Just ordered this book on everything that can go wrong in social science research.
Archive for October, 2009
28 Oct
midnight oil
I will try to stop complaining about my 9 AM Monday time slot after reading this. A pretty inspiring article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/education/28community.html?em
27 Oct
surviving and thriving
Today during class someone asked me how one can survive a Ph.D. program with their sanity and general happiness intact. Some quick thoughts:
1. Study something for your dissertation that you’re passionate about / fascinates you…or else your life is going to be kind of depressing and slow.
2. Write every week day for moderate amounts of time when possible.
3. Don’t totally isolate yourself. Find intellectual community.
4. Find non-graduate school community/friends. Hang out with them. Often.
5. Eat good food, and even better, healthy food. (Like the whole leaf lettuce served at In n’ Out.) If possible, pursue graduate education in a locale with a nearby Trader Joe’s.
6. Exercise. It really makes a difference.
7. Find a really wonderful friend who will make you snacks and tea lattes, make you exercise, cook you a garlic-themed birthday dinner, drink juice with you, always offer to drive, and listen to all of your incoherent thoughts.
8. Help fund a calculus camp. Be amazed that you have friends awesome enough to go to the mountains with their students…and study calculus.
9. Make good friends with a four-year old.
10. Learn to power nap.
My name is Julie Park and I approved this message.
23 Oct
objectively felt?
I tend to have a problem with studies that measure nebulous emotional states and then compare them back to other nebulous states experienced at different moments in time. You learn a lot from them about how people answer surveys, but not so much about how they objectively felt. (Judith Warner)
Okay, there’s a funny contradiction in those last two words, but Warner’s article has links to the back and forth between Barbara Ehrenreich and Stevenson/Wolfers’ study on female happiness (or lack thereof). I might use the discussion in the future for my 654 class–how people perceive research/quantitative methods/survey research, what they can do, what they can’t do.
23 Oct
dear college board
What are you afraid of? SAT folks slap down free, top-tier tutoring for the masses. (Thanks to Benji for posting)
16 Oct
teaching the revolution
It’s a little weird to read this as one who’s not that far removed from student activism days. Except now I have a normal job…I’m like, the man! (or the wo-man. or something of the sort.) Anyway, a great article. Also funny to read because I think quite a few of us would be delighted if students took over a building (in a safe, responsible fashion) or held a protest at Miami. I’ll bring the pizza.
(randomly but semi-fittingly, there’s a pizza place in oxford called sds pizza…every time i see a delivery car go by, i think…”students for a democratic society…pizza?”)
16 Oct
charles isherwood on purses
(full review here)
Ms. Ephron’s antipathy to the purse stems from her habitual inability to keep hers properly organized and hygienic. In the chaos of its interior she sees a symbol of herself, as in a dark mirror smudged with old lipstick and smelling of spilled perfume. But while laughing with no small sense of relief at Ms. Ephron’s identification with her bedraggled accessory, I realized that I do possess a small, disorganized receptacle filled with useless detritus, one that could be said to reflect my inadequacies as a person. It’s my apartment.
