Academia
drorzel | September 22, 2006I'm teaching our senior major seminar this term, which means that once a week, I'm giving hour-long talks on topics of interest to senior physics majors. This week's was "How to Pick and Apply to a Graduate School."
I've probably written this basic stuff up about three times already, but I'm too lazy to look for it, and this particular presentation was slightly different than anything I may have put on the web in the past. And I might as well wring another post out of the topic, while it's fresh in my mind...
There are several steps to the grad school application process, but the most…
drorzel | September 21, 2006Over at Inside Higher Ed, William Durden resorts to satire in response to the Spellings commission report:
In the nation's current zeal to account for all transfer of teaching and insight through quantitative, standardized testing, perhaps we should advance quantitative measurement into other areas of human meaning and definition. Why leave work undone?
I suggest, for example, that a federal commission propose an accountability initiative for those of faith (not such a wild notion as an increasing number of politicians are calling the traditional separation of church and state unhealthy for…
evolgen | September 20, 2006Over a year and half ago (~1 eon in internet time) I wrote this blog entry in which I turned around the title of Dobzhansky's famous essay "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution". I didn't think I was being all that clever when I came up with the following:
NOTHING IN EVOLUTION MAKES SENSE EXCEPT IN THE LIGHT OF GENETICS
I pointed out that evolution requires heritable variation first and foremost, hence genetics lies at the center of all of evolution. I then took the opportunity to explain why Hardy and Weinberg's derivation that random mating does not change allele…
drorzel | September 19, 2006Two quick academic links:
First, Eugene Wallingford on fundraising, which these days extends down to the departmental level. He has good thoughts on the raising of money, and the issues he talks about sound awfully familiar.
I'd add one thing to his advice-- if you're pursuing big gifts, make sure the donor is as specific as possible about what they want done with the money. My alma mater got an unexpected bequest of a rather large sum of money to the physics department, but the will was vague on what that meant, leading to some frantic scrambling and high-stakes bargaining. It would've been…
jstemwedel | September 18, 2006I'm revisiting a topic I posted about half a year ago: once you have a Ph.D., what are your job options beyond a faculty job or a research position?
The last post was more about what one could do with a science major or masters degree. It didn't necessarily exclude non-standard things to do with a science Ph.D., but it wasn't specifically aimed that direction.
Here, I want to take on directly the problem of what you do with that shiny Ph.D. (in science or any other field) if, despite all your efforts, you can't land a faculty job (or can't land one you can live with). And, I'd like to get…
clock | September 16, 2006Don't know, but we can test this hypothesis.
Go to Cognitive Daily and/or Uncertain Principles and take the test (and read what they have to say about it, each from his own perspective).
It is just the essay part of the test. You get the prompt. You write. After 20 minutes (you are typing - kids who write with pencils get 25 minutes), it is over. You can choose to submit your essay or not once you are done.
Dave and Chad will score the results and have the essays graded by professionals (English teachers, hopefully some real-life SAT scorers), as well as blog-readers. Then, they…
jstemwedel | September 15, 2006There's been a marked difference of opinion between two of my fellow ScienceBloggers about what ought to be done about the "pipeline problem" in physics.
Chad suggests that there may be a substantial problem with high school level physics instruction, given that "[e]ven if high school classes are 50/50 [female to male], the first college physics class is already 25/75".
I take it that the worry about what's happening in the high school physics classroom isn't going to spark much controversy in these parts. (However, I do recall hearing, when I was still in high school, that at some colleges…
clock | September 15, 2006Teaching Carnival #12 is up on Scrivenings.
Next time, on October 1st, the carnival will be hosted by me here. I will be posting an official 'call for submissions' in a few days, but in the meantime, if you write a post that has something to do with Academia and Higher Ed, please try to remember to tag it with the "teaching-carnival" tag. Still, since the tagging technology is unreliable at best, you can only be guaranteed the inclusion of your entries (and yes, multiple entries are welcome) if you e-mail them to me at: Coturnix@gmail.com. Put "Teaching Carnival" in the title and inquire…
evolgen | September 15, 2006I've told you before that I once dreamt of becoming a conservation geneticist. I major turning point for me occurred after I had completed rotations during my first year of grad school. I had to decide between two different labs: in one I would use molecular markers to study the demography of a species of tree and in the other I would study the evolution of Drosophila genomes. I chose the Drosophila lab (for reasons I won't get into here or now), and the rest was history.
It turns out I could have been a coauthor on a Science paper if I had chosen the tree lab. My potential advisor in that…
drorzel | September 15, 2006As discussed last week, the comments about the perfect-scoring SAT essays published in the New York Times made me wonder whether bloggers could do any better. On the plus side, bloggers write all the time, of their own free will. On the minus side, they don't have to work under test conditions, with a tight time limit and a specific question to answer.
Because we're all about a rigorous scientific approach here at ScienceBlogs, we'll settle this the modern way: with an Internet contest. Thus, we now present the Blogger SAT Challenge.
("We" in this case is me and Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily…
evolgen | September 14, 2006This is old news, but I just heard about it. A microbiology graduate student at the University of Wisconsin has a blog. He finished his rotations and chose a lab. His to be advisor found out about the blog and read it. After concluding that the student did not really want to be in grad school, he decided to not accept the student into his lab. The grad student got dooced:
Yesterday I received an email from my (former) PI, a Dr. WH, that I can no longer join his lab, despite having already joined about a week and a half ago. Needless to say I was perplexed...
I frantically emailed my (former)…
evolgen | September 13, 2006My last post was rather negative, and I tried my damnedest to not come across as an asshole. I think it's important to realize, however, that as cool as evo-devo is, it won't revolutionize evolutionary biology until it can be extended beyond animal body plans. Carl Zimmer commented that studies on social microbes may just make that extension. Lo and behold, PLoS Biology has published an essay on cooperation among microorganisms. It's very accessible to a general audience and open access, so you have no excuse not to read it.
The article is so readable (without requiring expertise in…
tfk | September 13, 2006After crunching the numbers on the trends in NIH funding, some interesting patterns emerge.
Clearly, the drop in funding of both R01 (initial grants) and R02 (renewals) are substantial over the Bush years. But intriguingly, the average size of a grant funded has risen. This may seem like a good thing. After all, more money is good, right?
Not necessarily.
The size of a grant will reflect various things, including how ambitious the project is, how technological it is, how many people are involved, etc. But it fundamentally reflects how much anyone is prepared to invest in it. Big grants…
scientificactivist | September 13, 2006Since I reported yesterday on a letter in Science describing the current decline in funding of NIH (National Institutes of Health) R01 grants, several others have chimed in as well. PZ Myers of Pharyngula gave the post a mention, and Mike the Mad Biologist as well as Orac of Respectful Insolence gave their own detailed commentary.
Here's what Mike had to say:
For faculty, many of whom have guaranteed salaries if they are tenure-track or tenured, this is an inconvience. For those whose salaries are dependent on this funding, this is far, far worse.
In the medium term, this is really going to…
drorzel | September 13, 2006Timothy Burke is thinking up new classes all the time, which is probably the bane of any academic. It's probably more common in the humanities, where the curricula are more mutable, but even us science types usually have a couple of ideas that would make for a good course if only we didn't have to teach introductory classical mechanics again...
This is as good an excuse as any for re-posting an old post I wrote on the subject back in 2004. I actually did one of these, in a very limited way-- I did one lecture of "How to Lie With Statistics" as part of a class on the election of 2004 (which…
scientificactivist | September 12, 2006In a letter in last week's issue of Science (subscription required), two scientists from the National Caucus of Basic Biomedical Science Chairs--H. George Mandel and Elliot S. Vesell--describe in detail the funding crisis currently plaguing American scientists. The authors demonstrate a shocking decrease over the last seven years in the allocation of NIH (National Institutes of Health) R01 grants, the nation's keystone funding program for supporting biomedical science.
Here's the data:
Fate of unamended (unsolicited) R01 research grant applications
Fiscal year
Number submitted
Number awarded…
evolgen | September 9, 2006You wanna know the best way to predict the quality of undergraduates at a college or university? It's not SAT scores or high school GPA. It's the quality of the school's ultimate team. From the press release:
A study (slated for release September 1) by Dr. Michael Norden shows that among all 86 private national universities, those ranking in the top half for Ultimate have a graduation rate of over 85%, while those in the bottom half graduate just 60%. The difference in the totals of Rhodes scholars and Marshall scholars among their graduates during this decade is even more dramatic -- 208…
evolgen | September 9, 2006As I was rollin' down the street this morning (with my alma mater proudly displayed on my license plate holder) on the way to the ole' grocery store, an older couple pulled up alongside of me at a stop light. The husband was driving, and he busted out the "Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon" window roll down. His wife was sitting in the passenger seat with a map spread out in front of her. I assumed the husband would be asking me for directions.
Flashback: A few months ago I was in the supermarket, sporting my alma mater on my hat. While in the produce section, an older gentleman walked…
drorzel | September 9, 2006The first weekend of the Fall term is always a strange time. Classes are back in session, so I'm in Teaching Mode, but there really isn't that much to do, because I haven't collected any work requiring grading yet. I always feel like the last weekend before classes ought to be some grand last hurrah of the summer, followed by an unremitting grind for ten weeks, but in reality, the academic grind takes a few weeks to really ramp up.
And somehow, every year, I'm surprised by this.
Anyway, I find myself with some Things to Do, but nothing all that pressing. And it's a beautiful day here after a…
evolgen | September 8, 2006A letter to Nature published this week asks when journals will begin to allow multiple last, or senior, authors. The letter is short, sweet, and to the point:
The correspondence mentioned in this letter wonders how the author list should be organized:
I thought I understood the guidelines for determining scientific authorship: the individual making the greatest intellectual contribution is the lead author, followed sequentially by those making progressively lesser contributions. In addition, the final-author slot is sometimes reserved for a lab head or project initiator, who may have made…