Blog of the year: Conditionally Accepted

As you may have noticed, the entire internet is required to compile a best-of list (or two, or ten) at the end of the year. Since I am lazy, my best-of list this year consists of one blog: Conditionally Accepted. Since grad school I have read a lot of blogs but none of the blogs I regularly read have done as much to remind me of the importance of practicing what we preach as Conditionally Accepted. To borrow a sports cliche, Conditionally Accepted reminds me of a young FemaleScienceProfessor, in that it regularly highlights the problems that it is easy for those (like me) in the white, male academic majority to overlook while letting people outside of the majority know that they are not alone. And it has only been five months!

Congratulations, Conditionally Accepted, and keep up the good work!

Read Full Post »

Popularity contest results

The other day I posted my ten favorite posts from the past three years. One thing I’ve been interested in during this time is how people end up here. The ten most-viewed posts from the past three years give some interesting insight into how that happens. There is also relatively little overlap with my ten favorite posts, reinforcing the idea that people will do what they want with what you’ve created. While I would like people to come here because they want to read “Inequality as a room on fire,” then, they’re more likely to come here looking for demeaning pictures of women. The ten most-viewed posts for the past three years were:

1. Sexism sells

This is the most-viewed post by quite a large margin due largely to the search terms that end up leading people to it. “Matchbox” is the number two overall search term and “big women,” “women and cars,” and “small women” are also in the top ten. I think it is safe to say that most people who arrive here after searching for one of those terms leave disappointed.

2. I don’t date sociology majors

This post’s popularity is a combination of the number one search term (“I don’t date sociology majors”) and a link from the political science job rumor forum.

3. PowerPoint, podcasts, and ending the illusion of student reading

This is one of two posts that appears on my list of favorites. I tried to make an important point here so I’m glad that it has been read quite a few times.

4. Turning down a tenure track job

I sometimes wonder if I would have made the same decision if I had known how bad the job market really was in 2008-09. With the benefit of hindsight, I definitely made the right choice.

5. Ten years of Office Space

“Office Space” and “Office Space Poster” are also in the top ten search terms.

6. Floundering on fellowship

Another one of my personal favorites. I’m still suffering from Major Procrastination Disorder.

7. STFU, Students!

These sentiments must still be true since they keep showing up in my dreams.

8. Bad reviews

There’s nothing like a mention on Scatterplot to make you realize how few readers you normally have.

9. The world’s most offensive Christmas song

I have to admit that I may have propped this one up by linking to it again a year later, but it needed to be said. Plan for it to become a Christmas tradition.

10. A compilation of job market resources and advice

I hope that some of these links still work, since “Sociology job market” is the third most popular search term!

One More Thing: The other SLACs

If you type “SLAC” into your browser’s address bar and hit “enter” with the intention of arriving at this site, you may end up at one of these other SLACs instead:

• SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
• Selective Liberal Arts Consortium
• Salt Lake Acting Company
• Student Labor Action Coalition
  

 

 

Read Full Post »

Three years summarized in ten posts

A lot has changed since my first post three years ago. Parts of the transition from ABD with a job offer to third-year assistant professor at a small liberal arts college have gone the way I expected while others have not. I’ve decided to celebrate the past three years with an early-career retrospective of my ten favorite posts from this time period. When selecting them I was happy to see that they were distributed fairly evenly so that I didn’t end up with a Pearl Jam Twenty situation in which most of the attention is focused on the first 25% of the overall time period. The fact that it was hard to narrow the selection down to ten posts probably speaks more to my self importance than the quality of my posts, but without that self importance I probably would have never started a blog!

My ten favorite posts, in chronological order:

• Floundering on fellowship
• If this is a marathon, stop telling me to sprint
• PowerPoint, podcasts, and ending the illusion of student reading
• I’ve never heard of that
• How often do you brush your teeth?
• The publication current
• The art of class discussion
• Sociology and the “real world”
• Inequality as a room on fire
• The near impossibility of befriending students

Read Full Post »