Category Archives: Grad School

June 2, 2012
4:55 pm
by: John Sangster

Teaching’s a Joy in this Flat World

In the last month I’ve checked two books off of my list for summer reading, with seven remaining.

Source: Amazon.com
After reading the first 150 pages of The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, barely a quarter of the full text, I decided to lend the book to a friend for the remainder of the summer.  My impression of the book thus far is that it’s fascinating, and that I’ll likely finish reading it someday, but for now I’ve got too much on my list to continue it.  Friedman’s book reads like a history of the last twenty years, as told through anecdote.  He examines how the dot com boom of the late nineties funded not just hordes of computer scientists to generate product, but also funded the construction of massive amounts of physical infrastructure that was left behind when the bubble burst.  In a classroom setting, this book could be well coupled with Andrew Blum’s book Tubes, which as it so happens was just reported on last week on NPR’s Fresh Air program.  The massive internet infrastructure built during the dot com boom provides data streams around the world that connects the highly developed countries that have high incomes to the less developed countries with lower incomes.  The moral of the story is that any work that can be sent elsewhere using a computer WILL be sent elsewhere using a computer in the very near future.

My purpose for adding this book to my summer reading list was because it appeared as required reading on a sample syllabus for a course I registered for this fall in engineering education.  I can only deduce that its purpose is to have future faculty members keep in mind that the engineers of the future, the students sitting in their classrooms today, will be expected to think critically and creatively in order to remain employed, and that we should build our learning objectives around these goals.  I’m glad I read it either way, as I’ve since found that this book may well come up in conversation among academics at any given time.  So okay, I got that message, now I’m moving on to the rest of my summer reading!

The kids: 2012-05-04
With Isaac’s birth this spring I’ve been faced with the daunting task of being a father to three kids under the age of four.  A natural consequence of this has been some stagnation of my research.  The balance we’ve found is that I spend 4:00 to 9:00 with the kids every evening, and then one full day each weekend not trying to get any work done.  I don’t think that five hours taken out of each day is what’s slowing me down relative to my peers, I think it’s the exhaustion of being “on” during those five hours every evening and remaining patient and supportive of my kids when I’m with them.  I was initially a bit panicked when I realized that I won’t be hitting my publication goals while in grad school, but I’ve come to terms with it a bit.  I realize that I don’t enjoy doing research full-time, and a career after grad school as a researcher wouldn’t be that much of an improvement over the consulting career I left, and what I really want to be doing is spending my time in the classroom.  Either way, I need to increase my productivity again.

Source: PhDComics
Source: PhDComics
The unfortunate reality is that ANY job in academia within engineering brings with it a research load, and every one of those jobs is being pursued with a vengeance by a hoard of recent graduates who have been publishing regularly (by regularly, I’m thinking four journal articles and eight conference papers during grad school).  Now that I’ve got myself into a tizzy again, I’ll come to the point; I’ve been feeling worn out and in need of some rejuvenation.  A vacation isn’t what I need; because that would put me even further behind on my research goals when I returned.  My proscribed bandaid for the problem is to put a couple of teaching books on my reading list.  The hope is that spending some time each week thinking about teaching will give my brain the processing time it needs to move the research forward, instead of just banging my head on my desk.  Which brings me to the second book I’ve finished from my summer reading list…

Source: Amazon.com
The Joy of Teaching (a practical guide for new college instructors) by Peter Filene was an enjoyable, if brief read.  In a compact 133 pages, Filene lays out what you need to know going into your first full-time teaching position.

The first section of the book is intended to help academics place their mindset for their upcoming course before diving into it.  Chapter one asks the reader to examine their own beliefs and values as an educator, pointing out that each person has different strengths and weaknesses, and that a given style of instruction may work wonderfully for one person but awfully for another.  The second chapter builds off of these ideas and examines how different students operate.  Filene encourages the reader to understand the different kinds of cognition, and to recognize that any given classroom will contain a spectrum of students with different preferred learning styles, and different levels of preparation to take responsibility for their own learning.  The third chapter brings the first two chapters together and examines the aims and outcomes of a course.  Once the goals of a given course are understood, it’s time to move on to the application.

The second section of the book is titled practices; beginning with writing a syllabus and ending with evaluation, the section spends a great deal of time discussing lectures an discussions in the middle.  Though there weren’t any light bulbs turning on or bombshells dropped in the syllabus chapter, it was succinct, useful, and made the task of laying out a course feel entirely approachable.  The middle of the book, with chapters on lecturing, discussing, and broadening the learning environment, actually felt the weakest for me.  These chapters were as well-written and engaging as the rest of the book, but I struggled to connect many of the author’s ideas to engineering, because they were so firmly embedded in a history or sociology classroom.  This weakness continued into the evaluation chapter, as much of the time was spent discussing how best to provide constructive feedback without becoming overwhelmed by mountains of literary submittals.  At some point I’m sure the author had to make a decision about the breadth of their intended audience, and I certainly don’t hold it against them to stick to their specialty, I just found it a bit frustrating because their advice was so approachable I wanted more that was geared toward me.

The final section of the book brought up some important issues that weren’t otherwise covered, mainly focusing on creating balance in the workplace.  Filene provides an entire chapter on methods to create dialog between the instructor and the students, with a number of suggestions to increase communication outside of the classroom atmosphere, while simultaneously warning that office hours and emails can swallow up all of an instructor’s time if they are not careful.  I found one of Filene’s comments to be particularly insightful, where he says that “… week after week you sit alone, except during those two days before an exam when anxious students line up in the hall.  Don’t fault yourself or your students.  After all, how often have you visited your physician just to talk?”  Before wrapping up the book and reviewing the main points, Filene takes a chapter to discuss the concept of publish or perish, and how the truth of this statement varies greatly depending on what type of school you are employed by.

In all I found the Joy of Teaching to be informative, but not inspirational.  I’m thinking that perhaps the book would have been more accurately titled: “I know you think you’ll never survive your first year of this, but here are some coping mechanisms to help.  You’re going to be okay.”  Filene comes back to the idea of being lifted up by your time in the classroom, but even when he does there’s some angst built in, and you can’t quite escape the feeling that the glass is half empty.  One of the quotes from the book is supposed to show the positive aspect of teaching and comes from Nancy Greenwood, who says “I can have a crummy day with my kid.  I can have a crummy day with my colleagues.  But I can go into the classroom and most of the time leave and feel like I’ve done something good that day.”  Another example of semi-positive quotes from the book, this time on the topic of negative student reviews: as one of Filene’s colleagues likes to say, “even Jesus lost one out of twelve.”

I’m in the process of writing first drafts for this summer’s conference paper submittals, so I’m thinking that my next focus should be on the statistical analysis books from my reading list, but we’ll see where my free-time takes me.  Quantitative summaries of qualitative information derived from observations of data are apparently not a strong suit of mine, but something I need to work on.  In the back of my mind I can’t help but hear a little voice yelling “find a co-author!”  Until next time…

Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Grad School, instruction, reading, research, transportation

June 2, 2012
4:55 pm
by: John Sangster

Teaching’s a Joy in this Flat World

In the last month I’ve checked two books off of my list for summer reading, with seven remaining.

Source: Amazon.com
After reading the first 150 pages of The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, barely a quarter of the full text, I decided to lend the book to a friend for the remainder of the summer.  My impression of the book thus far is that it’s fascinating, and that I’ll likely finish reading it someday, but for now I’ve got too much on my list to continue it.  Friedman’s book reads like a history of the last twenty years, as told through anecdote.  He examines how the dot com boom of the late nineties funded not just hordes of computer scientists to generate product, but also funded the construction of massive amounts of physical infrastructure that was left behind when the bubble burst.  In a classroom setting, this book could be well coupled with Andrew Blum’s book Tubes, which as it so happens was just reported on last week on NPR’s Fresh Air program.  The massive internet infrastructure built during the dot com boom provides data streams around the world that connects the highly developed countries that have high incomes to the less developed countries with lower incomes.  The moral of the story is that any work that can be sent elsewhere using a computer WILL be sent elsewhere using a computer in the very near future.

My purpose for adding this book to my summer reading list was because it appeared as required reading on a sample syllabus for a course I registered for this fall in engineering education.  I can only deduce that its purpose is to have future faculty members keep in mind that the engineers of the future, the students sitting in their classrooms today, will be expected to think critically and creatively in order to remain employed, and that we should build our learning objectives around these goals.  I’m glad I read it either way, as I’ve since found that this book may well come up in conversation among academics at any given time.  So okay, I got that message, now I’m moving on to the rest of my summer reading!

The kids: 2012-05-04
With Isaac’s birth this spring I’ve been faced with the daunting task of being a father to three kids under the age of four.  A natural consequence of this has been some stagnation of my research.  The balance we’ve found is that I spend 4:00 to 9:00 with the kids every evening, and then one full day each weekend not trying to get any work done.  I don’t think that five hours taken out of each day is what’s slowing me down relative to my peers, I think it’s the exhaustion of being “on” during those five hours every evening and remaining patient and supportive of my kids when I’m with them.  I was initially a bit panicked when I realized that I won’t be hitting my publication goals while in grad school, but I’ve come to terms with it a bit.  I realize that I don’t enjoy doing research full-time, and a career after grad school as a researcher wouldn’t be that much of an improvement over the consulting career I left, and what I really want to be doing is spending my time in the classroom.  Either way, I need to increase my productivity again.

Source: PhDComics
Source: PhDComics
The unfortunate reality is that ANY job in academia within engineering brings with it a research load, and every one of those jobs is being pursued with a vengeance by a hoard of recent graduates who have been publishing regularly (by regularly, I’m thinking four journal articles and eight conference papers during grad school).  Now that I’ve got myself into a tizzy again, I’ll come to the point; I’ve been feeling worn out and in need of some rejuvenation.  A vacation isn’t what I need; because that would put me even further behind on my research goals when I returned.  My proscribed bandaid for the problem is to put a couple of teaching books on my reading list.  The hope is that spending some time each week thinking about teaching will give my brain the processing time it needs to move the research forward, instead of just banging my head on my desk.  Which brings me to the second book I’ve finished from my summer reading list…

Source: Amazon.com
The Joy of Teaching (a practical guide for new college instructors) by Peter Filene was an enjoyable, if brief read.  In a compact 133 pages, Filene lays out what you need to know going into your first full-time teaching position.

The first section of the book is intended to help academics place their mindset for their upcoming course before diving into it.  Chapter one asks the reader to examine their own beliefs and values as an educator, pointing out that each person has different strengths and weaknesses, and that a given style of instruction may work wonderfully for one person but awfully for another.  The second chapter builds off of these ideas and examines how different students operate.  Filene encourages the reader to understand the different kinds of cognition, and to recognize that any given classroom will contain a spectrum of students with different preferred learning styles, and different levels of preparation to take responsibility for their own learning.  The third chapter brings the first two chapters together and examines the aims and outcomes of a course.  Once the goals of a given course are understood, it’s time to move on to the application.

The second section of the book is titled practices; beginning with writing a syllabus and ending with evaluation, the section spends a great deal of time discussing lectures an discussions in the middle.  Though there weren’t any light bulbs turning on or bombshells dropped in the syllabus chapter, it was succinct, useful, and made the task of laying out a course feel entirely approachable.  The middle of the book, with chapters on lecturing, discussing, and broadening the learning environment, actually felt the weakest for me.  These chapters were as well-written and engaging as the rest of the book, but I struggled to connect many of the author’s ideas to engineering, because they were so firmly embedded in a history or sociology classroom.  This weakness continued into the evaluation chapter, as much of the time was spent discussing how best to provide constructive feedback without becoming overwhelmed by mountains of literary submittals.  At some point I’m sure the author had to make a decision about the breadth of their intended audience, and I certainly don’t hold it against them to stick to their specialty, I just found it a bit frustrating because their advice was so approachable I wanted more that was geared toward me.

The final section of the book brought up some important issues that weren’t otherwise covered, mainly focusing on creating balance in the workplace.  Filene provides an entire chapter on methods to create dialog between the instructor and the students, with a number of suggestions to increase communication outside of the classroom atmosphere, while simultaneously warning that office hours and emails can swallow up all of an instructor’s time if they are not careful.  I found one of Filene’s comments to be particularly insightful, where he says that “… week after week you sit alone, except during those two days before an exam when anxious students line up in the hall.  Don’t fault yourself or your students.  After all, how often have you visited your physician just to talk?”  Before wrapping up the book and reviewing the main points, Filene takes a chapter to discuss the concept of publish or perish, and how the truth of this statement varies greatly depending on what type of school you are employed by.

In all I found the Joy of Teaching to be informative, but not inspirational.  I’m thinking that perhaps the book would have been more accurately titled: “I know you think you’ll never survive your first year of this, but here are some coping mechanisms to help.  You’re going to be okay.”  Filene comes back to the idea of being lifted up by your time in the classroom, but even when he does there’s some angst built in, and you can’t quite escape the feeling that the glass is half empty.  One of the quotes from the book is supposed to show the positive aspect of teaching and comes from Nancy Greenwood, who says “I can have a crummy day with my kid.  I can have a crummy day with my colleagues.  But I can go into the classroom and most of the time leave and feel like I’ve done something good that day.”  Another example of semi-positive quotes from the book, this time on the topic of negative student reviews: as one of Filene’s colleagues likes to say, “even Jesus lost one out of twelve.”

I’m in the process of writing first drafts for this summer’s conference paper submittals, so I’m thinking that my next focus should be on the statistical analysis books from my reading list, but we’ll see where my free-time takes me.  Quantitative summaries of qualitative information derived from observations of data are apparently not a strong suit of mine, but something I need to work on.  In the back of my mind I can’t help but hear a little voice yelling “find a co-author!”  Until next time…

Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Grad School, instruction, reading, research, transportation

May 3, 2012
4:46 pm
by: John Sangster

Summer Days, Drifting Away

The semester has ended, and summer is upon us.  Last summer I poured myself into research, and worked seven days a week on data reduction in order to get three papers submitted for the August 1 deadline for the big conference in my field.  Only one paper was accepted, and it ended up being my hobby paper, entirely unrelated to my thesis.  I’m in a different mental place this year, and I plan to submit whatever gets done between now and then; it’s not worth burning myself out to accomplish more.

As part of my effort to re-center and reactivate myself I’ve decided to set aside Fridays to study away from the house and away from the lab.  I plan to work on developing the Achieve Academe thing (I really need to come up with better ways to describe it) that’s been started, flesh out my webpage, and do some reading.  I keep hearing other people talk about summer reading, and I want to jump on that band wagon, though I think people might not agree with my recreational reading choices.

First up on my list of summer books are the textbooks that are required reading for the coming school year.  Next year will be my last year of classes, and I’m splitting it evenly between statistics and engineering education.  Some of these books I’m more excited to read than others, but I think I’ll enjoy them all.

In addition to the required texts, I’ve added a few more to my reading list…

Transportation Statistics and Microsimulation, by Spiegelman, Park, and Rilett

If for some bizarre reason I finish all of the books on my plate, what else along this vein should I be reading? What are your favorite books on education?  What books have you read that changed the way you looked at the world?

Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Grad School, instruction, reading, transportation

May 3, 2012
4:46 pm
by: John Sangster

Summer Days, Drifting Away

The semester has ended, and summer is upon us.  Last summer I poured myself into research, and worked seven days a week on data reduction in order to get three papers submitted for the August 1 deadline for the big conference in my field.  Only one paper was accepted, and it ended up being my hobby paper, entirely unrelated to my thesis.  I’m in a different mental place this year, and I plan to submit whatever gets done between now and then; it’s not worth burning myself out to accomplish more.

As part of my effort to re-center and reactivate myself I’ve decided to set aside Fridays to study away from the house and away from the lab.  I plan to work on developing the Achieve Academe thing (I really need to come up with better ways to describe it) that’s been started, flesh out my webpage, and do some reading.  I keep hearing other people talk about summer reading, and I want to jump on that band wagon, though I think people might not agree with my recreational reading choices.

First up on my list of summer books are the textbooks that are required reading for the coming school year.  Next year will be my last year of classes, and I’m splitting it evenly between statistics and engineering education.  Some of these books I’m more excited to read than others, but I think I’ll enjoy them all.

In addition to the required texts, I’ve added a few more to my reading list…

Transportation Statistics and Microsimulation, by Spiegelman, Park, and Rilett

If for some bizarre reason I finish all of the books on my plate, what else along this vein should I be reading? What are your favorite books on education?  What books have you read that changed the way you looked at the world?

Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Grad School, instruction, reading, transportation

April 30, 2012
10:04 pm
by: watsonaj

Work-Life Balance, A Follow-Up: The Guilty Academic

What perfect timing!  A friend recently shared with me an article from GradHacker.  The author of the article talks about the guilt that he or she feels while attempting to do any non-dissertation-oriented activities. This definitely struck a chord with … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Grad School, Pokie, Work / Life Balance

April 25, 2012
8:14 pm
by: John Sangster

Exposure, Disclosure, and Promotion

Recently in my course on Contemporary Pedagogy we had a guest speaker.  Jon Udell came in to talk to us about “web thinking” and his career working in a collaborative web environment.  In reading a bit of the prolific material that Mr. Udell … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Blogging, communicating science, Grad School, instruction, research, transportation, virginia tech, web presence

April 25, 2012
8:14 pm
by: John Sangster

Exposure, Disclosure, and Promotion

Recently in my course on Contemporary Pedagogy we had a guest speaker.  Jon Udell came in to talk to us about “web thinking” and his career working in a collaborative web environment.  In reading a bit of the prolific material that Mr. Udell … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Blogging, communicating science, Grad School, instruction, research, transportation, virginia tech, web presence

April 16, 2012
7:14 pm
by: John Sangster

Strengths and Weaknesses

I learned something today that simultaneously rocked my world and shored up the foundation of my self-understanding.

I’m always on the lookout for opportunities to spend more time in a classroom as the instructor instead of the student, so I was interested when I found out that the “Thrive” themed housing group for freshman at Virginia Tech was taking applications from upper classmen to be instructors.  Part of the Thrive community description says:

Thrive is a community in which residents can build confidence and form meaningful relationships with hall mates through a strengths-driven philosophy that helps students discover their inherent talents and then teaches them how to use those talents to benefit friendships, relationships, careers, and more!

This all sounds great to me, so I did some more digging.  One of the questions on the instructor application says “I am familiar with StrengthsQuestand/or I know my Top 5 talent themes?”  Well, I thought, what are my top five talent themes?  Then I discovered the Clifton StrenghtsFinder (or at least a reasonable approximation on a free website).  The result is what has caused all of this commotion.

My top strengths are:

Learner (100%) – Has a great desire to learn and wants to continually improve.

Intellection (100%) – Is characterized by intellectual activity.

Analytical (100%) – Searches for reasons and causes.

Input (100%) – Has a craving to know more.

Responsibility (92%) – Takes psychological ownership of what they say and do.

Relator (92%) – Enjoys close relationships with others.

Ideation (92%) – Is fascinated by ideas.

Restorative (92%) – Is adept at dealing with problems.

Belief (92%) – Has certain core values that are unchanging.

To me this is all well and good, and not just because I’m a data addict (Input).  After seven years in consulting I returned to grad school with an intent to never leave academia again, because on some level I recognized my need to be constantly learning and delving; I also recognized that I wasn’t going to find that along the career path I was on.  I appreciate that the test acknowledges my sense of responsibility for the things that I do, and it even knows that it’s important to me to feel close to others; yay test!  Now for the bad news, the test doesn’t just tell you just your strengths; it lists ALL of the categories, and tells you how well each one matches you…

My top weaknesses are: (drumroll please)

Inclusiveness (42%) – Is accepting of others.

Harmony (42%) – Looks for consensus.

Winning Others Over (50%) – Loves the challenge of meeting new people and winning them over.

Positivity (50%) – Has an enthusiasm that is contagious.

Context (67%) – Enjoys thinking about the past.

Individualization (67%) – Intrigued by the unique qualities of each person.

Fairness (67%) – Is keenly aware of the need to treat people the same.

Adaptability (67%) – Prefers to ‘go with the flow.’

I found this list to be extremely difficult to read; likely because my sense of responsibility makes me own up to the fact that to some extent this is all true.  When I come up against someone who has a strongly conflicting viewpoint from mine, I don’t look for consensus, and I don’t try to win them over, I just move on.  I am not able to bend my will to the will of others in order to ‘go with the flow,’ nor do I feel that everyone deserves to be treated the same regardless of how they behave.  A ten-minute multiple-choice test was able to identify the strengths and flaws in my personality that took me thirty years to come to terms with.

So what comes next?

Honestly I’m not sure that I want to “fix” my weak areas.  At the heart of the problem is that I feel so strongly about my core belief of learning is life / life is learning that I am often unable to relate to people who don’t incorporate wonder as part of their world-view.  I feel that, instead of being unaccepting of others, I am unaccepting of others who are close-minded.  Instead of winning others over to open mindedness, I’m more likely to just move on to the next person and hope they are different.  Instead of feeling like all people should be treated the same, I feel that people who don’t want to learn can be left to the lives they’re currently leading, and I’d rather go find a community where we can be inspired together.  I recognize that there are people in education who tirelessly work to engage every student in the material, but I unfortunately can’t count myself among them.  Perhaps it’s that 50% score in positivity that’s coming into play combined with the 92% score in responsibility; I believe that everyone is responsible for their own thoughts/actions, and I don’t believe that goodness comes naturally to every (adult) human being.  As I reflect on it, I’m a little bit amazed at how strongly I connect the ideas of “goodness” and “learner” in my mind.

So what about that freshman course I was going to apply to teach?  I think I’ll give it a pass, and let someone more qualified take it on.  I am confident that I’m the right choice to teach content-intense courses in my profession in a way that’s relatable to my students; showing them how it applies to their lives/career and getting them involved in the world of engineering knowledge.  However, I am not confident in my ability to help freshmen to create a community where they “build confidence and form meaningful relationships with their hall mates.”

Based on my experiences as a freshman in college I should perhaps be signing up to audit the course instead of teach it.  Maybe they could wheel me out on the first day of the lecture and I could explain to the students what the warning signs are of major depressive disorder; what it feels like to go from a 3.5 in your first semester to a 1.9 in the next (it would have been a 1.5 without that A in Poetry), and how it’s not healthy to drop down to 125 pounds when you’re 5’10” tall because you didn’t feel like eating.  Making sure that freshmen have a positive experience and that no-one drops through the cracks is something that’s near and dear to my heart; in part because no-one was there to catch me when I was falling.  Perhaps I have a way to go yet before I can summon up enough positivity to do it responsibly.

Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Grad School, instruction, strengths

April 16, 2012
7:14 pm
by: John Sangster

Strengths and Weaknesses

I learned something today that simultaneously rocked my world and shored up the foundation of my self-understanding.

I’m always on the lookout for opportunities to spend more time in a classroom as the instructor instead of the student, so I was interested when I found out that the “Thrive” themed housing group for freshman at Virginia Tech was taking applications from upper classmen to be instructors.  Part of the Thrive community description says:

Thrive is a community in which residents can build confidence and form meaningful relationships with hall mates through a strengths-driven philosophy that helps students discover their inherent talents and then teaches them how to use those talents to benefit friendships, relationships, careers, and more!

This all sounds great to me, so I did some more digging.  One of the questions on the instructor application says “I am familiar with StrengthsQuestand/or I know my Top 5 talent themes?”  Well, I thought, what are my top five talent themes?  Then I discovered the Clifton StrenghtsFinder (or at least a reasonable approximation on a free website).  The result is what has caused all of this commotion.

My top strengths are:

Learner (100%) – Has a great desire to learn and wants to continually improve.

Intellection (100%) – Is characterized by intellectual activity.

Analytical (100%) – Searches for reasons and causes.

Input (100%) – Has a craving to know more.

Responsibility (92%) – Takes psychological ownership of what they say and do.

Relator (92%) – Enjoys close relationships with others.

Ideation (92%) – Is fascinated by ideas.

Restorative (92%) – Is adept at dealing with problems.

Belief (92%) – Has certain core values that are unchanging.

To me this is all well and good, and not just because I’m a data addict (Input).  After seven years in consulting I returned to grad school with an intent to never leave academia again, because on some level I recognized my need to be constantly learning and delving; I also recognized that I wasn’t going to find that along the career path I was on.  I appreciate that the test acknowledges my sense of responsibility for the things that I do, and it even knows that it’s important to me to feel close to others; yay test!  Now for the bad news, the test doesn’t just tell you just your strengths; it lists ALL of the categories, and tells you how well each one matches you…

My top weaknesses are: (drumroll please)

Inclusiveness (42%) – Is accepting of others.

Harmony (42%) – Looks for consensus.

Winning Others Over (50%) – Loves the challenge of meeting new people and winning them over.

Positivity (50%) – Has an enthusiasm that is contagious.

Context (67%) – Enjoys thinking about the past.

Individualization (67%) – Intrigued by the unique qualities of each person.

Fairness (67%) – Is keenly aware of the need to treat people the same.

Adaptability (67%) – Prefers to ‘go with the flow.’

I found this list to be extremely difficult to read; likely because my sense of responsibility makes me own up to the fact that to some extent this is all true.  When I come up against someone who has a strongly conflicting viewpoint from mine, I don’t look for consensus, and I don’t try to win them over, I just move on.  I am not able to bend my will to the will of others in order to ‘go with the flow,’ nor do I feel that everyone deserves to be treated the same regardless of how they behave.  A ten-minute multiple-choice test was able to identify the strengths and flaws in my personality that took me thirty years to come to terms with.

So what comes next?

Honestly I’m not sure that I want to “fix” my weak areas.  At the heart of the problem is that I feel so strongly about my core belief of learning is life / life is learning that I am often unable to relate to people who don’t incorporate wonder as part of their world-view.  I feel that, instead of being unaccepting of others, I am unaccepting of others who are close-minded.  Instead of winning others over to open mindedness, I’m more likely to just move on to the next person and hope they are different.  Instead of feeling like all people should be treated the same, I feel that people who don’t want to learn can be left to the lives they’re currently leading, and I’d rather go find a community where we can be inspired together.  I recognize that there are people in education who tirelessly work to engage every student in the material, but I unfortunately can’t count myself among them.  Perhaps it’s that 50% score in positivity that’s coming into play combined with the 92% score in responsibility; I believe that everyone is responsible for their own thoughts/actions, and I don’t believe that goodness comes naturally to every (adult) human being.  As I reflect on it, I’m a little bit amazed at how strongly I connect the ideas of “goodness” and “learner” in my mind.

So what about that freshman course I was going to apply to teach?  I think I’ll give it a pass, and let someone more qualified take it on.  I am confident that I’m the right choice to teach content-intense courses in my profession in a way that’s relatable to my students; showing them how it applies to their lives/career and getting them involved in the world of engineering knowledge.  However, I am not confident in my ability to help freshmen to create a community where they “build confidence and form meaningful relationships with their hall mates.”

Based on my experiences as a freshman in college I should perhaps be signing up to audit the course instead of teach it.  Maybe they could wheel me out on the first day of the lecture and I could explain to the students what the warning signs are of major depressive disorder; what it feels like to go from a 3.5 in your first semester to a 1.9 in the next (it would have been a 1.5 without that A in Poetry), and how it’s not healthy to drop down to 125 pounds when you’re 5’10” tall because you didn’t feel like eating.  Making sure that freshmen have a positive experience and that no-one drops through the cracks is something that’s near and dear to my heart; in part because no-one was there to catch me when I was falling.  Perhaps I have a way to go yet before I can summon up enough positivity to do it responsibly.

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Posted in Academia, Grad School, instruction, strengths

March 21, 2012
1:26 pm
by: John Sangster

How I Roll

I had the opportunity for my course in Communicating Science to give a five minute speech on my research/study topic.  The format for my speech was based on what I learned last fall when watching an introductory video about the center for Communicating Science at SUNY Stonybrook.  At one point in the video, Alan Alda is emphasizing the importance of making it more personal, and this stuck with me.  If you want to see the before/after speeches from Stonybrook, check out the video below.

So how did I apply these ideas and make my own research more personal?  The draft for the speech that I wrote is below, and it’s pretty close to the speech that I actually gave.  It was a unique experience for me delivering five minutes of material with no props, and I enjoyed the challenge!

~

Good evening, my name is John Sangster.  Whenever I attend a dinner party, or meet other parents on the playground, the conversation naturally winds its way around to the question of what I am studying.  There’s always a pause before I respond, because I know what’s going to happen.  So I steel myself for it, take a deep breath, and say “I’m studying transportation engineering, but basically I’m a traffic engineer.”  The pause that follows this is usually longer than the pause that I took before speaking.  Most of the time I’ll get a placating response like “oh, that’s nice” or “hmm, that must be interesting,” but occasionally will be a bit bolder and they’ll tell me what they’re really feeling.  If you think back to the last time you swore at someone, odds are good that you were in your car at the time.  People have a visceral reaction to traffic, and telling someone that you are pursuing traffic for your career is like telling them you’re studying to be a divorce lawyer; everyone knows it’s necessary, but everyone wishes it wasn’t.  Most often I hear that such and such an intersection doesn’t work well, or that travelling on such and such road hits every red light at a certain time in the morning and someone should really fix it.  Every once in a while I’ll talk with someone really bold who will say “so… can I blame YOU for roundabouts?!?”  This, I think, is the funniest of all the responses I get, because yeah, to some degree, you can blame me for roundabouts.

Now… because I want to teach in the future, I’ve been studying all facets of transportation, focusing most strongly on traffic, a strength of mine from my years as a consulting engineer.  The bread and butter of a consulting traffic engineer is the ever-present big box store.  Every time a development is proposed, the local town or county, whoever’s responsible for maintaining the roads, requires a nice big three-inch thick report called a Traffic Impact Analysis Study.  This report tells how many cars will come to the building and leave from it, where they’re all going, and most importantly, how that traffic will change the travel time on the roads.  The amount of increase in delay determines how much money a developer is forced to pay to help reconstruct roadways or add lanes at traffic signals to make it all work.  The thing is, at $115 an hour it takes an engineer a long time to make a three-inch thick report, and between big box stores, gas stations, donut shops, subdivisions, and doctor’s offices, there’s a lot of reports to be done.  This is the kind of stuff I teach my students about.

For my own research roundabouts are the thing.  Well, not just roundabouts, but all intersections that fall into this broad category called “alternative intersections.”  There’s about a half-dozen of these designs in use in some part of the country, and all of them are a bit screwier than the roundabout.  What they have in common is that they increase the amount of vehicles that can get through going straight, by inconveniencing the minor movements, like side streets and left-turning cars, rerouting them in a way that lets more through cars go.  A huge benefit of these designs is that increase the safety of the intersection by reducing the number of conflicting movements that could cause crashes.  The roundabout’s a lousy example of helping the through movement, but it’s a great example of reducing conflict.  Some of the most dangerous traffic accidents are head-on collisions where you make a left turn without seeing the opposing car coming at you and they smash right into your front, or you go through a green light minding your own business and having a nice day, and then someone runs a red light and slams into the side of you in a t-bone collision.  Roundabouts completely get rid of these kinds of conflicts, leaving only fender-bender types of crashes as cars come together at an angle.  BUT… you say… EVERYONE HATES ROUNDABOUTS.  Unfortunately, I agree with you, everyone does hate roundabouts, and in the places around the country where those other alternative designs have been built, everyone hates those too.  So the focus of my research is to figure out how to explain the benefits of these alternative designs to everyone.  I have to convince people within my own industry, and in the general public.  Because the truth is that these designs are safer, and they do work better.  Thank you.

~

What are your thoughts on the speech?  Does it engage you?  Does it stir up some emotion?  How can I improve it?  Feedback, as always, is appreciated!!

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Posted in Academia, alternative intersections, communicating science, Grad School, roundabout, transportation, unconventional intersections, virginia tech, web presence