Academic Advising

Two links containing important advice for the academic set. First, Derek Lowe reminisces about summer in graduate school:

When I was in graduate school, I had a law student as a neighbor for a while. We were both pretty quiet, and got along fine in our respective dinky efficiency apartments, but we couldn’t help but notice some differences between our studies. The biggest one became clear around this time of the year: he left, and I stayed. I still remember the look of surprise on his face when I told him that we didn’t have any time off.

Well, I know that law students don’t generally go off and laze around on the ol’ hammock during the summer, but they at least get to go somewhere else for a while. But grad students just keep banging away, and if they’re in the sciences, they’re up there nights, weekends, and holidays.

He concludes with some must-read advice for those who are still in graduate school. His piece also reminds me of the story of a well-known atomic physicist, who supposedly was overheard telling a new post-doc “Technically, you get two weeks of vacation, but don’t feel like you need to use those”– academic research can be a real grind at times.

The other must-read post is the Dean Dad on construction in academia (excerpt below the fold):

It’s easy, in the short run, for a college to decide to scale down a proposed project to cut costs. The problem is that the people charged with scaling it down are often not the end users, so much of what gets cut eventually finds its way back in, by necessity, leading to the dreaded-but-ubiquitous ‘overruns.’ (“Where are the electrical outlets?” “D’oh!” I’m not making that one up.) Too, price inflation in the construction world is rampant and rapid, so a project cut into ‘phases’ is guaranteed to cost more, in the end, than a project done whole-hog. What looks like prudence at the initial stage actually winds up costing much more, and yielding less, than just jumping in with both feet. And by the time the later phases roll around, the pressure to cut costs is usually even greater. So the later phases are broken into sub-phases, resulting in higher costs and lower functionality, leading to still more cost pressures. Inflation-by-penny-pinching.

The other big source of problems is that most educational institutions end up using the lowest bidder for the contract, in order to save money. This is a problem, because you generally get what you pay for. For a historical example, back in my hometown, they have a Depression-era school building that needed a new roof, which they replaced in two stages: first a million-dollar repair of the roof on the auditorium, and then a second project to replace the slates on the roof of the main building above and behind the auditorium. The low-bid contractors hired for the second job took the big, heavy slates off the roof, and threw them over the side, down onto the expensive new roof of the auditorium, completely wrecking the first repair job.

(I’m a fan of the figure skating system for construction bids– throw out the highest bidder (for not getting the point), and the lowest (because they’re probably lying), and pick from whoever’s left.)

Anyway, if you’ve lived through or are planning construction on a college campus, check it out. He’s got some excellent advice that you won’t be able to get anybody to listen to, but that will allow you to feel smug later on…