Professional Development

InsideHigherEd has a new series called Ph.Do that discusses professional development issues.  It’s written by Eszter Hargittai from Northwestern.  So far, so good.

 

 

The Best Jobs

I have often said that I have the best job in the world.  Well, according to this report, I have the #8 best job in the world.  Notice how many of the top 10 jobs require good math skills.

More Grad School Advice

Blogs are a great place to learn about people’s experiences with grad school and transitions to faculty positions.  There are a lot of individual blogs that chronicle people’s lives and there are several group blogs, typically tied to a particular discipline or sub-field, that have branched into the business of collecting advice on different topics related to academia.  Since I haven’t found time to maintain a blogroll for this site, I’ll just highlight two of them here.  Orgtheory.net has a series called grad skool rulz that I’ve mentioned before.  They continue to add topics to the series.  Scatterplot, a group sociology blog, has a series called “ask a scatterbrain” that often includes good advice for grad students.  Two of their recent conversations that I found interesting were managing conflict and co-authoring.

Think Before You Use PowerPoint

Between the American Society of Criminology meeting and end-of-semester student presentations, I get burned out on PowerPoint by this time of year.  I end my Responsible Use of Information in Criminal Justice course with a lecture on the visual presentation of information and I rely heavily on Edward Tufte’s work, particularly his essay on The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.  I really think this essay should be required reading for all graduate students.  Getting professionals to stop using PowerPoint is probably a futile endeavor, and that’s not really my goal since I also use PowerPoint for teaching and presentations.  Instead I’m simply trying to get students to think critically about how they present information regardless of the format and to discourage them from trying to get technology to do the work for them.  Today I stumbled upon a new and fun example of how PowerPoint is misused.  It’s a slideshow called Death by PowerPoint available at the Slideshare site.

Citation Tracking Software

Many academics rely on the ISI Web of Knowledge to electronically search for statistics about citation counts, which are necessary for publishing performance metrics, and to know where publications are being cited for research purposes.  It’s a great service but it is not available at all universities because of the cost.  If your university doesn’t subscribe to this service you can still get this information from hardcopy publications, but it’s not as easy and efficient as the electronic service.  There is now free software that performs similar functions called Publish or Perish.  It is a Windows application that you have to install on your PC.  It searches Google Scholar for citation information, which will not necessarily give you the same results as ISI Web of Knowledge, although it is supposed to be pretty reliable for the social sciences.  I’ve just started using it and it seems to work well.  I’d be curious to hear from others who have used it.

Grad School Advice

Fabio Rojas is writing  a semi-regular series on orgtheory.net giving advice to graduate students.  The series is called Grad Skool Rulz and he currently has 10 of them.

1. Get the rules
2. Learn the unspoken rules
3. Choosing the grad skool
4. Course work
5. Passing the tests
6. Make some friends
7. Picking the advisor
8. The rest of your committee
9. Don’t pay for grad school
10. The dissertation topic 

His advice is practical, thoughtful, and well written. Current and potential grad students, as well as advisors, should read the posts and the associated discussions.

The Gendering of Academia

Last month the Organization of Women Faculty at UAlbany sponsored a public lecture called “The Gendering of Academia.”  Dr. Lisa Frehill, the Executive Director of the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology (CPST), spoke about the underrepresentation of women and minorities in academia.  Although the message was not new, the data she presented were certainly interesting, and somewhat depressing.  I had hoped to reproduce some of the statistics relevant to the social sciences here, but I was disappointed to learn that these data are not freely available from the CPST web site.  Needless to say, the social sciences had much better representation among women and minorities than the hard sciences, but some of the figures were still disturbing.

While the presentation was full of data, which I personally enjoy, it was short on solutions.  I suspect that the goal of the talk was to present the national figures in order to spur discussions about how UAlbany compares and how to address these disparities within our environment.  I think this is an admirable goal in and of itself, although I suspect that many members of the audience were from the social science disciplines and were likely to already have thought about the gendered state of academia.  Dr. Frehill did briefly mention two important factors contributing to underrepresentation: (1) the need to fill the pipeline early by encouraging academic development among women and minorities in high school and college, and (2) academic cultures that perpetuate gendered norms for success.  The last point is especially relevant for the social sciences where it is too easy to think that we have “conquered” these disparities because we have met certain thresholds of participation.