The Johnsen Biology Lab at Duke University has this gorgeously honest warning/disclaimer/nugget of wisdom posted on their website.

We currently have room in the lab for more graduate students. Before you apply to this lab or any other, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, be realistic about graduate school. Graduate school in biology is not a sure path to success. Many students assume that they will eventually get a job just like their advisor’s. However, the average professor at a research university has three students at a time for about 5 years each. So, over a career of 30 years, this professor has about 18 students. Since the total number of positions has been pretty constant, these 18 people are competing for one spot. So go to grad school assuming that you might not end up at a research university, but instead a teaching college, or a government or industry job. All of these are great jobs, but it’s important to think of all this before you go to school.

Second, choose your advisor wisely. Not only does this person potentially have total control over your graduate career for five or more years, but he/she will also be writing recommendation letters for you for another 5-10 years after that. Also, your advisor will shadow you for the rest of your life. People will always think of you as so-and-so’s student and assume that you two are somewhat alike. Finally, in many ways you will turn into your advisor. Advisors teach very little, but instead provide a role model. Consciously and unconsciously, you will imitate your advisor. You may find this hard to believe now, but fifteen years from now, when you find yourself lining up the tools in your lab cabinets just like your advisor did, you’ll see. My student Alison once said that choosing an advisor is like choosing a spouse after one date. Find out all you can on this date.

Finally, have your fun now. Five years is a long time when you are 23 years old. By the end of graduate school, you will be older, slower, and possibly married and/or a parent. So if you always wanted to walk across Nepal, do it now. Also, do not go to a high-powered lab that you hate assuming that this will promise you long-term happiness. Deferred gratification has its limits. Do something that you have passion for, work in a lab you like, in a place you like, before life starts throwing its many curve balls. Your career will mostly take care of itself, but you can’t get your youth back.

If, after reading this, you want to apply to this lab, we would love to hear from you.

It also works for explaining to the young(ers) about life and how it’s hard for a while and then you kick it (and by “it” I mean the bucket, not relaxing on the couch), so it behooves us all to figure out how to be happy sooner rather than later.

Via: A Blog Around the Clock

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Anyone needing an excellently oversimplified way to teach a kid about the economic crisis might want to use this Pokémon analogy from economist Kevin Nguyen:

The following is an actual conversation I had with my younger sister, Olivia. She likes to draw, play World of Warcraft, and now, she’s the only fourteen-year-old girl who understands the U.S. economic crisis.

Kevin: Have you been following the news?

Olivia: Yeah, I don’t really get it.

Kevin: Imagine that I let you borrow $50, but in exchange for my generosity, you promise to pay me back the $50 with an extra $10 in interest. To make sure you pay me back, I take your Charizard Pokémon card as collateral.

Olivia: Kevin, I don’t play Pokémon anymore.

Kevin: I’m getting to that. Let’s say that the Charizard is worth $50, so in case you decide to not return my money, at least I’ll have something that’s worth what I loaned out.

Olivia: Okay.

Kevin: But one day, people realize that Pokémon is stupid and everyone decides that the cards are overvalued. That’s right—everybody turned twelve on the same day! Now your Charizard is only worth, say, $25. More..

Posted by Alexa Harrington

If your school is experiencing campus-wide misery and angst due to the higher-stress second half of the term, budget cuts, what have you, then perhaps the student body could learn a thing or two from Hong Kong’s Hug Society, who have made themselves available to their fellow citizens during the city’s economic crisis:

In the meantime, Hong Kong’s glum populous can at least take comfort in the efforts of one of the city’s more esoteric groups. In mid-November, several members collected in Causeway Bay, a popular shopping and restaurant district, to offer people “free” hugs. More such sessions are planned in coming weeks. “Particularly in the [current] financial situation, people need more care and attention,” says Ricky Chow, a Hug Society organizer.

Starting your own Free Hugs Campaign is always an option, although you run the risk of getting busted—most humans are wary of kindness. I myself am not one for hugging random strangers, regardless of their admirable intentions. It’s pretty damn funny how I see myself as this cold hard b**ch, but that Dave Matthews Band hugging video makes me cry; first I’m all broken-hearted because no one will hug Judah Friedlander, and then I cry like a little girl when the old lady finally does. Yep, cold and hard and devoid of empathy.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Budget cuts are starting to tighten the screws at colleges and universities in California and Washington. Washington’s governor, Christine Gregoire, is fortunately leaving K-12 funding alone, but the public colleges and universities have been asked to either freeze or cut back on hiring, travel, equipment purchases and personal service contracts. That will save an estimated $36 million.

California’s State University system includes 23 campuses, over 450,000 students and 47,000 faculty and staff. That is a phenomenal amount of education going on. And that’s just the CSU system, which is totally separate from the UC system—they get cranky when people assume they are in any way related to one another, and they do not like it when students want to transfer between the two (as I discovered when I tried to transfer from CSUF to UCD).

With this year’s and last year’s budget cuts, the CSU system stands to lose as much as $600 million in state funding. The Cal State trustees had a big meeting and decided that the only way to deal with the huge number of students and the luck of funding would be to cut enrollment by 10,000 next year.

The policy will allow each campus to turn away students who in the past would have qualified for admission.

Campus presidents were overwhelmingly supportive of the move, which came as California prepares for what could be its largest group of graduating high-school seniors. Colleges increasingly have had trouble handling demand without adequate funding, said Stephen Weber, San Diego State’s president.

“What we have been involved in is literally academic fraud,” he said. “We have brought people and have not been able to provide the (courses) they need. That fraud catches up to us.”

Students and faculty also voiced support, saying the university should do whatever is necessary to preserve the value of a Cal State degree.

You have to respect any administrator who’s man enough to admit the situation is flawed and needs to be dealt with. Overcrowding means students don’t get into the classes they need and it becomes less and less possible to finish in four years. And while college is a lovely place to spend five years, the outrageous tuition costs make that option a nonviable one.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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It sucks that there is poverty in the world, and there’s something to be said for promoting poverty awareness, but I’m not sure Princeton and Dartmouth are going about it in the most effective way. It’s probably possible to educate people about poverty, but I don’t think there’s a feasible way to simulate the true poverty experience for college kids.

College kids are often lacking in disposable income, yes, but if they were actually living anywhere near enough to the edge to be capable of looking starvation in the eye, they would have bigger things to worry about than midterms and research topics and they would not currently be working to cross “College Degree” off of their To Do lists.

Dartmouth recently hosted the “Two Dollar-a-Day Challenge” and Princeton will host their own Princeton Poverty Simulation on Saturday, Nov. 22nd. Again, it’s excellent to be making people aware of how this lifetime is going down for a large portion of the human population, but I’m not on board with the attempt to simulate anything.

Nina Shield at IvyGate nails it superbly with this:

We had something like this once a year in elementary school gym class. It was called TRAFFIC and we all wheeled around on scooters and if we sped or veered off the roads or ran through the stop sign we were sent to traffic-jail, and when we went through the car wash Mr. Hennessey spritzed us with water. It was exactly like real driving.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

photo: maximolly

There is nothing ignoble or invalid about taking online courses or pursuing an online degree for purely time- and money-saving reasons. However, I would say that slightly more admirable are the motivations of the veterans taking online courses while their bodies and minds do some necessary mending.

It seems like it would be great fun attending classes and jumping right into the whole college campus scenario when your previously perfect body is newly broken and just won’t work the way you want it to and your mind is dealing with a sucky case of PTSD, but it’s probably nowhere near as good a time as it sounds. There are a plethora of solid arguments for online education; this is one of the better ones.

As far as online education advice goes: Again I say, if the student is self-motivated and is fine with not being involved with some or all of the college campus experience, then online classes and/or an online degree can be an excellent option. Taking everything online is possible for some degrees; taking some combination of on-campus and online coursework works, too. That’s kind of the best of both worlds.

Anyone cogitating on the online degree possibilities should always, always, always check up on the accreditation status of the college or university in question, especially if it’s a fully online school.

You’re usually safe signing up for online courses at a well-established brick-and-mortar school, but if there’s even a whisper of doubt, I promise it will be worth the five minutes it will take you to check. You can verify your prospective school’s accreditation status with the U.S. Dept. of Education’s database of accredited postsecondary institutions and programs, or with the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.

If you require more information and advice, these guys have a lot of information about online education, as well as a long damn list of accredited schools (all the schools listed on their site are accredited, which makes it easy).

Posted by Alexa Harrington

photo credit: Steve Sokolic, Associated Press

There’s a huge pile of work awaiting the next Secretary of Education. There’s the No Child Left Behind act to be dealt with, charter school issues, under-performing teacher improvement, accountability, a universal pre-K system, etc.

It would be great if higher education were a priority on that to-do list, but historically, nearly all of the previous appointees have had strong backgrounds in primary or secondary education. Admittedly, it’s a short history; Carter was the first president to appoint a Secretary of Education, so Obama’s Education chief will only be the ninth in U.S. history. Of the eight we’ve already had, only Lauro F. Cavazos, Jr., who served from 1988-1990, has had a background in post-secondary education.

Waiting and trying to guess at who will be picked is like some weird combination of high school prom (Who’s gonna ask who?), March Madness (Who’ll win the office pool?) and the weather report (read Chaos by James Gleick to fully appreciate how impossible it is to accurately predict the weather).

The not-so-short list of Obama’s possible picks are:

David Boren: Current President of the Univ. of Oklahoma; former Governor (D) of Oklahoma (1975-1979) ; former U.S. Senator (1979-1994)

W. Gaston Caperton III: President of the College Board

Michael Cohen: President of Achieve, a group that works to help states raise elementary and secondary academic standards

Linda Darling-Hammond: Top Obama education advisor

Arne Duncan: CEO of Chicago Public Schools

Christopher Edley, Jr.: Dean of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley

James B. Hunt, Jr.: Former governor of North Carolina

Michael Johnston: Director of the Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts

Timothy M. Kaine: Governor of Virginia

Thomas Kean: Former Governor of New Jersey, served as the Chairman of the 9/11 Commission in 2002

Caroline Kennedy: Daughter of President John F. Kennedy

Joel I. Klein: New York City public schools chancellor

George Miller: U.S. Rep. (D-CA), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and author of the College Cost Reduction and Access Act

Janet Napolitano: Governor of Arizona

Hilary C. Pennington: Director of Special Initiatives of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Colin Powell: Former Secretary of State in the first Bush Administration

Michelle Rhee: Washington, D.C. public school system chancellor

Sharon P. Robinson: President of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education

Andrew J. Rotherham: An Obama campaign advisor; co-founder of the education policy research group Education Sector

Jonathan Schnur: Chief executive of New Leaders for New Schools

Kathleen Sebelius: Governor of Kansas

Diane Shust: Director of government relations at the National Education Association

Paul G. Vallas: Superintendent of the Recovery School District of New Orleans

Robert E. Wise, Jr.: President of the Alliance for Excellent Education

Further Reading:

Who Will Obama Pick as Secretary of Education?
Early Transition Decisions to Shape Obama Presidency
Who Should Be the Nation’s Next Education Chief?
Obama’s Possible Candidates for Education Secretary
Who Will Be the Next U.S. Secretary of Education?

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Online learning is already a pretty flexible education option, but now students in Louisiana have an even bendier education alternative via mobile devices. This is a prime example of necessity being the mother of invention: The state of Louisiana has a workforce shortage of 90,000 and the job openings require some education and training. Unfortunately, the potential workers who could go to school and absorb the necessary knowledge are all already working in less-skilled, lower-paying jobs and have little or no extra time for on-site or even online courses.

The Louisiana Community and Technical College System (LCTCS) has partnered with Pearson Custom Solutions to create a customized online learning program for use on mobile devices, i.e., the AT&T Blackberry Curve. Courses will be facilitated by the Pearson company eCollege. The hope is that the combination of print, digital and online coursework will make education a viable option for Louisianians.

“We believe the ability to do some of their course work through the cell phone will be a major draw for individuals,” said Dr. May. “Presently, of the 4.2 million individuals that make up our state’s population, 25% have Internet access while 68% have cell phones. That means there are a large number of individuals to whom we can offer an opportunity to take courses, earn a degree, and have better quality of life in a more convenient way. We are very pleased to be able to offer this opportunity to our citizens. ”

While I think it’s a little creepy that the courses designed for mobile devices require the student to use a specific brand of cell phone, I still applaud the fact that the program as a whole isn’t a frivolous use of technology.

Further Reading:

Groundbreaking Mobile Learning Program Will Train For Louisiana’s 90,000 Job Vacancies

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Anyone who has more writing to do than motivation to get it done should check out Write or Die from Dr. Wicked, who claims to “put the ‘prod’ in productivity.” Write or Die is a lovely little web application that implements the Psych 101 principles of Operant Conditioning and Negative Reinforcement to get the writer’s ass in gear.

The writer sets a word count goal, a time goal, whether they want the grace period to be Forgiving, Strict or Evil, and then chooses the level of negative consequences: Gentle, Normal, Kamikaze, or Electric Shock (sadly, that one’s not actually selectable). Then the writer just has to start typing words in the box until the goals are met.

If writing stops, the negative consequences begin. In Gentle Mode, a little box pops up reminding you to keep writing. In Normal Mode, a really grating song starts playing and you will have it in your head for the remainder of the week. And in Kamikaze Mode, if you stop writing, your text begins deleting itself. A little bit evil, but it could certainly help anyone with procrastination issues.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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I totally do. I know that Mr. Obama was NOT named after the structures military personnel sleep in. Too bad for me, I had (had, until yesterday) my effing word processing program (Microsoft Word, if anyone’s keeping score) in its default auto-correct setting. I’ve always had it set there because it probably came set like that when I bought my MacBook. It has never been a problem until now.

Last week, I wrote a post the day after Election Day about our President-elect, Barack Obama. Right now, the red squiggly underlines are alerting me to the fact that Microsoft Word doesn’t think I spelled “Barrack” correctly; my computer, in all its infinite wisdom, thinks “Barack” is my misspelling of “Barrack.” *sigh*

So, unbeknownst to me, last week I typed in “Barack” and it was immediately corrected to “Barrack.” A good rule of thumb when writing an education blog is to avoid egregious misspellings. I’m just saying.

My husband gets full credit for reading the Obama post yesterday and giving me a heart attack when he said, “Um, hey, [he was trying to be gentle] did you know you misspelled Barack in that Obama post?” I said some bad words about mothers and stuff and dove for my laptop.

After fixing the error and recovering from my panic, I turned off the auto-fix thingy on Word. To avoid looking like a dumbass, I would highly suggest everyone else doing the same for the next four years or so.

Posted by Alexa Harrington