Paradigm shift to me as a published writer???

Oh, if only it would happen!!!

I submitted an article today for publication. I will let you know how it goes. I'm sure I made 9 million rookie mistakes, but I was working on transcriptions today and I thought, you know what? I checked over my citations, I have a good bibliography, maybe they will ask me for some edits but I'm going to bite the bullet and submit this.

And I did. If I get published, dear 3 readers, I will let you know. And I'll provide a link.

Wow I'm so excited. This glimmer of what it might be like to be a real research professor is very exciting. I think my research could be pretty cool.

Next stop is my book!!! Well, ok, by way of the dissertation. And now, returning to transcriptions.

Computer Challenge

Today I'm watching our sophomore students present their computer designs. It's an interesting design challenge - they had $500 to spend on creating a computer based on the needs of their customers and users. The customer/user is the other students in their class, who filled out a survey.

An interesting challenge that allowed them to learn about how to address customer needs and technical requirements, lending itself well to quality tools such as fishbone or Ishikawa diagrams and the House of Quality (part of QFD, Quality Function Deployment).

So far so good! They're always entertaining presenters.

Time

The process of "growing up" seems to be this: a relinquishing of the concept of free time. When I was younger my grandmother used to explain her ability to spend so much time with me as that "You either have time or money, but you don't have both." Her axiom made a lot of sense to me, but now it makes none. I see a lot of people with both money and time, and I see a lot of people with neither. I guess I fall somewhere in the middle, but probably closer to the having no money end than the having no time.

I'm lucky because I don't have to work 80 hours a week; yet it's not like I really have the option to work that and get paid more. And as many other academics know, much of the work you do is unpaid but still "part of the job" - research, coaching students, serving on committees. It's not like I get paid for the 3 hours a day I'm (supposed to be) spending on my dissertation. In theory, it will kick in down the line, but I'm growing more cynical about the whole "hard work pays off" business.

I'd like to talk to my grandma about this again - of course she's not around - but I guess at the end of the day, it depends on perspective. Whenever I feel frustrated, I try to take the bird's eye view and realize that on the continuum I'm doing pretty good. My frustration seems to stem from the fact that this year's "back to school" re-adjustment period has seemed incredibly challenging, perhaps complicated by the craziness of things at home (washing machine broken, no oven, no place to store my dishes, etc) while trying to maintain a positive attitude and get a significant portion of work done on my dissertation.

I think I told my grandma before she died that her axion wasn't true, and if I remember correctly she sighed and said, well, yeah, but you don't want to tell a kid that.

But hard work paying off, that's still true, right?

Right?

Good research on college completion

As it turns out, socioeconomic status is as important as test scores in determining whether or not a student will finish college.

"One striking result of this study is illustrated in the graph below: a student’s socioeconomic status (SES, a measure that combines family income, parental education and occupation) was about as good a predictor of whether he or she would get a college degree as the student’s test scores."

From the White House Task Force on Middle Class Families STAFF REPORT:
Barriers to Higher Education. http://bit.ly/WLjtC

this week needed a 3-day weekend

The first week of school should always be followed by a 3-day weekend. What a week - in one week, we kicked off three classes, matched 60 students to consulting projects, got over 50 students to RSVP for a big event next week, came up with a syllabus for a study abroad trip, and... lots of other stuff.

Yawn.

This could only be written by an English prof

Mad Men. It's an obsession. I'm enamored with the AMC series mostly because of the subtle complexity of the female characters as I move forward in my own life, away from the girlish secretary into some modern combination of Peggy Olson and Betty Draper.

Why We Love Mad Men. The Chronicle of Higher Ed.