Sean Carroll offers another installment of unsolicited advice about graduate school, this time on the topic of choosing what school to attend once you’re accepted (the previous installment was on how to get into grad school). His advice is mostly very good, and I only want to amplify a few points here. Below the fold,… Continue reading So You Want to Be a Grad Student?
Category: Education
Admissions Is a Hard Problem
There was an interesting article on Inside Higher Ed yesterday about the idea of “Affirmative Action for Men.” The piece was a response to an op-ed by Jennifer Delahunty Britz, an admissions officer at Kenyon College, where she talked about gender preferences in admissions, using the classic op-ed device of talking about a particular student… Continue reading Admissions Is a Hard Problem
Let the Games Begin
Classes start today for our Spring trimester, which is both the home stretch, and one of the most brutal academic death marches in the business– we wind up running into June every year (last day of finals is June 7), well after most colleges are out of session. By the end of the term, the… Continue reading Let the Games Begin
All Scientists Left Behind
Orac beats me to commenting on today’s depressing New York Times story about NCLB. It seems that, faced with strict “No Child Left Behind” requirements in reading and math, some schools are shifting things around so that their low-performing students take only reading and math: Rubén Jimenez, a seventh grader whose father is a construction… Continue reading All Scientists Left Behind
Great Moments in Student Course Evaluations
Question on the evaluation form: If there was a writing component in this laboratory, please comment on the attention given to it with respect to the improvement of your writing Student response: Dude, my writing totally improved. And so, we close the book on another academic term…
Great Moments in Exam Grading
(For reasons unclear to me, Mixed States doesn’t seem to pick up scheduled posts in the RSS feed, even after they’re published. I don’t know if other RSS aggregators have the same problem, but if you were wondering what happened to the promised True Lab Story, here it is.) A question from yesteerday’s final exam,… Continue reading Great Moments in Exam Grading
There Are Worse Problems to Have
Next term, I’m slated to offer one of our “Advanced Topics in Physics” upper-level elective classes. I was originally asked to do atomic physics, but looking at the syllabus and available texts, I decided I’d rather take a different tack, and agreed to develop a new course instead. I call myself an atomic physicist, and… Continue reading There Are Worse Problems to Have
Fred Hutchison: Teaching Opportunity
I’m not sure what I did to PZ Myers to make him draw my attention to Fred Hutchison, but whatever it was, I apologize. Mr. Hutchison is apparently a columnist writing for a web site run by Alan Keyes– the right-wing kook for people who find David Horowitz to be a little too sedate– and… Continue reading Fred Hutchison: Teaching Opportunity
Set My Syllabus For Me
I’m currently teaching our sophomore-level modern physics class, which is titled something like “Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Their Applications.” We’ve finished with the basics of Special Relativity and abstract quantum theory, and have entered the mad sprint through applications (Union is on a trimester calendar, so classes end next week)– three classes on atoms and… Continue reading Set My Syllabus For Me
Email Management
Pretty much every academic on-line has already commented on the New York Times piece on student email today. As usual, Timothy Burke says most of what I’d like to say: Much of the complaint recorded in the article also seems much ado about nothing. As Margaret Soltan observes, what’s the big deal about answering the… Continue reading Email Management