What was it like to have Kate McNamara a mentor?
Becoming and Living as a Happy Academic
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academia
Imposters at the ISA?
Long ago, Dan Drezner posted about the imposter syndrome. The basic idea is that many folks feel as if they will be found out, that there are other folks out there that are smarter, more informed...
Academic Family Tree
Almost exactly three years ago, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson blogged "Who’s Your Grand-Advisor? Crowdsourcing an IR lineage map" at the Duck. Patrick was searching for an academic family tree website...
Some Personal Reflections on Social Media and Tenure
Editor's note: this post first appeared on my personal blog. As some of you may know, I'm up for tenure this year, and it's not going to work out. I don't want to get into the details of anything...
More academia Posts
Are our courses easier than sleeping?
Yes. Your students have less observable brain activity duringlecture than when they're asleep.Updated for the humorless. See postscript below.A new paper in IEEE Transactions in Biomedical Engineering suggests so:Long-term assessment of EDA [a measure of nervous system activity] revealed interesting trends in the participant’s sympathetic modulation over a week-long period. Intervals of elevated EDA frequently corresponded to times when the participant was studying, doing homework, or taking an exam. This is possibly due to the increased cognitive stress associated with these activities. The...
A New Twist on the “Copenhagen School”
Hmm.Authorities in Denmark have charged a university professor with assisting “foreign intelligence operatives”, believed to be Russian. Professor Timo Kivimäki, a conflict resolution expert, who teaches international politics at the University of Copenhagen, is accused of “providing or attempting to provide” information to four Russian government officials on several documented instances between 2005 and 2010. The indictment claims Kivimäki, who was born in Finland, intended to give the Russians “information relating to individuals and subjects connected with intelligence...
Winecoff vs. Nexon Cage Match!
Kindred Winecoff has a pretty sweet rebuttal to my ill-tempered rant of late March. A lot of it makes sense, and I appreciate reading graduate student's perspective on things. Some of his post amounts to a reiteration of my points: (over)professionalization is a rational response to market pressure, learning advanced methods that use lots of mathematical symbols is a good thing, and so forth. On the one hand, I hope that one day Kindred will sit on a hiring committee (because I'd like to see him land a job). On the other hand, I'm a bit saddened by the prospect because his view of the...
Google Scholar Dystopia
Guest Post by Deborah AvantAnyone remember that 1980s Terry Gilliam film Brazil - a futuristic dystopia where overreliance on bizarre and mostly broken machines led to equally bizarre social maladies? Well, I’m having a Brazil moment. According to Google Scholar, I am no longer the author of my 2005 book. If you search my name, it has disappeared. If you search the title a (very well done) review article comes up but no book. The book – and my relation to it – has disappeared even when you search subject terms. According to an article in the Academic Newswire, this is a common occurrence....
Professionalization and the Poverty of IR Theory
[I wrote the bulk of this post very late at night while suffering a bout of insomnia. In the end, I ran out of energy and called it quits. Thus, I've edited the post for the purpose of clarity and style. Major content updates are in blue text (bad idea, now abandoned].[2nd Update: I called this post the poverty of IR Theory not the poverty of IR. There's a difference.]PM's post on getting into political-science PhD programs continues to provoke spirited debate. Of particular note is reaction to his claims (echoing Dan Drezner) about the importance of mathematical and statistical skills. As...
The tradeoffs of getting to graduate school in political science
This is the nerd equivalent of a dad joke. A pair of posts today from political scientists I admire prompts me to postpone my musings on the Hunger Games and to talk about how to get to graduate school in political science again instead. In an effort to convince you to read on, I'll name the authors of the two posts: Dan Drezner and Chris Blattman. Dan Drezner writes about how a post-graduate (non-Ph.D.) degree can help you to get into the doctoral program of your dreams. I'm surprised, by the way, that Dan doesn't address the burning issue of whether it's a good idea to go directly from...
Academia 101: Writing a CV
A twitter discussion got me thinking about this. We end up reading tons of CVs, developing opinions and pondering what people are thinking. First, there are no real rules for writing a CV except these:Read other people's cv's to get a sense of what looks normal (don't be strange).Take care so that it is not messy, has no typos (twitterfightclub pressure has killed my typing skills), and so on.Unless your audience is just a bunch of dim-witted bureaucrats, do not pad the CV. Most profs have been there, done that, so they can see stuff that is just crap used to make the CV longer. It has...
If At First You Do Not Succeed
Lots of posts these days about whether to go to grad school for a PhD, including by Dan Drezner. Drew Herrick has a nice post that not only presents his views but heaps of links to past posts by various folks (including myself) on this topic. What these blogs have largely omitted is any discussion of what happens to the aspirants who do not get in or who get in but without funding (which most folks then say "run away!").When I was applying to grad school in a galaxy far away, in a time long ago, I didn't get into several schools, and those were the ones that notified me the most quickly. ...