And now here’s some good news (and some super cheerful flower pictures) to balance out the bad news of the previous post (and my constant ranting about the SAT). The San Francisco Chronicle had a happy story about Carolyn Barnes, a young woman who grew up with way more reality to deal with than any kid should. (The complicated childhood isn’t the happy part). After high school she attended Virginia Tech on a full scholarship, graduated in three years at the top of her class, and is now twenty years old and about to begin her five-year fellowship at the University of Michigan. (This is pretty happy, but it gets better).

All of that would be good and wonderful enough. But in addition to using her brain to move herself in a happier direction, she’s planning on using her educational acquisitions (that full noggin of hers) to help ‘empower the poor.’ She’ll be working toward her doctorate in political science and public policy when she starts at the Univ. of Michigan, and wants to use her understanding of the subject matter — on both a personal and an intellectual level—to ‘become an expert on social welfare policy.’ See? Good and happy news. Someone with a kind soul who is using her powers to help her fellow humans.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

The bad news is this story about tenured faculty positions being slowly made extinct. Not a shocking bit of info as it’s been going on for quite some time, but distressing nonetheless. Colleges and universities have been steadily decreasing their tenured-professor numbers for the past few decades, all in the name of budget cuts, saving money, and lots of other super important reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with the pursuit of knowledge.

Back in the day, if you were teaching at a college or a university it was pretty much a given that you were a professor and that at some point in your career you would walk through the golden gates of tenure and into the light of academic freedom. Now, sadly, landing a full-time, long-term teaching position at a college or a university is difficult enough; actually achieving tenured faculty status is an incredibly big deal. Full professors are like the rock stars of academia.

If one were to be all Pollyanna-ish and find the silver lining, one might point out that having a higher population of non-tenured professors on campus would mean less publish-or-perish stress and politics, which would leave more time and energy to focus on the students. It would also mean less research, less article writing, and less freedom to say, think and teach whatever a tenured professor might want. Focusing on the students is great; less deep thinking and fewer new questions raised and answered isn’t.

To make everything black-and-white and to oversimplify to a ridiculous extent, institutions of higher learning are here for two reasons: the education of the students, and for the pursuit of lots of new, in-depth knowledge. Spending an entire career pondering, questioning and answering one piece of the universe is how mankind figures s**t out.

A university is the environment where that questioning, researching and thinking can occur. If faculty are increasingly hired only as part-time instructors or are given two-year contracts, and are only lecturing and not writing or conducting some form of research, then colleges and universities will exist only for teaching and turning a profit. No more higher thought. No more academic freedom.

Further Reading:

The Evolving (Eroding?) Faculty Job
‘The Academics’ Handbook’
‘The Last Professors’

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I love school; everyone who knows me can tell you how pissed I am that being a professional student isn’t a marketable skill. I stretched out my college career for as long as possible, and only stopped when I looked around and saw what my perfectionist tendencies and my exemplary GPA were doing to my family (it turns out it’s not possible, for me, anyway, to be a straight-A student and a good mother and wife).

As much as I adore school and wish it to be the answer to all professional and career-related bumps, quandaries and questions, I must say that I agree with Penelope Trunk’s post: Seven Reasons Why Graduate School Is Outdated. I do think that getting a graduate degree is necessary for some individuals and for the pursuit of some professions. But I also understand that the professional world is changing, the cost of higher education is rising, and it’s not a small thing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get a degree you may not necessarily need or ever really use.

People don’t stay in the same career for fifty years like our grandparents did. There’s a lot of motion in the workplace and along the career path. Everything looks to be in a pretty constant state of flux, and the people who seem to be adapting the best are the ones who are capable of learning as they go and switching lanes mid-stride.

Getting a huge dose of education at the beginning of the journey and then staying the course throughout the length of one’s career trajectory is fine if you actually stay in that particular field of interest and skill. But what if the subject matter that most interests you when you’re 22 isn’t what you want to continue working in when you’re 35?

I don’t think graduate school is outdated in all areas; I’d say it’s fairly necessary in several fields. I do agree with Trunk’s point that one should not use graduate school as a way to discover what one wants to be when one grows up, and one should perhaps rethink the idea of getting an incredibly expensive degree in an area one sort of thinks maybe they might want to earn a living at some day.

I’m not telling people to decrease their educational goals and aspirations, and I’m not trying to put undue amounts of pressure on anyone currently trying to decide what they want to be when they grow up. I’m just pointing out that Ms. Penelope Trunk made some excellent points regarding the possibly outdated graduate degree. I was in such disbelief that I actually agreed with what she was saying (being super pro-education) that I felt it was necessary to bring attention to her line of reasoning.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

There was an article in the NY Times a few weeks ago which I have tried (and have now officially failed) to ignore. Brain-enhancing drugs is the new hot ethical question in academia. The use of performance-enhancing drugs by athletes bothers me, but I didn’t react in quite the same way to hearing about the Tour de France and Major League Baseball and the Olympics as I did to reading about supposedly intelligent people enhancing their noggin function with chemicals.

The more I looked into it, the less intelligent I felt—this has been going on for quite a while in academic settings. Where the hell have I been? I do not enjoy the confusion of simultaneous opposing emotions: feeling cheated/lied to by the folks I thought were in possession of elevated intelligence, along with acute pissed-offedness at not even knowing this crap was available until it was too late for me. Seriously, I could have gotten so much more shit accomplished while I was in school. Probably an additional degree for one thing. Although, the side effects are extreme crankiness, intense focus, and generally just wanting people to go away so you can work, and I was already like that without any drugs in my system. So it’s probably for the best that I didn’t partake.

I can’t really come up with any solid argument against the use of brain-enhancing chemicals other than it just doesn’t seem right. People smoke cigarettes and drink caffeine so they can keep studying, and isn’t that basically the same thing? Possibly cheaper and more socially acceptable, but more or less the same idea. It sucks that humans are so obsessed with perfection that we will go to extreme measures to be the biggest and best athletes, the skinniest and most beautiful models, the smartest and greatest-thinking academics. Being great at a human level isn’t good enough anymore. We all have to find artificial ways to make ourselves super human.

I can understand why; I totally empathize with the level of intense focus you can achieve when everything in your life tunnel-visions down to one goal and all the rest just falls to the wayside. But I’m also a pretty black-and-white girl: I tend to categorize my world as right or wrong and there isn’t a lot of grey. I know I sound like I’m eight years old, but it just doesn’t seem fair. And, seriously, how pathetic if we have one more human endeavor category with an extra section for the asterisks: Fastest Athlete* (performance-enhancing drugs); Hottest Movie Star* (plastic surgery); Skinniest Model* (diet pills and eating disorder); Most Brilliant Scholar* (brain-enhancing drugs).

And, to further my confusion, let me ask this: is all medical assistance and/or enhancement bad? I adore penicillin and vaccinations and vitamins and all the life-saving and –advancing techniques that medical research has come up with. And I can almost guarantee that there was at least one old guy back in the day who saw doctors and their pills as the epitome of modern evil and would have none of it. That guy probably only considered old men who lived past the age of forty to be in the non-pussy category if they had lived that long without medical intervention or enhancement of any kind. Which would mean that by his lights, if I live to a ripe old age, I should have an asterisk on my headstone: Super-Old Lady* (went to the doctor, big fan of Western medicine).

Maybe all the enhancement stuff is just the way things are heading and we should assume everyone is doing it, that we’re all advancing a level of superness thanks to modern science, and we should just get used to it. It can’t be all bad to have a bunch of enhanced brainiacs running amok in the academic world, thinking a real lot and coming up with lots of new, exciting, and profoundly creative and advanced ideas. If they use their powers for good it should all work out great. (This is me being optimistic).

Knowledge Enhancement:

‘Era of Doping’ on the Horizon in Academia?
Is Your Professor Juicing?
Would You Boost Your Brain Power?
Pumping Up Your Brain With Legal Drugs
A Possible Target For Memory-Enhancing Drugs
The Doping Dilemma
Performance Enhancing Drugs in the Boardroom?
A Timeline of Performance-Enhancing Drugs in Sports
Fallout From BALCO Probe Could Taint Olympics, Pro Sports
CBC Sports: 10 Drug Scandals
Are They All Dirty?

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Jon Morrow from On Moneymaking just did a guest post on Brazen Careerist about why he regrets getting straight A’s in college. He lays out pretty clearly what he did, what he got out of it, and why it wasn’t worth it in the end. Some of the comments on the post had a definite pent-up rage undertone—I’m not entirely sure why. Were the commenters feeling threatened by Morrow’s ponderings about his own life and the decisions he’s made (which I’m fairly certain had nothing to do with them)? Who the hell knows.

I understood where he was coming from, even if the cranky commenters didn’t. And I can back him up in saying that being obsessed with your college GPA to the detriment of your actual life is unnecessary. As he points out and as I’ve said before: unless you’re applying to some highly competitive grad school program, an exquisite grade point average isn’t something anyone important will ever give a rat’s ass about.

I did the same thing Morrow did: I studied all the damn time and was focused to my very core on getting the highest score on every lab write-up, assignment, quiz and exam. I had an amazing physics instructor once who was smart, tough, unsmiling, and told us on the first day of class that she didn’t believe in extra credit so we shouldn’t waste her time asking for it. She expected us to learn the material well and to do the work she assigned, end of story.

And then she handed back our first set of lab reports and told the class that one student had gone above and beyond what even she expected and she had therefore gone against her twenty-year no extra credit policy and had given this particular student several extra points. This turn of events did not amuse her, and she stood over me and stared me down while announcing this in front of my glaring classmates. The grade-obsessed perfectionist half of me was supremely proud and was jumping up and down (on the inside) with delirious joy, thinking “Oh, hell YES! I kick ASS!” The normal half of me thought, “Crap. Now they all hate me and think I’m a freak.”

Which I was. Physics Class Me occured when I was working on degree # 2 and was ditching my infant daughter, my husband, my friends and any semblance of my life in order to devote every waking moment (of which there were quite a number as I rarely slept) to achieving academic success. Necessary? Yes, if I wanted to get into the program I was so focused on. No, if I had taken a step back and gotten my priorities straight. Unconsciounable? Absolutely. I ditched my child for about the first three years of her life because I couldn’t just let go a little (unclench) and get a few B’s.

Lest you think the perfection obsession was limited only to the New-Mommy-Staggering- Under-the-Weight-of-Parental-Responsibility Me, I have another sparkling example of School Obsessed Alexa. I had two weeks left of my senior year at Evergreen. There are two important bits in that last sentence: (1) normal people, if they are capable of unclenching, can usually find it within themselves to do so during the last two weeks of senior year; (2) I was at Evergreen, where obsessing about academic perfection is dumb because there are no grades.

Anyway, I had just returned from a photography road trip and had a lot of printing to do in the darkroom before my final project was due to be shown. My then-boyfriend, now-husband asked me to go away with him for the weekend to the San Juan Islands. His friend is a pilot and had offered to fly us there. How romantic. I knew that what my boy really had planned was to propose to me. He had set up this whole thing, his friend was willing to fly us, he had a ring, etc. I played dumb, pretended I just thought he wanted to go waste a weekend of printing time at a bed-and-breakfast, told him I loved him very much and it was a very sweet gesture, but I needed to stay home and rack up as many printing hours as possible in the darkroom before my project was due. I’m usually a very forthright and honest girl (I have no filter between my brain and my mouth, so I tend to say everything the moment I think it), so it’s fortunate I held back and didn’t say, “I’m too busy with school to get engaged to you this weekend. Better luck next time, pal.”

Isn’t that awful? I’m such a bi*ch. I cringe when I recall that stunning moment. For the record, he proposed after I turned in my project and hung my show. We’re living happily ever after and I’ve since learned my lessons regarding life vs. school and I’m a much better mom, wife and friend because of all the learning I’ve done (read: cringe-worthy moments have carved me into a real person).

School is good and working hard is commendable. But the pursuit of perfection to the detriment of your real life is usually not worth it. Find some sort of balance. Minus the crystals and granola. Unless that’s your thing.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

If one were to go solely by the involuntary facial twitching and general demeanor (crushed soul) of people writing grant proposals, one might conclude that grant writing sucks. Here are some resources to assist the grant writers among us through the excruciating process:

Technical Advice:

UC Davis: Writing Grant Proposals

Corporation for Public Broadcasting: Grant Proposal Writing Tips

Duke University: Research/Grant Proposals

(Very, Very Specific) Guidelines For Writing Grant Applications

Non-Technical Common Sense Advice:

What Do Winning Proposals Have In Common?

Lessons Learned

Different Glossaries With Similar Titles:

Glossary of Proposal Writing Terms

Grant Writing Glossary of Terms

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Undergrad Origins Of PhDs

Despite Reed College’s possible letter-writing inadequacy, they kick ass at molding their undergrads for PhD-hood. Their website has a very shiny table that shows the top 10 schools in the nation where PhD recipients earned their baccalaureate degree.

The table tracks a decent interval, from 1975 to 2004. It’s interesting to note the fairly solid state of the list: only 11 schools make it to the Top 10 in the 29-year span. It’s not the list I thought it would be—there are schools I hadn’t expected as well as several schools I assumed would have been on the list and aren’t.

Here’s the list, including number 11, in alphabetical order so I don’t piss anyone off:

Bryn Mawr
California Institute of Technology
Carleton
Grinnell
Harvey Mudd
MIT
Oberlin
Pomona
Reed
Swarthmore
University of Chicago

Grinnell College has part of the list as well, broken down by discipline. It’s interesting, but kind of a tease as they only show a tiny section of the list for each discipline where Grinnell appears. They only show the other schools at all for “context.” It is on their website, they can choose which parts to show us.

Earlham College has a good chunk of the data on their site that you can check out.

I don’t know whom you have to pay to be allowed to see the entire list. I looked, and the closest I came to finding the list in its entirety was someone else wondering how in the hell to get a copy of it. Feel free to let me know if anyone can shed some light.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Harvard Medical School, in the hopes of attracting teachers, is offering doctors salaries that are double what they would otherwise earn as primary care practioners, according to a CNN story. Sixteen million dollars are going into the effort.

I knew that a shortage of teachers was a major problem in nursing all through America. (From Massachusetts to California) but I didn’t realize that it was in issue at medical schools as well. Apparently, it’s a national problem…”the single biggest problem facing virtually every course director,” said David Cardozo, a neurobiology professor who led the effort to bring more money in for teaching doctors.

Teachers are the lifeblood of a well-functioning society, as are doctors. This is one problem we certainly don’t need.

Posted By Sindya Bhanoo
college | medical school