Category Archives: Useful Links

Two Links

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First up, an interesting article on why PhD students fail from Matt Might at the University of Utah. While his field, computing, is very different than that of Theatre Arts, there are still some overlaps and food for though to be found in his article:

The attrition rate in Ph.D. school is high.

Anywhere from a third to half will fail.

In fact, there’s a disturbing consistency to grad school failure.

I’m supervising a lot of new grad students this semester, so for their sake, I’m cataloging the common reasons for failure.

Read on for the top ten reasons students fail out of Ph.D. school. Link

Next up, an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, that focuses on part-time grad students and features some advice specifically for that demographic:

The numbers, however, tell a different story. They tell us that our romanticized image of the grad student is as damaging as the notion that most faculty are full-time faculty. In 2007, the latest date for which the U.S. Department of Education provides statistics, the number of full-time graduate students at degree-granting institutions in the United States was 1,112,365. And the number of part-time graduate students was 1,181,228. In other words, part-time graduate students outnumber full-time students. When the numbers are broken down by sex, the results are even more striking. In 2007, full-time male grad students outnumbered male part-time grad students (473,248 to 437,078), yet part-time female grad students outnumbered full-time female grad students (744,150 to 639,117). Put differently, women are more likely to be part-time graduate students than men are. Link

This is Your Brain On

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Andy Ihnatko has a interesting article up on the Chicaco Sun-Times that should be read by every graduate student. In short, he summarizes a few of the key points made by Matt Richtel on a recent interview with NPR’s Fresh Air about how the brain doesn’t really multi-task and that whenever we try to do so we are cheating ourselves out of our potential. I haven’t listened to the Fresh Air interview yet, but I’ve been becoming more and more aware of how important it is to focus on things you care about, whether that is writing creative fiction, returning emails, putting together a lesson plan, or reading an article, etc. Now, we are, it appears, wired to lose focus pretty quickly. As Ihnatko put it (with his usual flair for style and humor):

Distraction is a feature of our OS, a bit of legacy code designed to keep us alive as cavemen. We were smart enough and creative enough to figure out how to turn a chunk of volcanic glass into an axe head, but we’d get killed if we got so wrapped up in the creative process that the sound of a hungry growl from the nearby bushes failed to instantly command our full attention.

So in a way, every time there’s something clamoring for our attention in our peripheral perception — be it a sound or something visual — some old part of our brain processes it as a downscaled version of a panther attack.Distraction is a feature of our OS, a bit of legacy code designed to keep us alive as cavemen. We were smart enough and creative enough to figure out how to turn a chunk of volcanic glass into an axe head, but we’d get killed if we got so wrapped up in the creative process that the sound of a hungry growl from the nearby bushes failed to instantly command our full attention.

So in a way, every time there’s something clamoring for our attention in our peripheral perception — be it a sound or something visual — some old part of our brain processes it as a downscaled version of a panther attack.

Ihnatko proceeds to cover some of his own attempts to change his relationship to distraction.

I suggest you read his entire article here and you can find the Fresh Air podcast here.

Of course, as graduate students, our attention is finite and our tasks seemingly infinite, so how do we try to minimize distractions and focus on the task at hand when our brain keeps worrying about the 12 other articles we need to read, the research that we should have done yesterday, the grading that needs to be done, the paper that needs to be researched, and the laundry, grocery shopping, apartment cleaning that somehow don’t magically happen by themselves?

Good question. Though I think minimizing distractions from Facebook and Twitter and email might be a good place to start. Also, I think the admonishment that Ihnatko takes from Richtel about letting yourself have some time to do nothing and to not fear boredom is very important. I know that often I’ll be in such a hurry to get through my reading for a class that I don’t take the time to reflect on an article after finishing it, or even just let my brain rest for a few minutes before going on to the next task. I’m definitely going to start being more aware of taking the time to let my brain take a break. Next week I’ll try not to check Twitter and Facebook and my RSS feeds on my phone while on the bus to school and instead just relax and soft focus on the world around me and let subconscious do its thing without my conscious mind being bombarded with information–much of it not even remotely important–constantly.

Plagiarism Anxiety

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Several weeks ago during my various orientations as a new TA at the University of Pittsburgh, it became apparent that there is a great deal of anxiety and concern over issues of plagiarism. The issue was almost always framed in an “us versus them” kind of way, with students being framed as either lazy, stupid, or intentionally duplicitous. Now, granted, I have seen students engage in plagiarism for all of those reasons, but I grow increasingly concerned by the ways in which we are framing and discussing this issue. As noted in the Stanley Fish article that I posted about previously, plagiarism in not something that only undergraduates engage in.

Which is why I’m so interested in the The Citation Project.

The Citation Project is a multi-institution research project responding to educators’ concerns about plagiarism and the teaching of writing. Although much has been written on this topic and many have expressed concerns, little empirical data is available to describe what students are actually doing with their sources. At present, therefore, educators must make policy decisions and pedagogy based on anecdote, personal observation, media reports, and the claims of corporations that sell “solutions.”

The Citation Project begins the process of providing descriptive data. Our team systematically studies student papers that were produced in college writing courses and that draw on sources. Our purpose is to describe how student writers use their sources. With this information, educators will be able to make informed decisions about best practices for formulating plagiarism policies and for teaching rhetorically effective and ethically responsible methods of writing from sources. The Citation Project

I have poked around a little on the site and checked out some of the links and really recommend that every teacher or TA take some time to look at this work instead of relying on hearsay and anecdotal evidence of what students (and perhaps ourselves?) are doing when they (we) plagiarize.

Additionally, there is some interesting work being done by Susan D. Blum at Notre Dame that is trying to get a sense of how students understand the ownership of texts. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a story on August 2, 2010 titled “Students fail to see misdeed in plagiarism” by Trip Gabriel that interviews Dr. Blum and offers something of an insight to her book, My Word!: Plagiarism and the College Culture. Her contention seems to be that new notions of ownership and textual authority are changing how students understand plagiarism and the use of information. Ironically, I can’t link to this article because it’s not available on the Post-Gazette’s site. While I’m sure I could get a full copy through something like LexisNexis, it’s hard to understand why a newspaper would make it so that you can’t read a story that they printed by simply going to their website. Perhaps this sense of entitlement is related to Dr. Blum’s point about shifting notions of ownership? Perhaps they didn’t want anyone to “steal” the words?

The anxiety around this issue does seem to be increasing in an increasingly digital and information-dense world. I think that’s probably a good thing. What I am wary of in academia is that much of our discussion remains rooted in students doing a “bad” thing instead of taking the time to understand how both our students and ourselves work with text while navigating a geography of information that has shifted, in some ways dramatically, in just the last decade. Ultimately, we need to address our anxiety as part of a larger cultural shift in understanding textual authority and critical thinking. Dr. Blum says that “[o]ur notion of authorship and originality was born. It flourished, and it may be waning.” I don’t necessarily think that we ought to through up our hands and give up, but I do think we need to approach the issue with a deeper sense of context, both historically and culturally and start examining the issues rather than simply and dramatically reacting to them through whatever various ways we use to observe and discipline students.

Amazon Has a Great Deal for Students

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If you are a college student with an .edu mail account, you can sign up for Amazon Student and get:

Amazon Prime free for one year ($79 value)
Unlimited FREE Two-Day Shipping on textbooks and millions of other items
No minimum order size
Upgrades to One-Day shipping for $3.99/item
E-mail alerts for exclusive deals and promotions
It’s free for students – sign up by providing your school and major

Of course they are hoping that at the end of the years, you’ll have gotten used to having the Prime account and so will pay the $79. Still, it’s a great deal and could certainly save you some money for the year. I’ll be signing up immediately after posting this.

via Lifehacker