Not surprisingly, budget cuts really piss people off. Mark Yudof, President of the University of California, is the current target for those protesting budget cuts in the UC system. He’s president of all ten UC schools, but lives in Berkeley as he also holds a faculty appointment at UC Berkeley’s School of Law.
I’m a California native, and I know two things to be true about UC Berkeley: (1) no one calls the school UC Berkeley or UCB, it’s Cal or it’s Berkeley; and (2) of all the UC schools, the one most likely to protest anything is and always has been, Berkeley.
I realize that Berkeley has the best intellectual reputation of the group, but if I were in Yudof’s position, I would have chosen to park my life near one of the more beautiful and less angry UC campuses. Los Angeles, San Diego and Santa Barbara are gorgeous, smart, and a lot less likely to yell at you or make your life a living hell.
Also, I would have thought twice about accepting the $824,000 annual salary, especially if my hiring date (March 2008) happened to be within a few months of the first wave of budget cuts hitting the fan. I’m sure that being in charge of an entire university system in the State of California right when the recession is sucking the State down the toilet is a hard damn job. But have a soul for crying out loud. Or at least pretend to be vaguely human on the inside and quit laying people off and forcing retirement while bringing home enough cash to pay the salaries of at least sixteen staff.
Exploding cars is a terrible plan, and I do not commend violent protesting in any way, shape or form. Everyone watching will just think that your cause is pointless and that your group consists of infantile ***holes, and you will only bring the wrath of the police force down upon your heads.
So, protestors, use your smart-ass, Berkeley-educated noggins to come up with a better way to tell Yudof he’s screwing up. As for President Yudof, stop being an inhuman schmuck and if you can’t figure out a way to avoid tightening UC’s belts so horrendously, then take a damn pay cut so people will stop focusing their anger on you and your wife.
Fall term will be starting soon, whether you’re prepared for the deluge or not. Summer vacation is good for earning money and bonding with peers, but it’s getting toward the portion of summer that would be well spent on getting a few of your higher-education ducks in a row.
Getting one’s organization system planned out and ready to go before the second week of the fall term hits and you’re already in too deep to breathe, let alone dig yourself out, is a prudent move. I’m a sick and twisted little girl, and will sometimes let a deliciously unorganized disaster pile up just so that I can dive in and organize it to perfection later.
I did notice, however, that at the beginning of my college career I tended to hold off on the organizational system streamlining until the term was over. Winter, spring and summer breaks were spent cleaning up the previous term’s mess while muttering to myself that next term I would grow the hell up and keep my academic life in order from day one.
By the time I graduated, I was overly super at keeping schoolwork and papers in line and perfect. It turned out, weirdly enough, that dealing with a chunk of information as it came along was a thousand times faster than shoving it into my “Deal With” folder and having to dig through said folder after the term was over, and wonder (a) what the eff it was, and (b) figure out whether to keep it or toss it, and (c) if it was a keeper, then where would I be keeping it?
Arjun Muralidharan over at The Productive Student has a three-post series about organization systems for students. If you don’t have your own personal system designed and perfected as of yet, I recommend checking them out (before classes start).
Last week’s post got me thinking about the kid/achievement/parent dynamic. I may have mentioned, once or twice, my absolute fury toward and lack of goodwill for parents who place volumes of pressure the size of planets onto their kids’ shoulders and tell them repeatedly that only the achievements which can be recorded on paper are worthwhile, and that being anything but the top 5% is as good as failing utterly. I escaped having a mother and a father who put that kind of pressure to out-perform my peers on me, but I did have a few grandparents who made sure I was aware that success was all they were interested in.
As an older and wiser thirty-five-year-old, I’ve had some time to ponder the raising I had, and to figure out which bits made me a better person, and which bits made me wish I’d come from an uneducated, low-pressure family that would have been ecstatic if I’d achieved a high school education and a lifetime of honest work days.
Also, now I’m a parent, and since it’s really better to figure out what your parenting philosophy is prior to raising one’s offspring, I’ve been doing some research. You have a little leeway to screw up, because there’s some time to patch it up later. Plus, it’s difficult to impart much wisdom to a tiny person who crawls everywhere, can’t hold up their end of a conversation, and keeps shoving everything smaller than a tennis ball into their mouth. Keep in mind, though, that the more you mess up when they’re little, the more you’ll be scraping off and re-plastering when they’re older, more angry, and a lot less convincible.
Parents reading this should pay attention, and any kids reading this should make their asinine parentals (whether borderline or solidly inside the dumbass box) read it all the way through. Watch them to be sure they’ve really absorbed it.
As I mentioned in the previous post, I was so ready to escape small-town life and be my own person at college, I practically ran across the graduation stage. Sadly, I was excited for college because not only would I be free, I had also convinced myself that college would be similar to high school in that I would be able to skate by on my (slightly) above-average intelligence and my ability to charm every adult in the room. Studying was never something I had had to do very much of, and since I test well (college teaches you your social security number, and public school teaches you how to kick ass on standardized tests), I figured I’d do just as well in college as I had done for the past thirteen years.
It was not to be. Which sucked while it was happening to me, but is really effing funny to look back on and watch cocky little good-grades, non-student me get taken down a notch or three. Academic probation is a painful life lesson to report to your parents over the winter holidays. Even more painful is your very own parents nodding their heads and telling you, their supposed wonder child, that they had known the first semester would end like this. And down I went, five more notches. Ouch.
To be fair, my parents have really good bull**it detectors, and they probably knew the whole time (my entire pre-college career) that I was getting lots of praise for just being me: a slightly charming, well-read kid with a good vocabulary who tests well. Which is to say that my parents knew good and GD well that I was riding my little wave of glory without doing much to actually earn all that praise. They weren’t even all that impressed with my pile of swim team medals and ribbons until I actually started working my ass off trying to be a better swimmer than I’d started out (which I did for me, not for anyone else, and that also made them proud).
When I grew up a smidge and was able to get a little distance on high school and those early college years, it became clear that my parental units were not the types to slobber all over themselves with praise for anything that I hadn’t actually worked hard at achieving. They didn’t even seem to be impressed by place, names, numbers, or ranking; all it ever took was their witnessing of my literal or figurative sweat, and I’d get the look and the hug and the “You did good, kid.”
And that, people, is good and decent parenting. Loving your kids unconditionally for who they are, not for their scores and grades; seeing through their bull**it; and praising them not for their high placement or numbers, but for the work they did to get from point A to point B; and, most importantly, being content and satisfied with them when they are happy, not when they’re doing triple back-jumps through hoops on no sleep because they’re killing themselves to achieve awesomely high paper numbers so they can be ranked in the top 5% of some ridiculous and cruelly scored game of life.
Here comes the I’m a parent so I know of what I speak and I practice what I preach so listen up pal part: My daughter is seven, and is currently into gymnastics. At the end of the ten-week term, they have a Show Day and the parents come and watch the kids perform the skills they’ve learned, and at the end the kids all receive an identical pretend gold medal (which 99% of the kids believe is real gold).
After all of the parental applauding, my kid ran up to me, eyes shining with fake-gold-medal joy, hugged me violently and said, “Mommy! Aren’t you so proud of me for getting a medal?!” I said, “Nope.” I told her I was super happy for her that she had a medal because it was obvious that having something that cool and shiny was making her euphoric, but that I was proud of her because she had shown up to every class, had always tried her hardest, had worked to get better at her gymnastics skills, and had tried new things, even the stuff that scared the crap out of her.
I could see the little wheels turning in her head, trying to work out what her weird Mom meant. On the one hand it makes things easier on her: all she has to do is try and actually work at stuff. On the other hand, it makes things tougher on her: she’ll actually have to work because I, like my own parents, have a magnificent BS detector, and will know it when she’s riding the wave of charm and innate abilities.
Every August, right before the new freshman class shows up for Fall Term, Beloit College publishes the Mindset List for that year’s incoming class. This year, the incoming freshmen who make up the class of 2013 were all born in (or near) 1991.
In 1991 I was a junior in high school, and everything new thing that was occurring in the world and was blowing my little mind, they have never not known to be true. Computers were personal and were neither portable nor laptop sized, and the 1991 version of cell phones were transportable and were bigger than your head. Below please find the first portion of the Mindset List for the Class of 2013:
1. For these students, Martha Graham, Pan American Airways, Michael Landon, Dr. Seuss, Miles Davis, The Dallas Times Herald, Gene Roddenberry, and Freddie Mercury have always been dead.
2. Dan Rostenkowski, Jack Kevorkian, and Mike Tyson have always been felons.
3. The Green Giant has always been Shrek, not the big guy picking vegetables.
4. They have never used a card catalog to find a book.
5. Margaret Thatcher has always been a former prime minister.
6. Salsa has always outsold ketchup.
7. Earvin “Magic” Johnson has always been HIV-positive.
8. Tattoos have always been very chic and highly visible.
9. They have been preparing for the arrival of HDTV all their lives.
10. Rap music has always been main stream.
11. Chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream has always been a flavor choice.
12. Someone has always been building something taller than the Willis (née Sears) Tower in Chicago.
13. The KGB has never officially existed.
14. Text has always been hyper.
15. They never saw the “Scud Stud” (but there have always been electromagnetic stud finders.)
16. Babies have always had a Social Security Number.
17. They have never had to “shake down” an oral thermometer.
18. Bungee jumping has always been socially acceptable.
19. They have never understood the meaning of R.S.V.P.
20. American students have always lived anxiously with high-stakes educational testing.
21. Except for the present incumbent, the President has never inhaled.
22. State abbreviations in addresses have never had periods.
23. The European Union has always existed.
24. McDonald’s has always been serving Happy Meals in China.
25. Condoms have always been advertised on television.
26. Cable television systems have always offered telephone service and vice versa.
27. Christopher Columbus has always been getting a bad rap.
28. The American health care system has always been in critical condition.
29. Bobby Cox has always managed the Atlanta Braves.
30. Desperate smokers have always been able to turn to Nicoderm skin patches.
31. There has always been a Cartoon Network.
32. The nation’s key economic indicator has always been the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
33. Their folks could always reach for a Zoloft.
34. They have always been able to read books on an electronic screen.
35. Women have always outnumbered men in college. More…
I was never good at taking advice in my teen years, but grown-up me wants to go back to the 1990s, tie teenager me to a chair, and wait while the pain-in-the-ass younger version of myself reads the above book. I also would have liked to have known of its existence yesterday, when I wrote this post about an eerily familiar topic.
It looks to be an excellent resource for any community college newbie. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:
Bookstore shelves are crowded with books offering advice to college students, yet—astonishingly—none of these books offer needed advice to the majority of college students in the United States … those attending community college. Of the approximately 21 million full- and part-time college students, 11 million attend community colleges.
The Community College Guide aims to help fill this huge gap. The authors of this book have decades of experience between them as professors and administrators in both two-year and four-year colleges, have written numerous books for a general readership and thoroughly understand what community college students need to know to succeed in their college careers.
From how to apply to community colleges to what to expect from your courses, from the truth about what you’ll pay to actual financial aid opportunities, The Community College Guide offers a wealth of information for the millions of American students who desire higher education at the community level.
They make a good point: Why aren’t there any good guides available for community college students? A two-year institution isn’t as capable of drowning unsuspecting freshmen, but I’m sure those brand spanking new college students would appreciate some guidance and advice.
Not everyone heads off to a four-year higher learning institution right after high school. Some people forgo the awesomeness of freshman year in the dorms so they can save thousands of dollars learning how to become a stellar college student amid the relative safety of a community college before launching themselves full-bore into the larger and less safety-netted world of the four-year college or university.
I was dead-set on escaping my tiny hometown as soon as I turned in my rented cap and gown and was handed my official high school diploma. (They gave us blank rolled-up sheets of paper at the ceremony, and threatened us, on pain of death and of not ever officially graduating, if we failed to return our dorky graduation get-ups. Did they seriously believe that we would steal something so polyester and hideous?) I thought I would explode with anticipation for my higher education adventure, and had to talk myself into enjoying my last, fully free summer vacation, because all I wanted to do was dive head first into college life.
I had done pretty well in high school, considering I only bothered to carry my books home when I had a homework assignment that would take me longer then the five minutes before class the day it was due. I managed to get into a good school, and figured I was golden from there on out. This plan did not work out. I was shocked to discover, after receiving a ‘B’, a ‘C’, a ‘D’ and an ‘F’ for my first semester’s “efforts,” that there was an outside chance I was going to have to crack a book and study in college. Crap.
It sucked, it was humbling and painful, and it was horrifically expensive. My parents made just enough to not qualify for any help with my tuition costs, but not nearly enough to pay for my education outright. They had been saving since I was an infant, and I can’t tell you how shi**y it feels to tell your good, kind, hard-working parents that their dumbass kid just wasted several thousand of their hard-earned dollars trying to avoid the inevitable learning process that is a college education.
It would have been so much easier on everyone’s heads, hearts and savings accounts if I had skipped the dorm experience and had instead gone to a community college for a year or two. I would have had smaller classes, less of that dehumanizing I’m-a-number feeling, more attention from instructors, and a slew of accessible staff and tutors who would have liked nothing more than to help me help myself.
For any high school students out there who would prefer to get really great at being a college student before hitting the four-year campus of their matriculation dreams, then please consider spending a year or two at a solid, accredited community college, and transferring to what will then be a more easily conquerable four-year college or university.
So much excitement about the iPhone! CourseSmart just announced the release of its free eTextbooks application on the App Store. The eTextbooks App allows student and instructor subscribers to access their CourseSmart eTextbooks whenever and wherever they want.
“We’ve seen significant demand from student customers for the ability to get required textbook content in electronic form on an iPhone or iPod touch,” said Frank Lyman, executive vice president of CourseSmart. “It’s important to students to be able to access textbook content in color with the same page layout as a printed textbook and now the eTextbooks App allows them to do that.”
According to the press release, the iPhone App:
Provides any time, anywhere access to the eTextbooks students have purchased online at www.coursesmart.com[link].
–Enables students to easily browse, search, and read thousands of textbooks from their iPhone or iPod touch.
–Preserves the carefully laid out pages giving students quick and easy access to not only the full text but essential content such as diagrams, illustrations and charts.
–Allows students to “stack” all of their textbooks in the “My eTextbooks” personal, online library.
–Students can search for a topic within a single book or across their entire eTextbook stack, view text notes, access the table of contents, zoom in on text, graphs, and scroll through or jump to individual pages.
…It costs $99 and it’s called the App Store. This post over at the FairSoftware Blog starts out funny, but ends up making sense. If you’re working toward a degree in Computer Science, you’ll be writing (one hopes) cool and useful programs. Unless your future plans for world domination necessitate a separate MBA degree, consider the quick and dirty (and extremely practical) business lesson that selling your iPhone app at the App Store will provide.
You’ll be out the $99 fee to become a registered iPhone developer. That’s less than a textbook would run you, and you’ll have the chance to make that cash back, assuming you learn your MBA lessons well and write a kick-ass iPhone app that people will want to buy.
According to FairSoftware, here’s what you’ll learn by doing:
Marketing: How do users hear about your app? How can you create some buzz to attract more people? You will learn that having an amazing technical product is nothing if you can’t communicate its value.
Customer support: You will be forced to look at your product with the eyes of your end user. Is the app really intuitive? How come every user seems to be making the same usability mistake? You will learn to respect your end user and project yourself to code for what they need, not what you think is neat.
Economics: By now you should be having fun. Some money is coming in. You’d want more. How can you manage that? Maybe it’s time to bring on board another student to help with support or graphics. How much will that cost you? Is that a good return on investment? You will learn to make your own business decisions.
The arts tend to be less than fully appreciated, so it’s not like I thought art departments would be immune to the current swath of budget cuts, but it’s still depressing. Everyone’s taking a hit, but the NY Times has highlighted several painful examples:
If you are looking for a sign of how strapped the University of California, Los Angeles, is for cash, consider that its arts and architecture school may resort to holding a bake sale to raise money. California’s severe financial crisis has left its higher-education system — which serves nearly a fifth of the nation’s college students — in particularly bad straits. But tens of thousands of students at public and private colleges and universities around the country will find arts programs, courses and teachers missing — victims of piercing budget cuts — when they descend on campuses this month and next.
At Washington State University the department of theater arts and dance has been eliminated. At Florida State University the undergraduate program in art education and two graduate theater programs are being phased out. The University of Arizona is cutting three-quarters of its funds, more than $500,000, for visiting classical music, dance and theater performers. Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts, which supports four departments — dance, music, theater and visual arts — is losing 14 percent of its $1.2 million budget over the next two years. The Louisiana State University Museum of Art, one of the largest university-affiliated collections in the South, saw 20 percent of its state financing disappear. Other private and state institutions warn of larger classes, trimmed offerings, higher tuition and fewer services, faculty and visitors.
I’m hoping everyone can just hunker down and try to hang in there until things improve. Because things have to improve at some point, right?
Good news for data-analyzing statistics geeks: according to this article in the NY Times, being a statistician in the Internet Age has extreme hotness potential.
“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.”
The rising stature of statisticians, who can earn $125,000 at top companies in their first year after getting a doctorate, is a byproduct of the recent explosion of digital data. In field after field, computing and the Web are creating new realms of data to explore — sensor signals, surveillance tapes, social network chatter, public records and more. And the digital data surge only promises to accelerate, rising fivefold by 2012, according to a projection by IDC, a research firm. More…
