Category: Academia

The Female Science Professor has a post talking about types of reference letters. Much of what she says is fairly specific to letters relating to prizes or promotions, but some of her comments are perfectly applicable to the junior faculty job search letters I’ve been reading by the bucketload lately. Particularly worth noting are her… Continue reading For Reference Purposes

Doug Natelson posted the second installment in his inside view of the hiring process for academic physics positions, this one describing the campus visit/ interview process. Again, the description is mostly accurate for a much larger department than ours, at a research insitution, but the basic idea is the same. In our department, candidates making… Continue reading More Job Searching in Academia

Recently, my post about my SAT Challenge entry has leaped into the Top Five Most Emailed list over on the right, for what reason I can’t really say. That gives me two of the top five, though– eat my dust, Myers. Now there’s only that Deltoid character between me and world domination… The other Most… Continue reading PowerPoint Never Gets Old

Some of the discussion in my recent post giving example slides made me realize a problem with the way I posted them– converting the slides to PDF loses the transition effects, which are a significant part of the lecture. In an attempt to address this, here’s a crude simulation of the effect, done by making… Continue reading The Never-Ending Saga of PowerPoint

Via The Little Professor, a poem sure to touch most academics, Tom Wayman’s “Did I Miss Anything?”: Nothing. None of the content of this course has value or meaning Take as many days off as you like: any activities we undertake as a class I assure you will not matter either to you or me… Continue reading Academic Poetry

Having talked at length about my theories of how to do an effective PowerPoint talk, I probably ought to provide some examples. These are converted to PDF because it’s more generally readable than PPT, and because the files are slightly smaller. The conversion is done using CutePDF writer, which does something to the files that… Continue reading PowerPoint Examples

The Female Science Professor reviews an article from

Two links from the always interesting Tim Burke, on “Free Speech Kabuki”, and a humorous student response to it. The former will sound familiar to most academics, the latter is the sort of thing that makes this job rewarding.

Having strongly stated my opinion that PowerPoint is not actively evil, but can be used to give good scientific presentations as well as soul-crushingly dull bullet-point talks, I feel like I ought to say something to back it up. Here, then, are some of the rules of thumb I use when putting together a good… Continue reading How to Do a Good PowerPoint Lecture