Posts tagged “Academia”

You’re unpleasant

There are people who try to work nontenure jobs, of course, but usually they’re nuts and have very dysfunctional personalities and lives, and are unpleasant to deal with, because they feel disrespected. No idea at all why they would feel disrespected.

Why low pay for trainees is a feminist issue

Scientists get paid like shit in grad school and things don’t improve much when you’re a post doc. This pushes women (and men – but mostly women) who want families out of science. Just listen to the brilliant Claudia Alexander lay it out. “I was never able to find the right mix of work and […]

I am never busy

I am never busy. My to-do list is long and it grows every day I spend in bed with a migraine. But I never feel harried; I don’t even allow myself to rush. A departure from calm leads to migraine attack, a return to calm leads to migraine attack.  Busyness leads to migraines directly, through […]

Class matters

I’m collecting posts on class and higher education here. Add others to the comments, email (enchantressofnumbers at gmail) or tweet (@sarcozona) them to me. One of these things is not like the others: on being an academic from a non-academic family by Acclimatrix Poverty in the Ivory Tower by Sarcozona Economic barriers in the elite University […]

I’ve got the ideas, but is it enough?

Scicurious thinks she’s not good enough at coming up with ideas to be a scientist. I’m really, really good at coming up with ideas, but I’m terrible at breaking them down into scienceable chunks and carrying them out. Maybe (hopefully) this is something my training will fix, but wouldn’t it be awesome if people like […]

Navigating academia when you’re poor

Yesterday I wrote a post for Tenure, She Wrote about what it’s like being poor in academia, what you can do to increase your odds of success when you are poor, and how to support poor graduate students. It really seemed to resonate with a lot of people, both poor and not. I’d encourage you […]

Structural problems in academic science

Paula Stephan, an economist at Georgia State University, argues that many of the research community’s problems flow from two big features of how we do research. First, we staff our labs with low-wage, temporary workers—graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who move on after a few years. This means that universities have an incentive to recruit […]