Frogs and Ravens

Away for a While

I'm leaving to visit my parents for Christmas and New Years. See you when I get back!

Everybody's Doing It

So here's my result from the color quiz:

you are lightskyblue #87CEFA

Your dominant hues are cyan and blue. You like people and enjoy making friends. You're conservative and like to make sure things make sense before you step into them, especially in relationships. You are curious but respected for your opinions by people who you sometimes wouldn't even suspect. Your saturation level is lower than average - You don't stress out over things and don't understand people who do. Finishing projects may sometimes be a challenge, but you schedule time as you see fit and the important things all happen in the end, even if not everyone sees your grand master plan. Your outlook on life is bright. You see good things in situations where others may not be able to, and it frustrates you to see them get down on everything.

the spacefem.com html color quiz

What's interesting about this is that the last paragraph (brightness) seems to vary with my mood, while the color blend and the saturation remain consistent. Not a surprise, certainly, but interesting nonetheless.

Academia vs. Survivor

I'm not a long-term die-hard fan of Survivor but this season D. and I found ourselves caught up in the drama taking place in the Pearl Islands. At the end I was sufficiently curious to track down a description of the application process for would-be Survivors.

Ya know what? It doesn't look much worse than the academic job market! Doing a 3-minute video seems easy-peasy compared to a one-hour teaching video. Explaining which Survivor one is most like is not that far from answering the question, "Which theorists have influenced your work?" Going in for a mental and physical evaluation if invited to the interview couldn't be much worse than interviewing at the AHA. Willingness to be flown in to an unknown location where you will find yourself interacting with total strangers under tense, intimate conditions? Gee, sounds like being prepared to move to a college in a small rural town in a part of the country you'd normally avoid.

Here's the kicker, though: the odds of success are probably about the same, and while both can in theory lead to national fame and a million dollars, Survivor is over in less than two months and while physically challenging, probably has less long-term impact on one's self-esteem (at least to judge by the people on the show this season).

Hmm...

The Trouble with On-line Polls

Is that it is virtually impossible to screen who answers them. It's also hard to tell who those responders are -- who knows if they're using their real names!

If you're feeling mischievous, you might want to pop on over to this poll (link courtesy of yami at green gabbro), especially since the American Family Association is only "pro-family" in the most limited sense.

Little Bits of Paper

I just received my brand-spanking-new membership card for the American Association of Museums.

Whee!

Another Silly Blog

I'm not quite how to describe Hitherby Dragons beyond "bizarre" and "highly amusing" and "unlike any of the other blogs in my list."

Enjoy, all you grading people and avoiders of work!

Commenting Update

Observe my updated FAQs about the enetation comment service. I still don't fully understand what is up with it these days, but the long and short of it is that there are often comments even when they are not listed at the end of the post and even sometimes when they don't show up in the comment window.

So... if you see a post you're interested in, check out the comments even if nothing seems to have been posted. If the window's empty, try either (a) re-loading the window (if your browser permits it -- Explorer seems perfectly happy to do so, but iCab isn't) or (b) clicking on the "master server" link below the commenting box. If it's there (and sometimes it isn't -- also mystifying) it will reveal all the current comments. If you post a comment yourself and it doesn't automatically appear among the posted comments, doing (a) or (b) will allow you to confirm that it was indeed posted, eliminating double-posting.

A Question

Those of you who've switched from Blogger to TypePad, how did it go? Do you like the new service? Were there any glitches? What would you have done differently? Were you able to transfer your archives to the new server, and was it easy or hard?

(I'm thinking of asking for a TypePad subscription for Christmas, but since that raises the probability of my family wanting to actually _see_ what they're paying for, I want to know if it'd be worth it.)

It's the idea of integrated comments and the ability to post pictures that appeals to me, along with the perhaps mistaken belief that a popular system is likely to stick around longer, that's making me lean toward TypePad. If there's another hosting system that seems to fit this description, I'd like to hear about it too.

Dilemma

It is cold and blustery outside. The eucalyptus and pine and other trees I can see from my window are being blown and buffeted about by the wind. There may be rain, too; it's hard to see from here.

Unfortunately, I am out of milk.

Given that I can't eat breakfast without it nor indulge my tea-drinking habit in its most pleasurable form (hot tea, then sugar, then milk to cool), I need milk!

The place I like to get milk is the local independent grocery. It's a tiny affair, but it's trying to be both upscale and homey and "of the neighborhood," so I like to support it. Usually, too, the walk to the grocery is a pleasant thing -- just the right length and meandering along several streets with appealing houses and yards.

In bad weather* the walk is bound to be less pleasant. Yet, given that it is only about 4-5 blocks long, driving would be silly. What to do...

I guess I'll wrap myself in my PNW raingear and make an expedition of it. Could be fun, and the toast and hot milky tea when I get back may be all the more enjoyable for it.



*On the one hand, I feel like I should apologize to all of those enduring snow and freezing rain and other unpleasantries for daring to call our wind and rain "bad weather." On the other hand, I hate wind and cold, and my blood is thin. So there!

A PhD Is Not A Form of Vocational Training

I'm not sure who first wrote that phrase, but it is an interesting one. It comes from the comment thread for Invisible Adjunct's post "Life Outside the Academic History Box". I've been reading this discussion with interest, as I am currently in the process of re-tooling that Alexandra Lord and Julie Taddeo's site Beyond Academe (see sidebar) is meant to address (and, indeed, was one of the beta testers of her site).

I have to say I agree both with Timothy Burke and Lexi Lord, the main debaters, who I think are arguing from different sides of the problem: the phrase "a PhD is not a form of vocational training" sums it up perfectly, I believe.

Lexi on the one hand asks what to say to those people who went through a doctoral program and came out only to discover the truth of that statement. She suggests what Tim characterizes as a "salvage operation" should instead be viewed more positively; that her site is intended to give people with doctorates in history hope that their degrees will be of use in a variety of interesting, exciting fields. In other words, she argues that the doctorate can be re-jiggered to meet the needs of a variety of vocations.

Tim attacks the problem from the other side of the equation, wondering why this re-jiggering is left up to the PhDs after they leave their programs. He worries that a site like Lexi's allows departments to go on believing that their doctoral programs do indeed provide a solid grounding for a variety of careers (which, perhaps ironically, those leading these programs know little about personally and don't seem to wish to).

I'd say that both are right, but also talking somewhat past each other. I think Lexi at times mistakenly reads Tim's comments as hostile to the PhDs who are her intended audience; my sense of his position is more that it is aimed at prevention of more such unprepared PhDs than attacking current ones. She is correct, though, that an argument like his CAN (note, I say can, not should) be read as damaging to those PhDs in that pointing out such failures to prepare doctoral students for a variety of careers can lead said PhDs to imagine that the failure is their own personal one. However, this is not what I believe Tim meant.

Tim, for his part, is arguing (as I read it) that the failure is an institutional one and that talking about alternative careers provides comfort to those who don't want to acknowledge that the disjunct between graduate training in history and the skills needed for jobs outside academia can be quite large. In this he is like Lexi in seeing the implications of the other's position for an audience other than the one intended.

If Tim is to be faulted for not thinking about how his line of argument (addressing institutional failure and addressed at those currently running graduate programs) might affect PhDs failed by their programs, Lexi should also be faulted for the way her line of argument (addressing those PhDs and showing them ways in which they can make their graduate experience a positive rather than a negative asset outside academia) can comfort complacent departments as well as her intended audience.

I have to say that, while I am grateful for Lexi's work in the short run (and personally) as I re-tool myself into a museum curator or some such, in the long run I am with Tim on this.

As those of you who read this blog regularly know, my own situation has made this debate one of deeply personal significance. I do think I was failed by my department, though not out of any ill will. Rather, virtually no one was able to envision a career outside of academia, so there were no classes offered to train me in the ins and outs of how such careers might operate. Nor were there arrangements to work with other institutions that might be able to provide such training.

Possible examples: Internships with museums such as those offered by art history programs. Work-study in the library with research librarians rather than just TA-ships. Junior editorial positions helping journal editors. Research internships with non-profits. Collaboration with local newspapers and periodicals in which graduate students write articles on historical topics. Internships with researchers in media who need historical background. Work with Hollywood on research for all those historical period pieces. And so on.

I used to rail about how departments did a woeful job preparing us to teach (it was all research, research, research when I was in grad school -- teaching skills were learned in the classroom and in outside workshops I tracked down). Now many of them do indeed offer courses in syllabi design, classroom management, etc. (Not in response to my complaints, obviously, but in recognition that researchers who couldn't teach were unlikely to be hired in academia.) So there is not a lack of precedent, nor of need -- it is a lack of will and imagination (and perhaps simple denial that one is a rat on a possibly sinking ship).

It's good that Lexi and Tim are hashing this out; Lexi offers that outside perspective, while Tim demonstrates the will and interest in letting it in. If these two perspectives can be combined and result in larger transformations of graduate school -- so that a doctorate is indeed a vocational credential in the career sense as well as the spiritual or personal sense -- there will be far fewer folks like me falling into the cracks and having to fight our way out.