Academia
Category archives for Academia
On College Matching
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 18, 2013 We’re entering the heart of College Admissions Season– the offers are out, and students are doing the high-stress decision thing– which means it’s time for the New York Times to begin their annual series of faintly awful reports on the state of academia. And right on cue, there’s this weekend’s article about poor students who…
Science Communication: The Audience Exists
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 14, 2013 
In the twelve years I’ve been at Union, there are only two times I’ve tried to go to an evening speaker and been turned away. Once was 4-5 years ago, when Maya Angelou spoke on campus, the second time was last night, when Bill Nye the Science Guy spoke. I managed to make it to…
Asking Questions and the “Finkbeiner Test”
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 6, 2013 There was a lot of re-sharing yesterday of an article about the “Finkbeiner Test” to be applied to profiles of women scientists. This is analogous to the “Bechdel Test” in pop culture, which asks “Do two women talk to each other about something other than a man?”, only because we’re scientists, it’s more complicated, hitting…
Deficit Models, Bureaucratic Empathy, and Work-Life Juggling
Posted by Chad Orzel on February 28, 2013 Every now and then, I run across a couple of items that tie together a whole bunch of different issues that weigh heavily on my mind. That happened yesterday courtesy of Timothy Burke, whose blog post about an NPR story is so good that there aren’t enough +1 buttons on the entire Internet for it.…
Other Scientists and “The Public”
Posted by Chad Orzel on February 26, 2013 Over in Twitter-land, Ben Lillie of the Story Collider asked an interesting question, which sparked some discussion that he’s Storified on a Tumblr blog (just in case the date stamp wasn’t enough to mark this as 2013…). The original question was: Partly I’m wondering if there is a reason to have an event series for…
Help Wanted: Adjunct Physics Faculty
Posted by Chad Orzel on February 22, 2013 We’ve got calls out to the local grad programs, and I’ve mentioned this on Twitter a couple of times, but it can’t hurt anything to post it here as well: we’ve got a huge overabundance of first-year engineering students that is forcing us to open extra sections of our intro physics classes to accommodate them.…
Physics Is For Eternal Five-Year-Olds
Posted by Chad Orzel on February 15, 2013 Yesterday’s post about differences between intro physics and chemistry sparked an interesting discussion in comments that I didn’t have time to participate in. Sigh. Anyway, a question that came up in there was why we have physicists teach intro physics courses that are primarily designed to serve other departments. It’s a good question, and in…
Physics vs. Chemistry: Nobody Does Research on Newtonian Mechanics
Posted by Chad Orzel on February 14, 2013 Not long ago, I had a meeting with the Dean, who is a chemist. One of the things I talked about was my plan for distributing teaching assignments in the next few years, which ran into an interesting cultural difference. I explained how I was trying to make the distribution of assignments a little more…
“The Big Bang Theory” and Social Science
Posted by Chad Orzel on February 12, 2013 
I found myself writing about the social skills of scientists today for the book-in-progress (something I’ve done here before), and how they’re portrayed in the media, so of course I had to drop in a reference to “The Big Bang Theory.” Jim Parsons’s portrayal of Sheldon Cooper pretty much nails down one of the extremes…
On the Checking of Boxes, and the Need to Chill Out
Posted by Chad Orzel on November 29, 2012 In the comments to yesterday’s post about college admissions, Joseph Yoon quoted my statement that “I’m somewhat sympathetic to claims that Asians have a difficult position in higher education,” and shot back with: I wonder if you will feel more strongly about this in 10 years when your kids are near college. Will you advise…
