This piece kicks off a short forum on mentoring in academic careers in international affairs, written to honor Kathleen R. McNamara.
Mentoring Is What You Make Of It
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academia
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...
Tenure Letters: To Sling or to Shoot Arrows?
This piece has been making waves in the academic world (for a much better set of recommendations, see this piece). It gets much attention because it both identifies a real problem and then suggests...
Ranking IR Journals
Editor's note: this is a guest post by Brian J. Phillips, of the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics. What are the best International Relations journals? How do we know if one journal is...
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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. ...
Egghead
 How are pieces of research like eggs? Well, I was having a fun conversation with a grad student of mine while we were dining in the aftermath of a workshop on failed states, and I was suggesting a potential research strategy. The point I was trying to make is that you don't want to waste your research. At first, I was using bullets--but given our topics, violence, and given that bullets do not degrade over time, eggs made more sense.The basic idea is that when you do research, you don't always use everything you learn for a particular piece. Indeed, one of Saideman's rules of...
Friday “I Really Am Just a Nerd” Blogging
I was shocked, shocked to read Brian Rathbun's characterization of me in a recent Canard as a "robot" who has only been posing as a Battlestar Galactica addict as part of my cover (!):The academic and foreign policy worlds were rocked today by the news that Charli Carpenter -- prolific academic, policy wonk, and mom -- is in fact a robot. An anonymous source told this paper: "There were the academic writings, then all the policy work, the grant writing and management. She never missed her son's soccer games though... it was just too much. Her makers made a mistake by not giving her any...