It’s that time of the year again. The fall semester is starting up again, with students back on campus, classes back in session, and pumpkin spice starting to creep up everywhere. For me, I can sense the impending start of the semester much sooner than these telltale signs. My email starts to wake up from its summer hibernation around early August. Some of these emails include rising seniors who have been playing around with the idea of grad school. For…
What advice you would give new faculty starting out at your institution? Or phrased another way, what do you wish you would have known when you were first starting out? I was recently asked to serve on a panel of “established faculty” at my university’s new faculty orientation. Having just attended orientation only two years prior, I was surprised to be considered an established faculty. Regardless, I was happy to serve on the panel. I’ve learned a lot in the…
Have you heard of flipped classrooms? You probably have, especially if you’ve attended a teaching workshop recently. In a flipped class, the “lecture” and “homework” are effectively swapped; students learn new concepts as homework that is due before the class period in which students apply the concepts in an active learning environment. If you teach in the liberal arts then you are probably like, “pssshh, we’ve been flipping classes FOR YEARS” … and it’s true. In an English class, for…
I recently finished three graduate-level business classes this summer: intro to finance, financial accounting, and managerial accounting. Why did I take finance/accounting courses when I have degrees in computer science and a career I love? Why would I let myself get “distracted” when my tenure-track clock is ticking? Let me list a few reasons and maybe you will see at least one benefit of “going discipline rogue.” I’ll start with the reasons I signed up for the classes in the…
My dad still clips articles out of the newspaper, yes the actual physical newspaper! If he finds something he thinks is relevant to me in any way, he clips it and saves it until the next time he sees me. If it is going to be a while before he sees me, he will take a picture of the clipping with his smartphone and send it to me. Here is a clipping he gave to me about 7 or 8…
We are all familiar with the framed “first dollar” (or the first whatever) hanging on the wall of the mom and pop restaurant or the big corporation that started in a garage. The purpose of this post is not to claim its frame-worthy-ness, though if my blog takes off and this post is really what started “it all”, I’d be okay with that! No, truthfully this post for me is what Bezos calls Day 1 (in honor of Prime Day…