March 04, 2006
Recruiting
Attentive Obsessive combers of the archives here will recall that, just about a year ago, I discussed the virtues of what we call Visiting Days, our annual recruitment event. We bring the top 7 or so candidates to campus, pay for their travel, host them with current students, and wine and dine them for two days. It's a great way both for us to get to know them and for them to get to know us.
In the idealized world of "brains on sticks," we all choose graduate programs according to perfectly rational criteria, select our committees based purely on their explicit expertise in our exam areas and dissertation subjects, blah blah blah. In the real world, though, we work with people based on intuition, fit, compatibility, and all sorts of criteria that are, for the most part, immeasurable. It's certainly important to ask the rational questions about a given program, but I think we underplay the degree to which we make decisions by simply asking: can I imagine myself being successful here? can I see myself working well with this person? would I enjoy taking courses with these students?
In other words, I think it's important to give our prospective students as much access to the program as possible, and not just in the form of promotional materials. Likewise, it helps us to decide when we have a chance to actually talk with a student about his or her interest in X or Y, and not just attempt to intuit their abilities and interests from a generic 2-page statement of goals. As I said last year, this is an exceptionally ethical practice, and I think that it pays dividends for us in the quality of our students and for the students as well, both those who join us and those who don't. Even when we lose someone to another institution, I feel good about the fact that we've given them as much information as we could, and helped them to make the best decision possible.
As important as events like these are for us, they're also pretty taxing. Over the past 5 months, I've hosted a symposium of visiting speakers, co-chaired a search committee, coordinated 4 campus visits, and finally, as of a couple of hours ago, completed Visiting Days. None of this did I do alone; in fact, I'm deeply grateful for every single airport run, meal companion, feedback email, and general contribution that the people in our program provided throughout these events.
But oh. my. am I exhausted, physically, mentally, and emotionally. Saturday has just begun, but I plan to spend as much of it asleep as I possibly can. And then I can start in on all the to-do's that I've postponed during my event planning.
That is all.
Posted by cgbrooke at 12:08 AM | Comments (0)
December 01, 2005
D-fence! D-fence!
Two of our extended ABD family returned this week, to complete the final step in the process that involves moving them from our program's student page to our alumni page. Which is to say, somewhat euphemistically, that we had two students return from their positions elsewhere to defend their dissertations, and both did so successfully. Congratulations to both of them.
The dissertation season tends to be driven by graduation deadlines, and so typically, we look at the end of July and the end of November as our peak times in that regard. And as these events have rolled around, my attention is more easily grabbed by references to dissertation work than they might be otherwise. The latest issue of Academe, for example, has an article misleadingly titled "How to Grade a Dissertation." I say misleadingly because the article is really less about "how to grade" one than it is the results of a study that attempts to make more explicit the standards by which dissertations have been graded.
Attempts, and largely fails. While there's a mildly interesting chart or two at the back of the essay promising "criteria" by which dissertations are graded, these criteria are entirely predictable, and even a little insulting in their predictability. For example, would it surprise you to learn that "outstanding" dissertations
- are original and significant, ambitious, brilliant, clear, clever, coherent, compelling, concise, creative, elegant, engaging, exciting, interesting, insightful, persuasive, sophisticated, surprising, and thoughtful;
- are very well written and organized
- are synthetic and interdisciplinary
- Connect components in a seamless way
- Exhibit mature, independent thinking
Probably not so much. Heck, we all sit down with most of the above as our goals when we write. The subtitle of the article asserts that professors "owe it to their students to make those standards explicit," which is only half true. The standards that we use are only half the story, because for the most part, they are the standards that our students themselves use to evaluate writing, whether their own or others'. A more accurate claim, I think, would be: we owe it to our students to teach them to be able to achieve these standards. And I'm not sure that we are any more explicit about how to achieve these standards than we are about the standards themselves.
Part of the difficulty with a study like this is that professors' self-reporting is going to be no more accurate than any self-reporting--by and large, we are going to offer up what we believe to be the appropriate criteria rather than the ones we use.
And this article bears this out. "The focus groups indicated that most of the dissertations they see are “very good,” which is the level of quality the faculty members said they expect of most graduate students. Consequently, they had less to say about very good dissertations than about the other quality levels." Ahh, how nice. Most of the dissertations fall into this category, about which the faculty studied have the least to say. (Also, the lowest number of criteria for this category are offered.) "Very good dissertations are solid and well written, but they are distinguished by being “less”—less original, less significant, less ambitious, less exciting, and less interesting than outstanding dissertations." If I were still a graduate student reading this, I'd be both a little depressed and a little angry--the majority of dissertations these faculty read, and all they can say about them is, "well, they're not quite outstanding"?!?!
I'm pretty sure I have a finger for that.
It'd be a lot more useful if the "criteria" offered here didn't basically parallel the categories themselves so completely:
- Outstanding: Is very well written and organized
- Very Good: Is well written and organized
- Acceptable: Is workmanlike
- Unacceptable: Is poorly written
But in order to gather any sort of meaningful data about dissertations, these criteria would have to be triangulated with the dissertations themselves, and they'd have to be studied by people who don't already have a vested interest in the answers being sought. And I suspect that the results would have to be separated out by discipline a bit--the study above surveys faculty in "four science disciplines (biology, electrical and computer engineering, physics or physics and astronomy, and mathematics); three social science disciplines (economics, psychology, and sociology); and three humanities disciplines (English, history, and philosophy)." I'm pretty sure that an electrical engineering dissertation looks a little different, say, from one in philosophy, and that the corresponding faculty mean very different things even when they're using the same language.
There are a few interesting tidbits in this article, but they come in the form of asides more than they occupy center stage. My colleagues in writing studies will find fascinating, I'm sure, the heavy emphasis placed on rubrics, both as a teaching tool and as a way of archiving dissertations. I don't disagree that making expectations explicit is worthwhile--far from it, in fact--but it's curious to watch yet another instance of current-traditional writing pedagogy being offered up, in a nationally circulated publication, no less.
Because, you know, I gave this article a 5 for clarity, a 5 for coherence, a 3 for compelling, and a 4 for concise. How that information would help improve the article or provide a record of anything other than my own opinions I do not know. Ah well. I'm being snottier about this than I'd originally intended. I think that there are good intentions behind a project like this, but an unrealistic estimation of what an aggregation of self-reported, unverified criteria can accomplish.
That is all.
Posted by cgbrooke at 08:56 PM | Comments (6)
November 03, 2005
Symposium
Minimal action here, as I've been preparing for, and as of today excuting, a Fall Symposium on Digital/Visual Rhetorics (flyer), wherein we host Jenny Edbauer, Jeff Rice, and Anne Wysocki for a series of teaching workshops today and talks tomorrow. I'm trying to be good about photos, and I'll get some stuff up here in the next day or two as I'm able.
That's all.
Posted by cgbrooke at 04:40 PM | Comments (0)
August 21, 2005
And panic sets in...
I'm only slightly closer to figuring out what I'll talk about tomorrow, but thanks to some timely advice (and Ethiopian food) from Derek, I think I'll talk mostly about what I'm trying to accomplish with CCC Online, which is, if nothing else, my most concrete attempt to have an effect on this discipline where I find myself. And I'd be surprised if a paragraph or two doesn't come out of the essay that I've been working on as well.
My initial claim, I think, is going to be that our discipline is less than the sum of its parts. Now all I have to do is to think of a clever way to make that sound eminently reasonable, and I'll be home free. If I have time tomorrow afternoon, I'll blog the results of my thinking...
Posted by cgbrooke at 08:40 PM | Comments (0)
March 01, 2005
Identify!
Posted by cgbrooke at 04:47 PM | Comments (2)
8 points
Amy would kick my ass if I didn't include a shot of the scrabble tiles she gave me at her defense last August. Thanks to some sticky mounting squares, they now rest securely above my secret Bat-exit...
Posted by cgbrooke at 04:43 PM | Comments (1)
Collin's big wall of books
I've been threatening for days to snap a picture of my shelves and blog it, but yesterday, I finally cleared out enough of the crap in my office to feel comfortable doing it. And the best thing? The shelves are thick, have rounded edges (no open head wounds!), and fresh cut, which means that my office smells like pine.
Very nice.
Posted by cgbrooke at 04:40 PM | Comments (0)
February 21, 2005
Good walls make happy directors
And the good news is that my shelves arrived on Friday, which prompted a back-straining afternoon of box-hauling and -excavating.
Pictures soon.
Posted by cgbrooke at 11:38 PM | Comments (0)
January 30, 2005
2 weeks down, infinity to go
It's been a much longer break from cgbvb than I'd planned on, certainly. Part of the reason for my absence was work on my graduate course, which has gotten off to a pretty strong start. But a big part of it was the decision I made to hold advising appointments with all of the students in the program at precisely the same time as I've had to read applications from prospective students. Not the wisest of decisions, I suppose.
And for obvious reasons, I can't write much about either activity. The admissions process, though, has been especially frustrating for several reasons:
- The absence of clear-cut information concerning deadlines for application
- The institutional decision to centralize the graduate admissions process, channelling all materials through our Graduate Enrollment Management Center
- The inability of the GEMC to process materials in a timely fashion
- The depressingly small stretch of time from deadline to decision, necessitating frantic requests for materials, nagging, and frustrated attempts to read files that are incomplete, through no fault of the applicant or our own program.
Starting to get the idea? The initial deadline (for fellowship nominations) in the college is February 2nd, and in some places, our deadline is listed as February 1st. This is inconvenient, to say the least. And while I understand the desire on the part of the University to centralize the process, thereby giving them access to pretty important data, we are in the position sometimes of receiving materials 2 to 3 weeks after they arrive here. Also inconvenient. Finally, all of this is happening according to a very strict schedule, which requires a great deal of committee time at the point in the semester where we are all trying to get into a groove in terms of our classes, schedules, etc.
I'm not looking for pity or anything. Truth be told, this is part of what they pay me for. But I am looking for ways to tweak this system in such a way that we can give the process the attention and energy it deserves. That'll go on my long-term projects list this week.
Posted by cgbrooke at 04:23 AM | Comments (0)