Archive for the ‘GRAD 5104’ Category

Hello All,

I find this interesting article from bitesizebio.com [http://bitesizebio.com/articles/10-dos-and-donts-for-phd-students/] providing the 10 do’s and don’ts of a PhD student. Found that this was interesting however it’s possible that considering #1, this should be reviewed prior to entering a PhD program.  I think I like #10 the best….what’s your favorite?

ENJOY!

http://public.randomnotes.org/richard/notMad.gif

1. Do think about whether you really want to do a PhD. Being a PhD student is not the same as being an undergrad, nor like working as a research assistant. A PhD is extremely hard work requiring a lot of discipline and dedication. Don’t just start a PhD because it’s the line of least resistance.
2. Do choose your supervisor well. The quality of your supervisor will have a direct impact on how much you get out of your PhD and how good (or bad) an experience it is. Don’t choose your PhD supervisor because he/she is the leader in his/her field, in fact that’s the most likely way to find a bad supervisor. Talk to the PhD students already working in the lab, find out whether they are happy and get information about the supervisor’s personality, level of attention (too much/too little?) and how well they plan their projects.
3. Don’t leave the responsibility for your project to others. Don’t leave it to your supervisor to tell you how to work, what to read or plan your project. This is your learning experience: Get involved and take responsibility as early as possible.
4. Do get support from other PhD students. When things get tough, the only people who can understand what you are going through are other PhD students (or former ones!). If there are other PhD students around you, arrange to go for regular coffee/lunch breaks with them. If not, try an online forum such as the Postgraduate Forum.
5. Don’t waste your first year. It is easy to think that you have a long time to complete your PhD, but don’t be lulled into a false sense of security… time has a habit of disappearing fast. Start out as you mean to go on. Establish a strict work and study routine, and stick to it… you are not an undergrad anymore! (see #1!)
6. Don’t spend long hours in the lab for the sake of it. Make sure that when you are in the lab, you are working and not just hanging around. I’ve seen many people spend 16 hours a day in the lab, but they only actually work for eight hours or less. An 8 hour day, with time away from the lab to relax your body and mind will keep you sharp and focused.
7. Do summarise your results as you go. From the beginning, get yourself into the discipline of writing a monthly summary of experiments performed, results and conclusions and include all lab book references/data/images. The monthly reports will link up to make a story of your research and make your write-up much easier.
8. Don’t underestimate how long it will take to write up. However long you think it will take you to write up, double or even trebling it will be closer to the truth. The write-up is the hardest part of your whole PhD. When my wife says that I have no concept of the pain and agony of childbirth, I beg to differ. A PhD is like a long uncomfortable pregnancy and the write up is the long and agonizing labor.
9. Do take every opportunity to practice and learn Treat your PhD studies like an intensive training program. Listen to and learn from those around you, take every opportunity to try new techniques, present data, meet other scientists etc.
10. Do get a life. It’s not all hard work and heartache. Smell the flowers as you go along, enjoy the people around you and make sure you have some fun!

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 to pop up is the article that discusses how higher education leverages the holiday rush for its marketing schemes.

Suggestions are provided below that include ways of targeting parents, students etc. These are quite clever, and I can recall some of these tactics being employed on me as well. I wonder how well these work at a departmental standpoint. Also, what access may be restricted and to what level of the hierarchy in higher education do you have to go up to market in this manner. Makes me think, it’s all a money game after all…

FULL ARTICLE BELOW:

Higher Education Marketing: Leveraging the Holiday Rush

At one time or another we will have to make presentation either in our class, for presenting/defending our research etc. It’s always a good

idea to follow some basic tips so that you can focus on getting the most from your audience and vice versa. Therefore, below are 10 tips to

making good or as the author Neil Patel puts it “killer” presentations.  Hope this helps….

1. Don’t abuse your visuals – Usually your visuals are posters, charts, or even a PowerPoint presentation. Whatever your visuals may be, keep them simple and don’t put too many words on them. The audience isn’t there to read your slides, they are there to listen to you present.
2. Look at the audience – If you ever wondered where you should be looking when presenting, the answer is right in front of you. Don’t just single out one person, but instead try to make eye contact with numerous people throughout the room. If you don’t do this then you aren’t engaging the audience, you are just talking to yourself. This can result in an utter lack of attention from your audience.
3. Show your personality – It doesn’t matter if you are presenting to a corporate crowd or to senior citizens, you need to show some character when presenting. If you don’t do this you’ll probably sound like Agent Smith from the Matrix. Nobody wants to hear him present. (If you do, you are probably an agent yourself and we will find you)
4. Make them laugh – Although you want to educate your audience, you need to make them laugh as well. I learned this from Guy Kawasaki and if you ever hear any of his speeches you’ll understand why. In essence, it keeps the audience alert and they’ll learn more from you than someone who just educates.
5. Talk to your audience, not at them – People hate it when they get talked at, so don’t do it. You need to interact with your audience and create a conversation. An easy way to do this is to ask them questions as well as letting them ask you questions.
6. Be honest – A lot of people present to the audience what they want to hear, instead of what they need to hear. Make sure you tell the truth even if they don’t want to hear it because they will respect you for that and it will make you more human.
7. Don’t over prepare – If you rehearse your presentation too much it will sound like it (in a bad way). Granted, you need to be prepared enough to know what you are going to talk about but make sure your presentation flows naturally instead of sounding memorized. Usually if you ask experienced speakers what you shouldn’t do, they’ll tell you not to rehearse your presentation too much because then it won’t sound natural.
8. Show some movement – You probably know that you need to show some movement when speaking, but naturally you may forget to do so. Make sure you show some gestures or pace around a bit (not too much) on the stage when speaking. Remember, no one likes watching a stiff. People are more engaged with an animated speaker.
9. Watch what you say – You usually don’t notice when you say “uhm”, “ah”, or any other useless word frequently, but the audience does. It gets quite irritating; so much that some members of the audience will probably count how many times you say these useless words.
10. Differentiate yourself – If you don’t do something unique compared to all the other presenters the audience has heard, they won’t remember you. You are branding yourself when you speak, so make sure you do something unique and memorable.

In order to keep in line with topic seven, this post will serve to show various student mentoring programs in higher education. There is discussion that will show the importance of having a mentor for native students and even more so for international students, serving as an intermediary bridge.

An interesting topic came up while looking through education on the international scale. There is a global campaign for higher education internationalization, and it is found that an overseas degree is increasingly valuable, however it has been plagued with a specter of corruption as private institutions finds this as a profitable venture and some of them have been found as “less than honorable” looking at internationalization as a contribution to the all mighty “bottom line” – PROFIT.

Who would have thought that education would be involved in such corruption, well if business ethic principle serve us right, then according to Milton Friedman the social responsibility of business is to increase profits, so why is it a surprise that there are unethical practices being utilized when higher education is a billion dollar enterprise.  Here are a few examples and excerpts from Altabach’s 2012 article entitled “Corruption: A Key Challenge to Internationalization.” :

Problem

“A serious and unsolved problem is the prevalence of unscrupulous agents and recruiters funneling unqualified students to universities worldwide.”

“Altered and fake documents have long been a problem in international admissions.”

“Examples of tampering with and falsifying results of the Graduate Record Examination and other commonly required international examinations used for admissions have resulted in the nullifying of scores, and even cancelling examinations in some countries and regions, as well as rethinking whether online testing is practical.”

Solution

“The higher education community can recommit to the traditional “public good” values of internationalization, although current funding challenges may make this difficult in some countries.”

“[Accrediting] Agencies and the international higher education community must ensure that universities were carefully evaluated and that the results of assessment are easily available to the public and the international stakeholders.”

“Governmental, regional, and international agencies must coordinate their efforts and become involved in maintaining standards and protecting the image of the higher education sector.”

“Consciousness-raising about ethics and good practice in international higher education and awareness of emerging problems and continuing challenges deserve continuing attention.”

Also mentioned is the recognition of the problem, it seems as if its a 12 step program for recovering alcoholics. Essentially, the educational tree will always have a few bad apples, careful attention needs to be made to ensure that those rotten apples do not ruin the whole bunch. Let’s face it, business and ethics go hand in hand, whether the ethics are assumed negative or positive is left to the curator.

The full document can be accessed here>>>https://htmldbprod.bc.edu/pls/htmldb/f?p=2290:4:0::NO:RP,4:P0_CONTENT_ID:118595

In light of open access week, I figure I will share a few videos that correlate to the theme, giving a little twist, I don’t know about you guys but am tired of reading, time for a break:

What is open access?

Benefits of Open Access

Open Access 101

The Future of Open Access (If you have the time…)

GOOD LUCK!

KEN

In light of previous posts that discussed education in other countries, I felt that as the sole representative of the Bahamas I would share a little information regarding our educational system. I included a 2005 report prepared for UNESCO and IESALC that outlines higher education in the Bahamas (Link below). From the World Bank report, the Bahamas has a little of 347,000 inhabitants.  Therefore, it should be expected that with the population of Virginia Tech roughly being 9% (30k), Liberty University roughly being 33% (100k) and the University of Phoenix roughly being 89% (300k) of our total population, it is easy to see why the report mentioned above indicates the College of the Bahamas (COB) as our only considerable University in the Bahamas of which I am a proud alumnus. I won’t go into the detail of the report, but I will give you my account of how the educational system works in the Bahamas which does not skew drastically from the United States system, as some other countries may have and I will start from Kindergarten through the common end point of a Bachelors degree from the College of the Bahamas; however other institutions such as Nova Southeastern University, University of Miami and the University of the West Indies have graduate offerings provided via an branch campus (usually not in a stand-alone building).

Here’s my best attempt to define education in the Bahamas:

Grade School

1) Gradation of K-12 education is exactly how it is put, in most cases schools start at either Kindergarten and develop from grades 1-12.  The only difference between the Bahamas and the US is that it separates the schools in terms of primary (K-6) and secondary (7-12) education whereas, if I am correct, the US goes elementary (K-5) middle (6-8) and high (9-12) school. Oh BTW, no A/C i.e. heated learning! (This goes for most of the College of the Bahamas and other vocational/training institutions as well, so count your blessings).

2) Every 3 years essentially, there is a standardized test which is GLAT (grade level assessment test) for grades 3 and 6, BJC (Bahamas Junior Certificate) in grade 9 and the BGCSE (Bahamas General Certificate of Secondary Education) in grade 12, which is usually the basis for admittance into COB and for scholarship application.

3) The SAT is mandatory at some schools, however the curriculum is not prepared for SAT accomodation.

Higher Education

1) As previously mentioned, the College of the Bahamas is the main institution for Higher Education, although there are other institutions that are public and private that includes the Bahamas Technical and Vocational Institute (Certificates) the Bahamas Baptist Community College (Associates Degrees), Success Training College (AA) Atlantic College (AA) Galilee College (AA) etc.

2) There are other institutions that provide MA degrees such as mentioned above that includes UWI, NOVA and UM.

3) What I find most about the Higher Education system in the Bahamas is that it is mainly preparatory for international education especially in technical fields. Usually, this caters to institutions in the US, Canada, the UK and on some occasions Cuba (medical school).

For example: The engineering program in COB is an AA degree called pre-engineering. In pre-engineering, all of the foundational courses of engineering students are offered that are common of all engineering programs. Additionally, for a Construction Management student, one may take Civil Engineering Technology prior to entering a CM program in the US, Canada or UK etc.

4) The population usually comprises of Bahamian students, however other students usually enroll from other close Caribbean nations and some from other parts of the world such as Zambia, India and the UK.

5) The populous at COB is 8,700 students and as I recall, my class sizes were no bigger than 30, if it was it felt like a huge class.

6) 3 credit hours would accumulate to 4 in class hours a week  and a 4 credit hour course would be roughly 6 course hours a week.

7) Tuition is roughly $150 per credit, so roughly full time tuition would be $1800 for Bahamian nationals and for non-Bahamians it is $200 per credit hour so roughly $2400 for a full-time semester.

8) The Bahamas, if it wasn’t already gather from the previous information provided follows the same degree nomenclature in assigning degrees in the US etc. such as AA, BA, MA.

9) In transferring to the US, a 3rd party agency evaluated the coursework performed in the Bahamas against the coursework in the US for transfer of credits.

By no means is this list exhaustive or the same for everyone else, however I am drawing a blank right now regarding what else I can talk about so if you have any questions, please feel free to let me know.

Ken

Link to World Bank Report on Population of the Bahamas

http://data.worldbank.org/country/bahamas

Link to PDF Report on Higher Education in the Bahamas

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCoQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.iesalc.unesco.org.ve%2Fdmdocuments%2Fbiblioteca%2Flibros%2Fnational-report-bahamas.pdf&ei=Yy1zUMfbGq2z0QGq0YGYAw&usg=AFQjCNG2GS_lOcpw2A_iJ5KgJRKpFejQnw

According to payscale.com, there area a few “party schools” that actually reflect large incomes post-graduation

during the middle of their career etc. Just found this to be an interesting study. Where’s VT on this list I wonder?

“Methodology

Party School: One of the 20 schools on the 2011 Princeton Review Party School Ranking.

Mid-Career Median Salary: Half of the mid-career employees who are graduates of a school will earn more than this salary, while half will earn less. Salaries listed are for full-time employees with only a bachelor’s degree and no further higher education.”

http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2013/party-schools-that-pay?utm_medium=Email&utm_source=ExactTarget&utm_campaign=2012-09+Salary+News+9.2&utm_term=http%3a%2f%2fwww.payscale.com%2fcollege-salary-report-2013%2fparty-schools-that-pay&cm_mmc=Email-_-2012-09+Salary+News+9.2-_-NA-_-http%3a%2f%2fwww.payscale.com%2fcollege-salary-report-2013%2fparty-schools-that-pay

This video goes over the economic risks being taken to enter into higher education. Something to think about, will we be able to maintain in the higher education bubble in our or our future generations? Is there an expected crash as the housing market had. I believe this is something that needs further investigation and insight.

Ken

America is facing a higher education bubble. Like the housing bubble, it is the product of cheap credit coupled with popular expectations of ever-increasing returns on investment, and as with housing prices, the cheap credit has caused college tuitions to vastly outpace inflation and family incomes. Now this bubble is bursting.

Learn more at: http://www.encounterbooks.com/books/the-higher-education-bubble/

Hey All,

While in a research course, we had an individual from the library to give us a little workshop on usage of library resources and I though that I would share this while its fresh in my head.

Many of you may already know of this resource but if you’re like me and just starting out, this would be excellent for searching through databases without being taken away too far out of your discipline, and if your research is complex and diverse, at least it can help you hone in on particular topics without going crazy searching through databases you are unfamiliar with.

If you go to this link – it will take you to the subject guides for each individual program of study and help you refine your searches.

Another link is Ulrich’s web which can help you find a research journal, investigate whether it is active, non active and whether it is refereed or not.

HOPE THIS HELPS SOMEONE AS MUCH AS IT HAS ALREADY HELPED ME!