fit well into the established lab personalities. However, depending on your program, you will only have a limited amount of time to work in this lab before you have to either move on to another or make a decision as to where you will be working for you dissertation. Selection of your dissertation lab is a very important cornerstone to your graduate school experience and will determine the bulk of what you learn during your education.

This past Monday I attended the Innovation to Drive Productivity in Postsecondary Education meeting sponsored by the The Department of Education that Paul Fain describes in his 10/2 IHE article. I'm writing this post in an effort to respond to some of the comments to Fain's article.

Last spring, in a conversation with my (former) neighbor, who also happens to be an accomplished late-career scientist with whom I work from time to time, he sympathized with the dilemma my husband and I were debating at the time: whether to move our family across the country (if you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll know we decided to move, which is why I identify my neighbor as “former”). “Big life decisions are the bane of my existence,” was the way he put it. I could have hugged him. Big decisions are difficult, draining. Having someone recognize this as I was going through it - especially someone who has done well in his own life - was a tremendous comfort.