Tuesday June 26th 2007, 9:54 am
Filed under: College
If all of my professors and instructors had taught like this, forking over the tuition would have been far less painful. I’m not saying all profs need to have slick media shows every lecture. I’m saying college costs a lot, and 95% of the time undergrads are being lectured to by either a T.A. or an overworked, underpaid instructor who stands in front of the room and basically re-states the textbook out loud (only this time it’s in monotone).
It’s clear that this guy, Asst. Professor Michael Wesch at Kansas State, knows his subject and still gets off on imparting knowledge to his students. Here’s hoping the politics involved with teaching (and publishing or perishing) at a university don’t wear Mr. Wesch down to a monotonous nub any time soon.
And no, all of his lectures aren’t like this video. This was his way of brilliantly using the subject itself to explain to his Digital Ethnography students (and everyone on YouTube) the very (very) basics of Web 2.0 and how the world and our perception of it and ourselves is changing because of said increasingly accessible and far-reaching technology.
Here’s the video you need to show your professors so they’ll understand how much they need to love what they teach so it will be worth everyone’s while for you to take their class:
US News and World Report’s June 21st article College Majors Could Cause Women to Earn Less provided some revealing insights into reasons why women, one year after college graduation, earn 80% as much as men. [NOTE: The title of the article is strangely off, because according to the article, even when women choose higher paying careers in engineering and science, they're still paid less.]
It’s not their college major that’s causing women to earn less than their male counterparts; it’s that most women don’t view themselves as primary wage earners. Even if women aren’t married, even if they don’t have a family, it shows that women anticipate a time when they won’t be expected to work or make money to support themselves or their whole family. Traditional gender roles are so deeply ingrained that women don’t anticipate being the family breadwinner, which means they also don’t feel the pressure / drive to earn more money. It’s my suspicion that this breadwinner psychology mindset is also fueling the discrimination women experience in the workplace.
From the article:
Londa Schiebinger, director of Stanford University’s Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, says it’s not that women don’t care how much they make but rather that they are more influenced by other factors. For example, she says women tend to prefer being around other women. If more professors, students, and professionals in a field of study are women, female applicants are more likely to choose that discipline as a college major. “I don’t think they consider pay as much as something they have a stronger commitment to,” she says, citing teaching and community service as examples of fields women connect to.
The idea that women don’t place high financial gains as their top priority is an interesting comment on how women perceive their responsibilities within the family unit, Schiebinger says. “Women still feel freer to do what they want to do and still feel they aren’t the primary wage earner,” she says.
AAUW Educational Foundation says the smaller numbers of women in certain fields can always grow. But even if that happens, there’s still a piece of the gender wage gap puzzle that is missing. Hill says, and the study agrees, that piece could be discrimination. “It seems to be conventional wisdom that as younger generations make different choices, the wage gap will disappear,” she says. “But even when women are making the ‘right’ choices, they are still getting paid less.”
Advance your earning potential with the following degree options:
Monday June 18th 2007, 10:41 am
Filed under: College, Tips
What do you wish you’d been told before you left school?
For anyone who has just graduated, this advice may come too late. But if you’re still in the throes of your higher education, Lifehacker.com has a solid, reader-written list of everything they wished they’d been told before they left college for the real world. It’s a pretty long list, but contains useful tidbits nonetheless. Looking down from my worldly and wise vantage point (total crap—I’m 33 but most days I feel more like I’m 12) I can also see that a lot of the words of wisdom are correct. The picture of post-college reality I had when I was 18 turned out to be severely false.
While I was reading through Lifehacker’s article, I was wishing someone had let me in on all of this need-to-know information. I was irate for 0.7 seconds, and then I remembered the teenaged me and couldn’t imagine that charming young lady sitting still long enough or opening her ears wide enough to ever actually hear some adult’s sage advice. So for all I know, I was appropriately advised with regards to college, life, and reality and I just don’t remember.
It’s worth your time not to make the same mistake. Also, reading advice online is way less annoying than having to sit and listen to some pedantic uncle carry on about his glory days and why YOU should help him to re-live them by following in his footsteps. Or, conversely, Uncle Whatsit hates his life and whippersnapper you should follow his advice to the letter so YOUR life will be fabulous and he can finally achieve his smashing success vicariously through you.
Don’t be anyone’s puppet. Live your own life, make your own decisions and all that. But sometimes older people do have smart stuff to say (usually because they’ve screwed up hugely and have since learned from their mistakes). You can read the Lifehacker thing, pay attention to the choice bits and skip anything smacking of pedantic uncle.
A few choice bits:
“No one cares about what grades you got.”
“Learn that there are things that are very valuable and are not taught in school.”
“If you’re not ready for higher education, then travel.”
“Your major doesn’t necessarily determine your future career path.”
“Don’t get caught up in what other people want you to do.”
“Everything you just learned means nothing in the real world.”
“No matter how prepared you are for Real Life, you’re not. It’s hard, stressful, and sometimes cruel. When your parents said, ‘College was the best time of their lives’, they weren’t kidding.”
“Use your vacation…don’t be that guy.”
“Get to know something abut each of your co-workers. Even, or especially, the quiet or odd ones.”
“Never stop learning and studying.”
“Don’t be afraid to look stupid…..I’ve met plenty of people I didn’t like, but I have yet to meet anyone who didn’t have SOMETHING they could teach me about.”
“Get out there and do things. College gives you plenty of easy opportunities…”
“Real life isn’t like high school, but some workplaces are.”
“The most important skills to remember from college include how to write clearly, how to think critically, and how to get along with people who are not like you.”
“Don’t be afraid of anything.”
“It’s just a job.”
“People you went to high school with won’t matter in 2-3 years. Quit worrying about them.”
“Floss. Exercise. Like, a lot.”
“Build your own life, don’t leech off of someone else.”
“Just because you have a degree doesn’t mean you know everything.”
“Don’t get a credit card from those companies that come to campus and offer a free t-shirt if you apply. They aren’t really your friends and don’t give two craps about you.”
“Be completely honest with yourself and others, even if it means taking a risk. Tactful bluntness will carry you much further in life than telling people what they want to hear.”
Humanitarian Message From Most Successful College Dropout
Bill Gates told the graduating class of 2007 that “reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.”
I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world — the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.
I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.
But humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.
I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries.
It took me decades to find out.
You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the world’s inequities than the classes that came before. In your years here, I hope you’ve had a chance to think about how – in this age of accelerating technology – we can finally take on these inequities, and we can solve them.
Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause – and you wanted to spend that time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it?
For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have.
During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease I had never even heard of, rotavirus, was killing half a million kids each year – none of them in the United States.
We were shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of children were dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there were interventions that could save lives that just weren’t being delivered.
If you believe that every life has equal value, it’s revolting to learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: “This can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving.”
So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: “How could the world let these children die?”
The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system.
But you and I have both.
We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism – if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes.
If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world.
This task is open-ended. It can never be finished. But a conscious effort to answer this challenge will change the world.
I am optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there is no hope. They say: “Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be with us till the end – because people just … don’t … care.”
I completely disagree.
I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with.
They work in labs and figure out how to cure humanity of its many ills. (Only the physical ones.) They come up with vaccines; they try to find cures for cancer; they develop pharmaceuticals; they research illness and disease so they can be avoided or cured. There is a lot of lab work (did the science part not make that clear?) and that involves the real-world combination of being able to think for yourself, work by yourself AND maintain your works-well-with-others skills because you’re probably going to be working in a lab with a team of researchers like yourslf. And it probably couldn’t hurt to rock at writing grant proposals (poetically begging for money in writing with pie charts and graphs).
Where They Are Employed:
Government
Scientific research and development services firms
Pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing
Private Hospitals
Private educational services
Ambulatory health care services
Management, scientific, and technical consulting services
Who Pays For It:
That’s the tough part: finding financial support for a research project that will take years to get results, and those results will most likely be a tiny piece of the puzzle, not the whole answer to the cure for cancer. There is private funding, federal funding, grant money, etc. It’s a gamble a lot of the time. A team of medical research scientists can work at something for several years, only to hit a wall at the end. This would suck badly enough for the scientists who just spent that much time and energy for naught. But No Results tends to really piss off your funders. Especially if said funders were hoping for some scientific breakthrough (i.e. a cure for cancer) which was going to make all involved parties rich and very popular (Nobel prizes for everyone!).
Which brings me to the sad truth of it all: it’s much easier to get the financial support required for research if you’re wanting to study something that’s hot right now. Which means, of course, that the unpopular diseases aren’t going to be figured out any time soon. And I would imagine that blows for someone with, say, any disease that a famous person or a Baby Boomer hasn’t been diagnosed with. And what kind of cash pay-off is there for finding a cure for the AIDS virus vs. the money to be made for coming up with the next miracle weight-loss pill? There seems to be a lot of money being funneled toward finding a cure for the Fat and Lazy American epidemic which is sweeping the nation. And still no cure for HIV/AIDS.
This might be one of those Litmus Test careers: you can use it to find out what kind of person you are. Will you use your powers for good and better the world? Or will you walk the sparkly path and get the money?
Education They Need:
A lot. There’s really no way to avoid having at least a PhD in biological science or an MD. Depending on the research requirements, there can sometimes be an either / or with the MD or the PhD. However, the best scenario is having both the PhD and the MD. Some medical schools have special MD-PhD programs, which would certainly come in handy. And if your research requires any, say, gene therapy or the administering of drugs, then you’ll have to have not only the MD, but the State licensing exam and the residency to go along with it so you can call yourself a licensed physician (no poking the other humans without State approved qualifications). Here is a list of Allied Health Care Career Schools
What They Earn:
If they’ve followed the path of the righteous, shouldn’t the karmic reward be enough? It’s good enough for teachers…Here are the BLS numbers as of 2004:
Pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing $76,800
Scientific research and development services $65,110
General medical and surgical hospitals $55,410
Colleges, universities, and professional schools $45,600
What The Future Holds (Career-Wise):
There’s still cancer and AIDS to cure, obviously. And then we’ve got international travel and overcrowding which do an excellent job of spreading existing diseases and helping Mother Nature come up with new and improved ones. If all that wasn’t enough to keep medical scientists busy, keep in mind that the Baby Boomers are starting to fall apart. There’s a load of money to be made in medically assisting the Boomers with aging more comfortably. And they won’t start dropping like flies for at least 20 more years (read: job security). If you’re pissed that they’re going to suck up all the Social Security, a career in medical research (or any Boomer-relevant health field) may be your best bet for getting your hands on some of that cash. And you’ll look like a good citizen doing it.
On May 31st, the New York Times revealed how deep the corruption at Columbia University ran. The financial aid director for Columbia’s undergraduate college and its engineering school, David Charlow, was promoting a student loan company in which he held stock. Columbia dismissed him last week. Now Columbia is giving $1.1 million to a fund to educate students about loans.
The article also announced that the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators would end the practice of turning to bankers and other lenders to sponsor its many conferences and allowing them to court its members through meals and gifts.
When Mr. Cuomo first started investigating student lending problems, the group protested vehemently, accusing him of tearing “the fabric of trust between schools and students.” It said that abuses and conflicts of interest were rare.
Buttoday, Dallas Martin, the group’s president, who was at Mr. Cuomo’s news conference, said he had been wrong.
“I want to apologize,” he said. “We did not have all the facts. We do not condone individuals taking kickbacks.”
He said his association’s directors had expanded its own ethical code, and that the group would in the future bar loan companies from sponsoring its conferences or giving gifts or other payments to its members.
“I hope we can put these issues behind us,” he said, and that students and parents can feel confident in the advice they get from financial aid officers.
