Entries Tagged 'Academia' ↓

When all the beautiful minds at Princeton run out of windows to scrawl on, they step things up a notch.  I snapped a shot of this setup in Princeton’s Firestone Library earlier today, but it’s been there as long as I can remember.  I’ve never seen anyone working there, so as far as I know [...]

The number one emailed article over at the New York Times these days is a story about positive psychology and how  popular the field has become on college campuses.  There’s a link in the article to Authentic Happiness, the website for the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania where they have umpteen questionnaires [...]

Ticked off because your advisor hasn’t written back in a week?  Bent out of shape because your inbox is overflowing with emails about upcoming lectures you’ll never attend?
I heard a three minute segment on NPR’s Morning Edition today that put grad student griping in perspective.  Abdulla Mizyead talks about trying to do his thesis defense [...]

I would rather get a root canal than sit through a conference where people just read their papers.  Honestly, who wants to have an academic paper read to them?  I can think of no better way to tell an audience you aren’t interested in respecting their time than to stand before them and read.
I thought [...]

Kudos to Chris Uggen, professor of sociology and chair of the sociology department at the University of Minnesota for blogging about how he failed one of his Ph.D. qualifying exams as a grad student.
Yes, you heard right.  He’s a professor.  He’s chair of the department.  He failed one of his qualifying exams.  And he just [...]

A few days ago I received the sad news that one of my favorite high school teachers, Brooke Workman, had passed away.  Dr. Workman taught American lit. and humanities courses as well as trimester seminars that focused on the writings of a single author (my year it was Hemingway).  From the title of his classes [...]

I had coffee on Friday with Hubert Krieger, a research manager for the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, an EU agency located in Dublin.  Hubert overflows with energy–sometimes too much, he confessed, especially for someone who’s been working 20 years in the same position.  But I think this is a [...]