Dr. What Now? has a nice and timely post about helping students prepare for oral presentations, something I’ll be doing myself this morning, in preparation for the annual undergraduate research symposium on campus Friday. Of course, being a humanist, what she means by oral presentation is a completely different thing than the PowerPoint slide shows […]
Category: Academia
Playing Dice with the Future
Monday is the decision deadline for accepted students to decide whether they’re coming here next year, and we’ve had a slow parade of people getting tours of the department and suchlike over the last few weeks. We’ve also had a couple “Open House” events, where accepted students and their families are invited to campus to […]
Why Are You Asking Me?
I’ve found myself in the weird position of giving career advice twice in the last week and a half. Once was to a former student, which I sort of understand, while the second time was a grad student in my former research group, who I’ve never met. I still don’t really feel qualified to offer […]
What’s On Your Syllabus?
When I teach introductory classes, I use a somewhat more complicated homework policy than most of my colleagues. As a result, my syllabus tends to run longer than theirs, by at least a page or two. I sometimes worry that this is excessive, but happily, Inside Higher Ed is here to prove me wrong: By […]
Alea Iacta Est
The official letter from the department requesting the formation of an ad hoc committee for my tenure review was sent in yesterday. This is the official start of the process– I’m still a little fuzzy on the timeline from here out, but by September, I’ll have to provide the committee with a huge amount of […]
Poetry About Physicists
Reading this article reminds me that I forgot to talk about the poetry reading from a few weeks ago. In lieu of a regular colloquium talk one week this term, we co-hosted a poetry reading by George Drew, a local poet with a book of physics-themed poems. There are some sample poems on that site, […]
We’re Number Two!
A slightly more serious topic, also noted via Inside Higher Ed: Money magazine has deeemd “College Professor” the second-best job in America. The fact that it trails “software engineer” makes me a little dubious about their methodology, but there you go– I have the second-best job in the country. Of course, looking at the detailed […]
You Are Likely to Be Eaten by a Grue
Of special interest to Nathan, evidence that the process of dissertation writing is the same across disciplines: > work on dissertation You spend three hours reading five articles which have nothing to do with the dissertation. > work on dissertation You spend twenty minutes online reading about baseball. > tear out hair Taken. You find […]
What Students Want
Inside Higher Ed takes a look today at a new survey about how students choose colleges. They make an effort to make the results sound surprising, but it’s really about what I’d expect: A survey of 600 students who scored over 1100 on the SAT, half of whom scored at least 1300, found that campus […]
Ah, the Glamour of Academia…
It’s kind of a dismal grey day today, so I find myself planning to spend a good chunk of the day working in the lab (which I haven’t been able to do during the week, because of my teaching responsibilities). I have a student who’s going to present a poster at DAMOP this year, and […]