Most graduate students and postdocs know they should give serious thought to their next career steps, but they aren’t sure how to navigate the career exploration process. After all, for those with doctoral training, there are a dizzying array of possible career “destinations” both inside and outside academe. Collecting information about even a few of those options can quickly become overwhelming and hard to sustain along with your current job.
How students respond to failure is a strong predictor of future success.
Emerging research suggests that for students to fare better, they need to fail better. How students respond to failure is a strong predictor of future success, and the notion of resilience is increasingly prevalent in conversations about higher education. Resilience has a number of characteristics, including levels of persistence, effort, positive mindset, motivation and self-regulation.
Mental health problems are on the rise among UK academics amid the pressures of greater job insecurity, constant demand for results and an increasingly marketised higher education system.
University counselling staff and workplace health experts have seen a steady increase in numbers seeking help for
mental health problems over the past decade, with research indicating nearly half of academics show symptoms of psychological distress.
Building on StudentsNS’ quality and accessibility values, this report discusses the systemic barriers that persons with disabilities face when pursuing post-secondary education. Providing an in-depth discussion of the supports and challenges found within the academic system, this paper begins to re-conceptualize how disability is viewed and accommodated. Nova Scotia has made great strides toward enabling persons with disabilities to access post-secondary education in the past several decades, but we still have a long way to go. Persons with disabilities remain among the most underrepresented and underemployed groups in Canada. Ensuring persons with disabilities have access to and adequate support during post-secondary education is fundamental if we want this to change. Programs aimed at increasing persons with disabilities’ participation in post-secondary education, and in the work force are often insufficient. Similarly, the supports offered by post-secondary institutions (funded through the province) could be improved to better support students with disabilities. We make suggestions for the post-secondary system to further develop present accessibility measures and improve the quality of education delivered to students with disabilities. Recognizing that providing support for students with disabilities is not purely an academic matter, this report will be complimented by future reports on campus health services, social determinants of access to post-secondary education, and discrimination and human rights.
Americans are obsessed with narcissistic leaders, or at least they have an ambivalence between the ones they like and the ones they promote. A case in point is Real Estate baron and presidential candidate Donald Trump. Not that he is alone. At various times, similar attention and popularity have been heaped by the public and especially by the media for leaders such as Steve Jobs, Lee Iacocca and Larry Ellison.
The philosophical halls are ringing lately with an argument over the virtue of graduate-student publication. J. David Velleman, a professor of philosophy at New York University, started the clamor in July when he posted "The publication Emergency" on a philosophers’ blog, "The Daily
Nous."
Velleman makes a simple but radical two-part proposal:
First, philosophy journals "should adopt a policy of refusing to publish work by graduate students."
Second, to give teeth to the ban, Velleman suggests that philosophy departments "adopt a policy of
discounting graduate-student work in tenure-and-promotion reviews."
This paper challenges conventional wisdom about the drivers of international community at the individual level. Presenting
new data and a novel natural experiment approach to the study of cross-border contact and international community,
it tests some of the key microfoundations of international relations theory about how a sense of shared international community may arise and evolve among individuals. The hypotheses are tested using survey data from a large sample (n = 571)
of American study abroad students in a range of universities across a treatment and a control group. Surprisingly, findings
do not support the main hypothesis that cross-border contact fosters a sense of shared international community. However,
the second hypothesis drawn from the liberal paradigm, suggesting that cross-border contact lowers threat perceptions, is
strongly supported. The “Huntingtonian” hypothesis that cross-border contact heightens nationalism also garners wide
support. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for theory and future research, especially the potential
of rethinking the drivers of international community at the individual level to rely less on a sense of shared identity and
essential sameness, and more on a feeling of “enlightened nationalism” and appreciation for difference.
Moving into the broader campus community, the campaign builds on the success of 2017's university initiative when more than 20,000 student-athletes from 53 universities led the campus mental health conversation at more than 100 university sports events leading up to Bell Let's Talk Day.
How international university students think about home significantly influences their migration plans upon graduation, according to a new study from the University of British Columbia.
“A lot of research focuses on where international students go to study, but few focus on where they go after graduation,” said study author Cary Wu, a PhD candidate in UBC’s department of sociology and an international student from China. “Our study shows that migration plans for international students are far more complex than this binary of stay or return.”
Mental ill-health can lead to poor work performance, high sickness absence and reduced labour market participation, resulting in considerable costs for society. Improving labour market participation of people with mental health problems requires well-integrated policies and services across the education, employment, health and social sectors. This paper provides examples of policy initiatives from 10 OECD countries for integrated services. Outcomes and strengths and weaknesses of the policy initiatives are presented, resulting in the following main conclusions for future integrated mental health and work policies and services:
Women leaders make a difference in terms of having more female faculty members, at least in the humanities,
according to a new working paper from the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute.
Data “suggest that the gender of an institution’s president is both a large and statistically significant factor increasing the share of women in full-time, tenure-track positions” in the humanities, the paper says. “A single president who remains in office for 10 years could increase the share of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty that is female by 36 percentage points.”
Statistics Canada recently released its comprehensive reports on education, covering a wide range of topics, including overall education attainment and the skills mismatches and earnings potential of those with bachelor’s degrees. There was good news and bad news.
StatsCan reported that in 2016, 54 per cent of Canadians aged 25 to 64 had either college or university qualifications. Canada continued to rank first among the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in the proportion of college and university graduates. That’s good news.
The Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) represents over 17,000 professors and academic librarians at 28 faculty associations at every university in Ontario. OCUFA represents full-time tenure-stream faculty, and at many universities also represents contract faculty members who work either on a limited-term contract or on a per- course basis.
OCUFA estimates that the number of courses taught by contract faculty at Ontario universities has doubled since 2000.
If we see a colleague with a fever, we say “go home and rest.” Why can’t we treat mental illness with the same understanding?
Today, I want to revisit the story David told in his last post. Someone he knew collapsed, became addicted to crystal meth and ended up homeless. We all wonder after such a story – could this have been prevented? Overall, it is difficult to provide a single answer and there is no one person to blame but I hope that after reading the list below, you will feel like you can help (even if it is only in a small way).
It’s now simply a given among student affairs professionals that parents will be involved in their children’s lives at
university.
John Hannah notes, with a laugh, that his kids are “nauseatingly close to postsecondary age.” The father of two will soon watch as his teenagers begin the exciting but often bureaucratic and stressful journey of applying to university. Mr. Hannah must make a tough call: how much, exactly, should he hand-hold, guide and support them during this pivotal step towards adulthood?
Can college students text and tweet their way to a better grade?
In “Mobile Phones in the Classroom: Examining the Effects of Texting, Twitter and Message Content on Student Learning,” Jeffrey H. Kuznekoff, assistant professor in the department of integrative studies at Miami University (Ohio) at Middletown, explores if texting, tweeting and note taking can be combined. The article [1] appears in the most recent edition of Communication Education, a journal of the National Communication Association.
McMaster University
Abstract
While a wide variety of publications have suggested that the development of student creativity should be an important objective for contemporary univer- sities, information about how best to achieve this goal across a range of disciplinary contexts is nonetheless scant. The present study aimed to begin to fill this gap by gathering data (via an electronic survey instrument) about how the teaching and learning of creativity are perceived and enacted by instructors in different disciplines at Ontario universities. Results indicated points of both convergence and divergence between respondents from different fields in terms of their understandings of the place of creativity within courses and programs, and in terms of strategies they reported using to enable creativity in their students. We discuss the implications of these findings, including the ways in which the data speak to ongoing debates about the role of disciplines within teaching, learning, and creativity more broadly.
When I was 19 and decided I wanted to become a psychology professor, I did so from the comfort of my dorm room, on the window seat across from a decommissioned fireplace. I’d always loved reading, writing, and talking, so what better career for me than academe? I could not have known that my vision of faculty life would become anachronistic by the time I was out
of graduate school.
I am one of an increasingly small group of Ph.D.s whose faculty dreams have been realized. I have a tenure-track job with paid sabbaticals and institutional support for my research. I’ve written a book. But with each passing year, my experiences as a faculty member are less and less the norm. What it means to be a professor has changed for many other Ph.D.s — largely
because academic life and culture is nothing like it used to be.
Teacher evaluation is a major policy initiative intended to improve the quality of classroom instruction. This study documents a fundamental challenge to using teacher evaluation to improve teaching and learning.
Clare Sully-Stendahl is barely old enough to vote, at 18, but the first-year university student has been making career
choices for years. “I’ve always liked the humanities and the sciences,” she says from her dorm room in Halifax. “But in high school, there was pressure to pick one over the other.”
Instead of opting for theatre or film studies classes, Sully-Stendahl decided to be strategic and chose a second science while still in high school. But, “physics and I didn’t really get along very well. There’s no way I would continue with that in a career. I chose it because I knew a lot of universities require physics for engineering, medicine, a lot of sciences . . . ”