This day will come

I wonder how many (other) graduate student blogs consist mostly of reposts from PHD Comics…

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Dig in

One of the things that I am most looking forward to about starting a tenure track job is the opportunity to dig into the area and get to know it.  I’ve lived in the same town for the past seven years and the same apartment for the past five, but my life here has always [...]

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Judging emotions

Female Science Professor has a nice post today about questions that have been raised about Supreme Court Justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor.  Obviously, it is important to thoroughly examine people who will be put in influential positions (clearly, we don’t need someone like this on the Supreme Court), but some of the questions that have been [...]

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Rankings revisited

Last week I noted that there is more to a potential job than the school’s rank, even though nobody in my family has heard of the school where I will start work in the fall.  My experiences as a graduate student (and observer of junior faculty) in a highly-ranked department led me to seek a [...]

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The computer says you’re going to leave

Graduate student attrition has been discussed before, but now Google is using employee data and a computer algorithm to identify employees who might quit their jobs “even before they know they might leave.”  As reported by the Wall Street Journal: The move is one of a series Google has made to prevent its most promising [...]

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It begins with the rankings

An article from the spring issue of Contexts has just been posted on The Contexts Blog examining rankings of colleges and graduate schools (they’ve also posted a free link to the PDF version of the article).  Because of the importance many place on rankings, this is a fitting beginning for those embarking on the summer-long [...]

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Framing farming

As Shamus on Scatterplot posted earlier in the month, Washington State University has decided to eliminate its rural sociology program and, with it, the jobs of eight faculty members.  Today, Inside Higher Ed posted a report on the topic: That a land grant university would simply abolish the discipline — and in particular a rare [...]

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Seemed like a good idea at the time*

Do you need business cards if you are not a businessperson?  Last spring, in anticipation of the upcoming job market, I thought that it might be helpful to have something for others to remember me by.  I imagined giving business cards to prospective employers that I happened to run into in the hallways of the [...]

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When religion fails, call Big Brother

Religion may prevent socially disapproved behaviors because of an omniscient, judging other (panopticon religion), but it also prevents individuals from taking action because of a promised “better” life ahead (opiate religion).  It appears that religion is failing us on both fronts.  The potential presense of an omnisicient, judging other does not prevent all of us [...]

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At the rank of assistant professor

My mom was recently talking to my grandparents about my upcoming graduation and job and she happened to mention that I would be starting as an assistant professor.  They couldn’t belive that after all of the years I’ve spent in grad school to earn my Ph.D. I would only be assisting others with teaching and [...]

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