Tag: academia

So You Want to Be a Scientist?

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl

Cover of "Science Nonfiction" by Darren Lipomi

When I was a physics graduate student at Arizona State, one of my fellow grad students had a roommate who, after obtaining an undergraduate business degree, got a job as an office assistant for an economics professor. The roommate (remember, not a grad student) was earning like a young professional, not a wizard’s apprentice. “You know what he’s doing this week?” the grad student told us during a typical lunchtime rant. “He’s downloading files one by one from a dot-gov website and copying them into spreadsheets. A week of work, for what I could write as a five-minute script! And he’s getting $60,000 a year for this!”

Whether or not $60,000 sounds like a lot of money depends on one’s position. My whole life, I have seen claims the median physics B.S. graduate makes that much, but I personally didn’t make $60,000 until my third year as an assistant professor—and, even then, only after getting another job and negotiating a raise.

Science Nonfiction: Behind the Scenes in University Research, the new memoir from Dr. Darren Lipomi, chair of the Department of Chemical and Sustainability Engineering at the University of Rochester, addresses such issues bluntly—until it doesn’t. “There is a fair case to be made that the financial burden of research is borne not by the taxpayer,” Lipomi writes, “but by the ‘forever trainee’—the twenty-two-year-old PhD student who becomes a postdoctoral scholar at twenty-nine, and an untenured research scientist at thirty-four.” But now in his mid-forties, having more or less figured the system out, Lipomi is doing better than fine, and his memoir charts an uneasy path between celebration and critique. Read more »

Thursday, October 3, 2024

The KPI Μachine

Posted on by Eleni Petrakou

by Eleni Petrakou

Decorative artwork. Various types that look related to academia, industry, science and the church with ominous and cartoonish appearances. Art deco and dystopian undertones.
From the webcomic Dresden Codak

Let this text be a string of anecdotes this columnist has been exposed to, mostly through her work in research and academia. Said work was spread in space and time. The anecdotes, however, come from the western world and its sphere of influence.

*

The first-year student is asking me what to do about the courses by those lecturers who don’t know how to answer her questions.

Five minutes later she’s asking the same thing again.

In the meantime she explained that she’s aware many students lack the background necessary for higher education and of the reasons why. And that yes, she knows she can find lectures from elsewhere online.

*

The senior lecturer is showing me photos of past exam answer sheets. It is clear that some science students don’t know lower high school math.

All of them passed the exams thanks to their marks for the other half of the questions, graded by his co-teaching colleague.

*

Minor detail in Guardian article a few months ago. A seasoned professor says that the quality of studies is going down and for the first time ever she had to fail more than 10% of students.

*

The friend who quit academia is listening to me being concerned about grade inflation. She comforts me by adding that at one university, on her first day at work, she was made to sign an agreement that she wouldn’t ever fail more than 15% of students. Read more »

Monday, November 7, 2011

The (De)Merits of Pop Culture Conferences: Coyne and Tanner on the ‘Jersey Shore’ Academic Conference

Posted on by Tauriq Moosa

by Tauriq Moosa

JerseyShore1The gods of irony are smiling. I recently attributed the existence of the TV-show Jersey Shore as the closest thing to an insult I could fathom for myself, when comparing myself to Christians who regularly want things banned. Then, thanks to Jerry Coyne, I discovered my old friend – my seriously old and now obviously senile friend – academia has cozied up to said show, in order to get them young folk interested in “bigger questions”.

Not so long ago, the University of Chicago had an academic conference on Jersey Shore, where the various sessions discussed important topics like: “The Monetization of Being: Reputational Labor, Brand Culture, and Why Jersey Shore Does, and Does Not, Matter”, “The Construction of Guido Identity” and “Foucault’s Going to the Jersey Shore, Bitch!”. What are the merits of having conferences on pop-culture, where questions are discussed on metaphysics, ethics and “identity” (I still don’t understand that topic)? Anchoring these questions to pop-culture topics, like Jersey Shore, is like putting scented oils on a corpse, serving little purpose other than to keep our breakfasts down before we bury the whole mess and carry on with our actual lives.

Coyne certainly thinks it’s largely useless:. He says: “(1) I’m not a huge fan of academic pop-culture studies, which seem shallow, too infested with postmodern obscurantism, and bad in that they replace more substantive material that can actually make students think deeply about things. (2) Pop-culture courses seem to me to be an easy way for professors to attract students by tapping into their t.v.-watching and music-listening habits.”

Now those are two distinct points. The first part argues that pop-culture conferences are largely useless, a waste time and resources, too indulging in obscurantism, and replace actual learning with the illusion of grappling with profound subjects because the titles indicate “big questions”. The second part points out why such conferences exist at all and how professors can be comfortable teaching this with a straight face: it gets them students, therefore maintains income because more students would come to a course on Jersey Shore than just vanilla ones on Plato, etc. The second is a description and seems to me obviously true: It is one way to keep education alive, one way to secure oneself a regular job, and so on, by affixing your learning toward what your audience actually cares about.

Read more »