Monthly Archives: November 2012

November 30, 2012
2:53 am
by: Dan VB

Drawing a Line or Walking the Other Way?

Multiple times this semester, Oscar Wilde’s stance on morality has come up, “Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.”  I agree with his position to a point.  We must have clear moral standards or we will have none at all. … Continue reading → Continue reading →

November 29, 2012
8:38 pm
by: watsonaj

Citizen Scholarship

I’ve become involved this semester with Virginia Tech’s Citizen Scholar Program.  It’s a wonderful program with the goal of “encouraging graduate students to create a mutually beneficial partnership with the community by utilizing their research and academic skills to solve … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in citizen scholarship, engagement, Students

November 29, 2012
1:24 am
by: cavingcliff

Mentoring – The Highest Calling

I’ve been thinking about mentors.  I’ve had two teachers in my life that became mentors for me.  One was my high school chemistry teacher, Mrs. Mellion; and the other was a professor of mining engineering here at Virginia Tech – … Continue reading → Continue reading →

November 27, 2012
11:28 pm
by: katevance

Being comfortable as a TA

This is kind of going back to the communicating science idea. It came to be a little bit after my last blog post. I was talking to a friend at an internship I’d done last year in Austria. He worked in … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in PFP12F

November 27, 2012
7:32 pm
by: cavingcliff

Never Discourage Youth

After last night’s class, I just had to hit the blog again.  I (we) had another example last night of a teacher/counselor that told a student that “they couldn’t do…” or “they would never do…” something with their education/lives/etc.  This … Continue reading → Continue reading →

November 26, 2012
10:29 pm
by: ksands85

Higher Education Marketing: Leveraging the Holiday Rush

So, while thinking of the upcoming winter holiday, having celebrated the thanksgiving holiday, I thought to myself, what would be interesting regarding the holiday and higher education, so I enlisted the help of one of my closest friends “google” to assist in this search by typing “Holidays” + “Higher Education”. One of the first items […] Continue reading →

Posted in GRAD 5104, PFP12F Tagged

November 26, 2012
7:06 pm
by: cavingcliff

Millennials and Old Farts

Well, I just took the “millennial test” – and, as expected, I scored “old fart.”  Because – hey – that’s what I am!  A good, solid “15.”  Of course, I knew as I was taking the test that if I admitted … Continue reading → Continue reading →

November 26, 2012
4:56 am
by: lilengineerthatcould

Re: large scale makefiles

In a recent post thomaswy asked about maintaining makefiles for larger projects.  It is certainly true that manually updating lists of dependencies for many (hundreds… thousands even, the Linux kernel is comprised of some 22,000 source files) can become tedious.  Luckily there … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in ECE2524

November 20, 2012
11:31 pm
by: anamitrapal

Peer Review

I read an interesting article in the Times Higher Education [1] which talked about peer pressure from the peer review point of view. Most graduate students and tenure-track faculty members have to publish frequently to stay ahead of their contemporaries. … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in PFP12F

November 20, 2012
4:29 am
by: anamitrapal

Publish or Perish!!!

The academic world has been plagued with this dilemma for quite some time now. Wikipedia describes it as the “pressure in academia to rapidly and continuously publish academic work to sustain or further one’s career” [1]. Nowadays, it has become … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in PFP12F