Archive for December, 2006

College Student Spy Cams

  • December 29th, 2006
  • Posted in College

I can’t even write about this article because my eyes are stuck in disgusted eye-roll position. The Christian Science Monitor published a piece about spy cams (real-time cams) on college campuses that enable hyper moms and dads to keep an eye on their college kiddos. The colleges view the spy cams as the parents wanting [ READ MORE ]

Transfer Students

  • December 20th, 2006
  • Posted in College

I can’t tell which is more skewed: my personal experience or the research study done by Cornell Higher Education Research Institute. The premise for the study is good: which transfer students fare better in their upper division courses, students who transferred from two-year (less selective) institutions or students who transferred from four-year (more selective) institutions? [ READ MORE ]

Early College Admissions

Colleges are sending out early decision letters this week. I have been hearing about big envelope / small envelope apprehension all week, from a group in line at Starbucks to the man on his phone at the gas station to the daily reports I get from my brother who is waiting nervously to hear from [ READ MORE ]

Rank My Professor

Are online professor rating sites even useful? I’ve been reading about these new “grade your professor” web sites (Pick-A-Prof and Rate my Professors) and, while I think the basic idea is good, I have mixed feelings about their ultimate usefulness. When I was an undergrad at Harvard we had a nifty little (actually, it was [ READ MORE ]

Getting Organized

Clear Your Head Regardless of who you are (student, parent, circus freak) and what you do all day, I think that by this point in the year, everyone is so overwhelmed with the things we have to get done that none of us knows where to start. I’m as smart and as organized as the [ READ MORE ]

Dual Academic Careers

Do smarty-pants professor types feel they need a bigger challenge? Was defending their dissertation not enough? All of those years of undergraduate and graduate work, living somewhere near the poverty line, working and striving for those extra letters after their names? Why do obviously intelligent humans do this to themselves? Because they want to spend [ READ MORE ]