Is anyone in or knows who the key players are in the realms of behavioral neuroendocrinology or stress research and its impact on learning in animal models? I'm looking for names and their location -- both US based and abroad, esp. in Germany.

I'm googling, and pubmed-ing and such, and have began gathering some data, but I thought I'd ask for some help in the mean time because this is taking forever..

Has anyone here applied for the NSF GRFP before? If you'd be willing to share your experience I'd appreciate it, especially if you applied for neuroscience, psychology, or a related field. Even if you did not receive an award, did applying for it help you in other ways (i.e. making you a more appealing graduate school applicant/student, developing grant writing skills, etc.)? Any websites or resources you can recommend for prospective applicants would also be great. Thanks in advance.

Does anyone have any first-hand experience or knowledge about the Health Professions Scholarship offered by the U.S. Army? I'd never heard about it before, but then I saw an advertisement for it on Facebook the other day and took a look at the website. On paper, it sounds like a pretty good opportunity, especially with how the cost of education seems to go up and up every year; but I'm just a little skeptical about what I could potentially be getting myself into if I did sign up — you know, the fine print and everything.

Here's the website address if anyone's not familiar with it or want to learn more about it like I did:

http://www.goarmy.com/amedd/hpsp.jsp?iom=9510-ITBP-MCAU-01012009-47-09021-ADUNIT

Anyway, like I said, I was just hoping someone might be able to provide some insight and I thought since it was learning more about how to fund an advanced degree, i.e. MD/PhD, that it would be appropriate. If not though, please let me know and I'll delete it. Thanks.

A taste: "The four-year college degree has come to cost too much and prove too little. It's now a bad deal for the average student, family, employer, professor and taxpayer. A student who secures a degree is increasingly unlikely to make up its cost, despite higher pay, and the employer who requires a degree puts faith in a system whose standards are slipping. Too many professors who are bound to degree teaching can't truly profess; they don't proclaim loudly the things they know but instead whisper them to a chosen few, whom they must then accommodate with inflated grades. Worst of all, bright citizens spend their lives not knowing the things they ought to know, because they've been granted liberal-arts degrees for something far short of a liberal-arts education."

The rest: http://www.nypost.com/seven/06282009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/dont_get_that_college_degree__176545.htm?page=0

(Posted with permission. This has been crossposted a few times, my apologies if you’re seeing this several times.)

I’m currently doing research on LJ for my master’s thesis in applied anthropology. Specifically I'm looking at relations between LJ, Inc. and LJ members; where the relationship breaks down, how one side sees the other, questions of ownership on the site, profitability/ads, etc.

To that end, I have a survey I’d like to have as many LJ-ers take so I can get a good idea of how the userbase feels about these issues. The survey is here, and it should take a maximum of 10 or 15 minutes to fill out. I am posting this to several communities; if you know of a community I should post this in, either comment here and let me know or feel free to repost this message in its entirety to that community (or to your own LJ!).

Thanks so much for your help!!

"Radical Quakers denounced the universities as madhouses for the over-privileged, whose degrees marked them out as certifiable"

- from Stevie Davies's Unbridled Spirits: Women of the English Revolution 1640-1660

I listened to the first part of Helga Rhodes’ audiobook—-Dealing with Conflict and Confrontation, and cracked up in the tram back home. She talked about two types of conflicts: an overt conflict and an underground conflict. The underground conflict is conflict in denial. It’s the conflict that people know about, but no one talks about except among themselves in their little cliques. The one where, in the hierarchy of the workplace (or academia!), the big fish at the top rises an eyebrow and says: “Problem? We don’t have any problem”.

And for a very long while, yes 3 years in fact, my academic institution had the same reaction. We don’t have a problem, we are the next Princeton and next Princetons don’t have problems. But there were (and still are) problems, big serious problems that won’t go away unless you solve them.

So what happens when you have this kind of situation? When people feel they can’t bring up the problem because they are scared of what will happen to them? And when they do bring it up, they get treated as if they are the problem? What happens in an environment full of stress and frustration?

Helga said that people will start to fall sick. They fall sick a lot. Productivity dives. You end up spending more time updating your CV in hopes of finding a new job than actually doing the job that you have. People become more competitive. And massive thievery—-of office supplies, food, cleaning products, toilet paper, computer monitors. Oh, and beware of the coffee for it will most likely have spit in it.

This is the part where I cracked up in the tram. Because it is simply true. In Next-Princeton, all of those things happened. Next-Princeton is in fact, a textbook case of Underground Conflict. LOL it feels weird to be able to diagnose the illness of a whole institute.

(READ MORE)

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The excerpt above was taken from this blog: PhD-ing

Just wanted to know what you guys think and if other people are facing or have faced the same situation....

Just a group question out of curiosity...

How did you decide whether your advanced degree was/is worth the cost to obtain it? (For example: if your field's general earning potential is, say, $30k/year, how did you decide it was worth 50k to get the degree?)

How do you measure whether a degree is worth the cost to obtain it?

http://media.www.thelantern.com/media/storage/paper333/news/2009/05/27/Campus/rub-My.Nuts-3744105.shtml


*note, the sports teams here are called the Buckeyes and there was a picture of a buckeye below the words "Rub my Nuts" on the t-shirt




thoughts? would this effect your decision on application or attending if this was your program's dean?

I'm attending my first conference in August and there are many sessions on at once. Rather than having to write down everything I see I was planning on buying a dictaphone for the experience, so I could record everything spoken by the Speakers, and write down complementary notes. As this is my first conference I'm eager to not make a total fool of myself, and I was hoping someone could tell me if this was common practise, or am I going to look like an idiot?

Do people use voice recorders in sessions often? Is it polite, is it acceptable? Will I get admonished or, worse still, will my recording them put Speakers off. Someone recorded lectures while I was an undergraduate and it got my lecturer very flustered. I don't want to repeat that.

Link sent by a colleague via e-mail this morning: http://www.academicmind.com

To say that the stated idea behind this website seems a bit fishy, and desperate, would be something of an understatement. However, we could be wrong - when times are hard, the goalposts get moved, and notions of what is, or is not acceptable may be subject to change.

But a Gmail address for correspondence? Lines like, "We need to fill the categories below with academic papers." and, "After the paper is posted, it will have a permanent URL that can be referenced on resumes and job/school interviews/applications as academic works completed."?

Hmm...

Hello all. Sorry to interrupt your Sunday with a (potentially really dumb) question, but here it goes:
I'm a Master's student in my first PhD-level seminar. I'm working on a paper and I've gathered from some of my colleagues' comments that the first 5 or so pages should be dedicated to a "lit review." Seeing as how I've not even written a paper as long as this one in my MA-level courses, I really have no idea how to format said lit review. Oh, and I'm in the humanities - literature.

I'm wondering if someone could suggest an easily accessible article that I could read as a template of sorts, just to get an idea of what the start of my paper should look like. I know that a lit review is supposed to situate your own argument within an ongoing conversation, I'm just not sure exactly what that should look like. For what it's worth, it seems that all of the articles I will be including in the "lit review" lack that very aspect.

Any help or suggestions appreciated. You can even make fun of me for being a grad student who doesn't know what a lit review is, if you like.

I've just finished a paper for a fieldwork class. I did observations at a local tattoo and piercing parlor, and really wanted to get the employees something to thank them. A card seems cheesy, but I'm drawing a blank on appropriate thank-you gifts that are cheap yet not cheesy/useless. I'm a grad student, so I don't have tons of money. I'd like to set a budget of about $10/person. Suggestions? Or is this entirely inappropriate to begin with? I know this is similar to questions asked previously, but those all seemed to be directed at professors. I feel like interview/research subjects are maybe a little different(?).

Hi everyone,

I teach at a big state university in the US, and this fall I am giving each of my two Composition classes (introductory and advanced Composition respectively) a class about the Holocaust, as it pertains to the central themes of each class. I am assigning an excerpt from Maus for both classes, and I will use it in different ways for each class depending on what I want the students to focus on. Before the reading is assigned I will  present a brief history and overview of the Holocaust, as much as time allows but hopefully not too much information that it just becomes overload.

My students are, generally speaking, freshmen and sophomores, with the occasional junior, and my question is: how much, in your experience, do early college students know about the Holocaust? I'm wondering how basic a level I should start at, I don't want too much new info for them or too much repetition obviously. I have other questions about this class I'm planning, but I'll ask those at a later date once I have a lesson plan worked out.

Thanks for any input :) I am a non-American teaching at an American school, so I'm concerned that what I learned about the Holocaust in high school might not be what they learned in one way or another (most of them are coming to this college from the same public school district).

"A group of University of Chicago students think it's time the campus focused more on its men. A third-year student from Lake Bluff has formed Men in Power, a student organization that promises to help men get ahead professionally. But the group's emergence has been controversial, with some critics charging that its premise is misogynistic. Others say it's about time men are championed, noting that recent job losses hit men harder and that women earn far more bachelor's and master's degrees than do men."

More here: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-u-of-c-mens-groupmay19,0,4707353.story

I understand that in different schools student feed-back operates differently; we have a sheet distributed at the end of the semester wherein students check a series of answers (how organized, how available, how prepared, etc, was an instructor), award a point-value to the overall running of the class, and have a space for comments. I'm a little confused (as are my colleagues to whom the same thing happens) by the undergraduate students who write on a course evaluation "this was the best class/lab/discussion section evar and I learned so much and prof/TA is awesome and cool and also smart blablabla" (/hyperbole) and check the highest answers to the questions, and then circle a 5 or 6 out of 7. I get the ones with actual constructively (or even non-constructively) critical comments, because there will obviously always be problems or issues throughout a semester, but for those who loved the class and were inspired enough to say so in the evals and/or in private, why the 6?

I know these numbers don't matter much, but they are after all included in job apps and perhaps tenure reviews, and it would be idiotic to give more weight to comments (in which just as easily you can have something like "I like her boobs LOL"). Is there a proper way to explain this, or specific things a student is looking for in assessing the overall quality of an instructor? There seems to be some sort of conceptual disjunct in the heads of these same kids who howl in confusion when anything but an A is awarded. Why this hesitation to give the full point-value? Do they think they're being, I don't know, circumspect and careful in their awarding of delicious instructor-points? That they would somehow spoil their instructors, so that we would careen around campus drunk on our new-found point-indicated power and destroy their educations with our vanity and narcissistic compulsions?

From checking the tags I don't see a discussion of this particular phenomenon, so I'm wondering if this is a common occurrence or an indication of something problematic about my department's teaching, something so foul it cannot be articulated, even on an anonymous evaluation!

I know the general rule that it is considered unethical to submit the same article to 2 journals at once. However, I'm not sure if this applies, or not, to my current situation:

In January I submitted an article (>6,000 words) to a social science journal, and am still awaiting the results of the peer review. In the meantime, there is a deadline coming up for proposals for a short (1000 word) article in a professional association newsletter, the topic of which closely relates to my discussion in the 6,000+ word article currently under consideration elsewhere. If my proposal were accepted, I would be using some of my discussion from that longer paper (modified, of course) in the short article. Would that be considered unethical in any way?

Thanks!

( Congratulations on receiving your BSc in New Age Gobbledygook, and welcome to the 'Endarkenment'. )

Full article here: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e2772e34-45a0-11de-b6c8-00144feabdc0.html

So I've been going to a few conferences this spring and summer, adding a few lines to my c.v., and generally having a good time.

It seems, though, that each time I register I'm inquiring of the organizers what category I fit under as far as the fees go. I'm a recently-graduated sessional (a.k.a. "adjunct") instructor, and just at the moment that universities are cutting costs by hiring sessionals, and conferences are losing university funding and raising their fees, sessionals are needing to go to more conferences to get hired in the tighter environment. And, being part-time and without funding, they can often ill afford the travel and conference fees.

It's a nasty little circle, of course, but I'm attending conferences (even though I know that articles are better for one's c.v.) because the social aspect of our discipline is important to me.

My reason for posting this is to suggest that conference organizers might want to start taking the growing adjunct demographic into account, and listing them specifically under the fees categories. Usually, the categories are something like "full," "graduate student," and "independent researcher." But while you might say that a sessional instructor fits under the latter, we do like to have an institutional affiliation.

Thoughts?

Hi Guys,

I had a class that wasn't exactly in my field of study and I struggled to do as well as I could. I always asked for advice, and took it to the best of my ability and spent hours upon hours making sure my essays were my best work. I have just discovered that I have a 79.3 in the course, basically a "C". Since I am in graduate school this puts me in an embarrassing situation, not to mention a troubling one as well. Having a "C" will mean I am not eligible for a job on campus that I have applied for (not that there's any guarrantee I would get it of course) but also I worry about the effect it would have on my GPA. I had wanted to go on to get a PhD later, but I don't think a "C" will look good, do you? I don't know whether my professor will round the grade up to a "B", but my gut instinct tells me this won't happen. I am also disappointed, because I truly did my absolute best in the class, and had hoped it would be enough to do well.

Has anyone here had a grade like this? If so, what did you do about it? And how would you go about preventing this kind of thing from happening again? Will this prevent my from applying for a doctorate in two years? I don't know who else to ask, since my family doesn't know the answers. 
;_;

Mostly cloudy, 18C (15C)

Hello, academics!

I’ve recently heard about this University of the People online university and thought there might be some parties here interested in participating in it--either as students or as professors/administrators/volunteers--or at the very least in the fact that it exists. It currently offers only two programs (business administration and computer science), but it seems they expect that to change.

Talk amongst yourselves!

(cross-posted variously)

I'm in the middle of a very sticky and somewhat unusual situation, and thought I would turn to this community for an opinion. If you want to read the whole story, click through to my personal LJ and feel free to read it, it's unlocked. This is the super short version of what I am dealing with.

I am supposed to start grad school in the fall. I say "supposed" because I found out late last week that, due to a computer error, I had sixteen fewer credits than I or any of my advisers had realized. Due to this mistake, I am faced with a number of equally poor options.

The first option is the obvious one. Do sixteen credits of work this summer, finish my undergrad degree, and start grad school in the fall. This would keep me on track, but is problematic in that in order to get the work done, I would have to take either six classes this summer (which seems insane to me) or do a full-time unpaid internship and two classes, which would be easier but would mean that I would not have enough graded credits to graduate from the honors program I am enrolled in with Latin Honors. If I was actually graduating, I'd be summa cum laude.

Second, I could delay entry into the graduate program for one year. This would allow me plenty of time to make up for this mistake, and earn enough graded credits to secure Latin Honors. However, I am a non-traditional student (age 38 next month), already have an extra boatload of credits I can't do anything with, and don't see how I benefit academically from waiting an extra year.

So I have a few questions for the group. First, if you were in this spot, what would you do? Second, is it worth it to delay starting grad school for a year in order to have "summa" on my CV? Or does it really not matter, especially since I'm already accepted to graduate school?

I thought it might be good to teach online for some extra cash, but they don't seem to pay much. Anybody hear anything through the grapevine about what it is like to work for them?

First, I'll introduce myself. I'm a Master of Divinity student at Methodist Theological School in Ohio, so I guess I officially fit the definition of who can post here. However, I plan on going into ministry, not pursuing a doctorate immediately.

Anyway, if I or my post is off topic, then I apologize and I won't bear any hard feelings if the mods delete it. I would appreciate being redirected to another community that might be more relevant.

My problem right now is that my grades, attendance, written work, and level of motivation are all much higher in the fall semester then in the spring semester. It's not that I cannot do the work, it's motivating myself to do the work and organizing myself so that it gets in on time. My academic adviser has also noticed this cycle and commented on it. I am ADHD and depressive, but other students have these disabilities but don't seem to be affected so strongly. I know that I need to break this cycle. I was wondering if anyone here has struggled with a similar problem, or knows someone who has, and how they overcame it and got through grad school. Also, if anyone has a theory about WTF is wrong with my brain, please tell me.

Edit: Yes, I am on meds, and I have adjusted them, which helped quite a bit. I am not getting talk therapy right now, but am trying to make an appointment with one I think will help.

Edit 2: Corrected a spelling error.

Edit 3: Thank you everyone who told me about SAD. I intend to look into full spectrum lighting and mention the possibility to a professional ASAP.

Is anyone familiar with interfolio.com? Do you know any other services I can use that are cheaper or even free?

I'm going to be doing interviews in a bit and thought I'd see what types of recording devices a_a members have found to be the most useful. Right now I'm using a Panasonic digital recorder that will do about two hours at a stretch. It has been alright but I find the two hour limit a bit of a problem when I have longer sessions. I'd like to find something that will record for longer periods of time and as well as letting me pull the files off like a flash-drive instead of needing specific software. I don't think that I'm being difficult with this requirements but so far I'm not finding anything that makes me especially enthused.

What types of recorders do you use? Any thing to avoid? Has anyone used recorders that will record phone conversations?

No, that's not a typo.

"The University of Missouri's School of Journalism has made an Apple iPhone or iPod Touch a requirement for incoming freshman*, but school officials said the rule won't be enforced. That's because the school applied the requirement label so that students getting financial assistance would have the option of using the money to buy either device, which is also similarly required in 50 other U.S. universities. [...] School officials believe the Apple devices will be useful for learning. MU this summer is installing a program called Tegrity that will allow the recording of lectures, which can later be downloaded through Apple's iTunes U to the iPhone, iPod Touch, or PC, The Missourian said. The online store offers free content hosted by universities."

More about the controversial announcement (which was criticised via the "Rotten Apple" Facebook group) here: http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/iphone/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217400325&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_All

http://www.tegrity.com

Update: Amusing Japanese spin on the "free university iPod" phenomenon...

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/05/18/big-brother-in-japan-university-tracks-students-via-free-iphones/

*Now that is a typo. Presumably more than one new student will be arriving...

Hello all,

I graduated from undergrad two years ago, and in the interim I have been saving money, working (developing a plan b for career-after-graduate-school), taking grad classes when possible, etc.  I will be applying for a PhD in English within another year or two.

I'm preparing to submit a paper to a conference as an independent scholar, but I'm a bit stumped on fulfilling the request for a vita. All my honors and achievements are undergrad related. Will it look juvenile to include all of this information? In this situation, would it be acceptable to turn in a traditional resume instead?

Thank you for the advice!

Greetings, friends,

I am soon to defend my dissertation and I'm becoming very nervous. So I'm asking you: what makes for the best dissertation defense presentation? Just to discuss your intro, read bits from a couple chapters, one chapter, etc.? 

ETA: I defended successfully, and I want to thank you for all of your comments! You guys really helped me out. :)