Grad students who weren’t schooled at elite universities face real challenges in a squeezed academic job market. But many talented grad students do reach tenure when they receive the same support and guidance offered in elite universities.
There are many things worth dabbling in: Pokeman Go!, the arts, alternative medicine, old films, astrology, gourmet cuisine….the list could go on and on. I really like when people, including...
Hi, Ducks! It’s me, Amanda. It’s been a long time. I’ve not blogged in awhile. There were many reasons for the break. First, it was a busy spring: I finished up being the ISA Program Chair, got...
I’ve been wanting to write a Duck post about the experience of a woman with visible minority status in IR for quite some time now. I was waiting for the right moment. So thanks to the American...
Dear PhD Prospective (with kids or thinking about kids), Thanks for contacting me. It sounds like you missed Steve Saideman’s sage advice and are actually going to be trying to get a PhD in political science. Many top people in the discipline will keep working to discourage you from attending – with your best interest at heart – but it sounds like you aren’t going to take their advice to avoid a PhD altogether.[1]  So, welcome aboard! It’s a fun profession and you’re just at the starting line. It also appears that you are either (a) a parent already or (b) thinking about becoming a...
(click on the image to enlarge) I'm usually cautious about linking to anything in the PSJR/PSR family of sites, but this strikes me as pretty interesting: a wiki devoted to tracking political-science journals. Contributors note the journal, the turnaround time, and information about what happened to the article. Despite the promulgation of end-of-year journal reports, the submission-to-review-to-outcome process remains a mystery to many. In general, more information is a good thing -- especially considering how much influence peer-reviewed publications have on the allocation of status,...
I'm passing along some ideas from Brian Matzke, a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at the University of Michigan. Making social rules and expectations explicit is a big part of contemporary classroom management, and this document is a good starting point for other instructors developing their own syllabi or cataloguing their own expectations. This version has been very lightly edited; you can see the original (with comic strip!) here. Etiquette Guidelines for Students Interacting with Instructors Success in any college course is determined by your performance on the graded...
"My main job [as an assistant professor at insert-flyover-university-here] is advising presidential policy on public religious life." I actually heard a Ph.D. tell his neighbor that on an airplane. I know that there might be more worthwhole topics for my first post in months (I haven't been a total slacker, I have been doing some programming), but none is more pressing ... I have made back-to-back trips to conferences (first ISA and then MPSA) this week, and have connected through Atlanta each time, providing me with the rare opportunity to ride the airplane with other political scientists...
Practically the whole roster of Duck bloggers is out at the biggest IR conference of the year--the ISA Conference is in San Francisco this year--leaving this think tank Duck in DC alone and further pondering the divide between the policy and academic worlds.  In light of this cri de coeur from a high ranking Navy officer, I had a long conversation this weekend with a former high ranking Army officer who before recently joining the private sector spent two years back in higher education studying classics/philosophy/politics. In my first and second post after joining this group blog--whose...
One of the topics online and at the ISA has been the gated-ness of academic writings. Journal articles are almost always behind a paywall so that ordinary folks cannot get at them. This is likely to change as many folks are now complaining and the threat of ditching academic publishers for the net may force the journal publishers into being responsive. We are already seeing more journals temporarily providing open access to various articles and issues. But, I am afraid, my friends, that is almost entirely irrelevant. Why? Because why would any ordinary person want to read a jargon...
I am happy to invite my friend Tom Nichols to guest-post about the continuing Iraq War debate. Tom responded so substantially to my original post series on the war (one, two, three), that I invited him to provide a longer write-up. Tom is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct professor in the Harvard Extension School. His blog can be found here, his twitter here. His opinions of course are his own, so whenever he says I’m wrong, you probably shouldn’t listen… REK I’ve been reading Bob’s thoughts – cogent as always – on the tenth anniversary of...
Spring (where it exists) is the time of year when applicants to PhD programs find out the outcome and decide where, if any place, to go. While there are many factors that one must take into account, including what might happen if your preferred adviser leaves (Will Moore's take and mine), there is something far more fundamental: are you going to get funding?* If the answer is no, then the decision is painful but easy: don't go. * This post is inspired by a question asked at Political Science Job Rumors. Even if the poster was really trolling, it is an important...