The Emerging Scholars Blog

Are you a life sciences student or professional that loves the science, but doesn’t want to follow a traditional career? If so, this is the place for you. This site will cover alternative science career options for those obtaining or that already acquired a science degree, but first let me describe a bit about why this site is being started. … — Kristy Houck, About, Alternative Careers Resource:  Best Career Resource for Scientists Looking for Alternative Careers, December 16, 2009.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to connect with Kristy Houck.   She not only has a great basis for and inspiration behind the site (visit About), but also has lots of practical material/suggestions to share.  These broader themed posts particularly caught my attention:

1. Life Science Executives- New Trend?
2. Benefits of interning- particularly when pursuing alternative careers.
3. Top Ten Tips For Resume Writing
4. Breaking Into Freelance Medical Writing
5. “Alternative Careers in Science” Book

So if alternative science careers are of interest to you (or you’re engaged in one), I’d encourage you to take a few minutes to swing by the site.  In addition, if you know of other sites with similar resources (for those in the sciences and/or those in other disciplines), let us know by commenting or emailing.

Have you seen and/or experienced  The Rural Brain Drain (Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas, Chronicle of Higher Education, 9/19/2009)?  After a number of suggestions regarding how to address The Rural Brain Drain, Carr and Kefalas conclude:

Ultimately, with a plan and a vision the undoing of Middle America is not preordained. The rural crisis has been ignored for far too long, but, we believe, it isn’t too late to start paying attention. The residents of rural America must embrace the fact that to survive, the world they knew and cherished must change. And, on a national level, rural development must be more closely linked to national economic growth priorities, and policies must be created to help these communities prepare for a future that is already here.

The article is drawn from material in their soon to be published Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America.  As a resident of the rapidly developing (or should I say over-developed) Lancaster County, PA, I intend to place Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America on my to read list and see what insights might be transferrable to my context. 

Rural Road in Lancaster County, PA

Below are a few brief thoughts which I would be interested in discussing further.  Any takers? 

1. Although rural and small town America overlap, they are not the same.  
2. Pennsylvania, in contrast to some large stretches of Middle America, has a high number of regional state universities and liberal arts colleges which bring the educated back into small towns.  Pennsylvania even boasts a large state university intentionally built in a rural location several hours away from the distractions of urban life, i.e., Penn State University.  Note:  Some faculty on small town campuses commute from metro-areas, so that their families can take advantage of more opportunities.  In addition, many campuses find it difficult to serve/partner with their local communities even though quite a few started with that intention. 
3. I wonder how much the larger brain drain is a societal lack of interest in the value of education itself. I find the idealized desire for learning in films such as Music Man, referenced by the article, a rare commodity.  That’s why inspirational producations such as Music Man return year after year in small town/rural communities, but seldom become part of the lived fabric of the community. 
4. Simplicity.  Any interest in returning to living off the land as part of extended families or tightknit communities?  I hear and read about this as an ideal desired by many, but are the authors saying this is impossible?  Note:  Our family continues to seek to move more and more in this direction.
5. Local congregations have much to contribute in the discernment of vocation/calling, intentional commitment to one’s community, and the life of the mind.  Do you have positive illustrations and/or visions of possibilities to be offered in rural/small town settings?

Any responses to the NY Times piece End the University as We Know It?  Another piece highlighting the concerns of specialization and the slave labor by graduate students in the research universities with diminishing chance of reward after pushing through the system.

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

What do people on the inside think about Mark Taylor’s, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia, assessment of higher education and his proposal of rigorous regulation and complete restructuring?  Does he shake you from your complacency and open academia to a future you cannot conceive, just speak out without proposing viable next steps, or miss the boat for followers of Christ engaged in higher education? 

Note:  I was particularly interested in the transforming the traditional dissertation, providing opportunity for other formats.

There is a good blog post at Inside Higher Ed today about the struggle between commitment to a particular place and the realities of the academic job climate. Dana Campbell writes that she and her husband (both from the West Coast) assumed that their time on the East Coast would be temporary, and that even their faculty appointments in Maryland would be short. She continues: Read the rest of this entry »

Questions inspired by and related to You’ve Read the Headlines. Now, Quick, Read the Book (by Motoko Rich, NY Times, 3/29/2009, posted at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/books/30quic.html)

Questions: 

1. How does this necessity/predisposition for more, deeper material ASAP affect popular writing by academics and academic publishing in cutting edge fields of technology?  
2. Are there particular topics, themes, fields which deserve (possibly even demand) a longer time frame for consideration during the writing process, the community of scholars, and the wider public? 

Quote from the article:

“People can’t wait a year to get timely information on critical subjects,” said Amy Neidlinger, associate publisher of FT Press. “Especially today it’s dated 10 minutes after you’ve just received the first installation.”

Of course many publishers and authors suggest that taking time to produce a reflective work is what books are about, and that they should not succumb to the pressures of the 24-hour news cycle.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some news related to Mike’s earlier post Hard Times, Come Again No More. … According to the Chronicle of Higher Education article For Some, Hard Times Make Hiring Easier:

some institutions are going against the grain of the poor economy and appointing new professors. This decision has given those campuses an edge, yielding top-quality candidates who might not have been within reach in a more-competitive job market. — by Robin Wilson, from the issue dated March 13, 2009.

Of course, the competition is high at these colleges and universities.  As such,

“This is an opportunity to find the very best people,” says Michael J. Chajes, dean of the University of Delaware’s College of Engineering — which had more than 500 applications each for two of its eight faculty job openings. — by Robin Wilson, For Some, Hard Times Make Hiring Easier, Chronicle of Higher Education, from the issue dated March 13, 2009.

Want to know the campus hiring the most?  Take a moment to guess before you look. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, the NY Times published a depressing story about the state of tenure-track jobs. This gives you feel for the article:

Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D. candidates is finding the prospects worse than ever. Public universities are bracing for severe cuts as state legislatures grapple with yawning deficits. At the same time, even the wealthiest private colleges have seen their endowments sink and donations slacken since the financial crisis. So a chill has set in at many higher education institutions, where partial or full-fledge hiring freezes have been imposed.

Marc Bousquet, however, calls the whole thing a sham. The problem isn’t the economy, he argues, because this has been the trend for the past forty years. Bousquet’s position: Read the rest of this entry »

Tenure-track positions can be hard to find, and many universities are cutting back on hiring, but Colorado State is looking for a new Director for their School of Education.  I know there are many education scholars in ESN, so perhaps this is a perfect fit for someone.  The full position description can be downloaded as a PDF here.

There’s a very interesting article today at the Chronicle of Higher Education, How to Be Happy in Academe ($) by Gregory Pence, professor of philosophy at Alabama-Birmingham. He’s writing about how career expectations can become defeaters, leading you to feel depressed about perfectly fine academic work. He shares his own tangled path from New York City to Birmingham, and how much more rewarding his “Plan B” has become than he ever expected.

Compare Pence’s article to two recent articles published on InterVarsity websites – Christian Professors Flourishing? by Terry Morrison and Loving the Academic Life by Dorothy Boorse. All three get at the issue of fulfilling one’s academic calling, but all from different perspectives.

Any stories to share of unexpected rewards of working at “second-tier” schools? Feel free to change names to protect the innocent.

My home state of Kentucky is considering ending tenure for its entire community college system. This news prompted Mark Bauerlein (professor of English at Emory and regular blogger at the Chronicle of Higher Education) to ask “Is Tenure Doomed?” at MindingTheCampus.com. As he notes, Read the rest of this entry »