Blog Central

Ben Buckley/The Peak

A post-secondary education may be the ticket to higher earning potential, but not before your institution bleeds you dry.

After you finished your last assignment, you feel free as you did the first time you coasted down a hill on your bike after getting your training wheels off. Then you apply for convocation and realize that, unless you’ve got over $100 just kickin’ it in the bank, you won’t be crossing any stage.

With the amount of student fees lumped together and tossed at us every September, you’d think the cost of convocation would be covered. Even if someone doesn’t want to cross the stage and rent regalia, my university—and most in Canada—charge students a fee to graduate.

I guess we shouldn’t be that surprised. Distance education students still have to pay gym membership fees. Health insurance is compulsory, too, unless you opt out, and even then you pay upfront and get a refund. What makes convocation any different?

Continue reading I have to pay what to graduate?!

The audience at Fiamengo's U of T lecture

A men’s issues event I reported on in March at the University of Toronto drew masked protesters who were there to intimidate people, city police there to keep things in order and it was, inevitably, delayed by a fire alarm. What followed was a rather lightweight critique of women’s studies from University of Ottawa professor Janice Fiamengo.

I was pleased that free speech prevailed, as it was by no means assured. A lecture a few months earlier hosted by the same men’s issues group, The Canadian Association for Equality, was almost shut down. Protesters accused professor Warren Farrell of “hate speech” for, among other things, his controversial views on date rape.

CAFE will host another provocative professor, Lionel Tiger, tonight in Toronto. That event will be at a private venue off campus where the group will raise funds for a men’s centre.

Continue reading A cooler approach to men’s issues

woodleywonderworks/Flickr

Stanford University recently announced that it will fully fund PhD graduates who go on to education degrees. While the traditional route for PhDs is academia, the reality of the job market in the U.S. means they might not find jobs in higher eduction, so they’re being encouraged to help alleviate a shortage of high school teachers instead.

As we know, the job market in Canada is very different. Here, new teachers struggle to find work.

Last week Ontario announced that it will halve the number of people admitted to teacher’s colleges in 2015. The province also added another year to the program. That means most new teachers in Canada will have four-year bachelor’s degrees and two-year bachelor of education (B.Ed.) degrees, for a total of six years. Some will also have master’s degrees and a few will have PhDs.

Continue reading As Ontario cuts admissions, Stanford pushes PhDs to teaching

Another week, another professor has sparked a virtual brou-haha on social media. Enter Geoffrey Miller, a visiting professor at New York University, who recently wrote the following tweet:

Dear obese PhD applicants: If you don’t have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won’t have the willpower to do a dissertation. #truth.

As you might imagine, cyberspace went nuts, calling Miller lots of nasty names, calling for his resignation, and hinting darkly at the possibility of legal action. Many outlets then took a closer look at some of Miller’s other public statements including the time he wondered whether women might be wise to schedule job interviews while they are ovulating because, he said, they are more sexually attractive then. There are also renewed questions about his ideas and involvement in Chinese eugenics—as in this article which seems to equate wealth with intelligence, and ends with an allusion to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World—Miller seems unaware of the fact that the novel actually condemns biological manipulation for social benefit.

Continue reading Fat-shaming prof must, sadly, keep his job

David Woodward

Queen’s University student David Woodward’s final project All I Am Is What I’ve Felt got the type of reaction many new Bachelor of Fine Arts graduates dream about: he was asked to take it down, meaning far more people will now see it.

Woodward, 22, was not surprised his work—10 white briefs adorned with cryptic slogans and images, some of them sexual—offended people. Still, he didn’t expect to be censored. He says the work is autobiographical and discusses “the limitations of romantic love.”

It has also stimulated discussion about the limits on freedom of expression at campuses like Queen’s where some employees get carried away in their mission to avoid offending anyone.

Here’s what happened. Woodward was asked by his campus alumni office, along with other visual artists and musicians, to show off his work to potential donors at an event in April. He forwarded a link to a website that showed his product. On the big day, he arrived early and hung his undies.

Continue reading Queen’s pulls down student’s underwear

Students at U. Waterloo (Jessica Darmanin)

We hear a lot about how “entitled” students are these days. Employers complain of new graduates who want to be the boss right away or who demand high pay before they’ve earned it.

New research by four students at the University of Windsor, all in the Master in Social Data Analysis program, sheds light on the phenomenon. The researchers e-mailed a 96-question survey to all students on campus and used 1,025 responses.

The good news: entitled students aren’t the norm. The bad news: those who feel entitled may be setting themselves up for failure at school or work.

Academically entitled students are those who want exams rescheduled around personal plans or who think they deserve high marks so long as they’ve paid their tuition and put in the hours. They’re like Cher Horowitz, the Beverly Hills bimbo who argues her way to As in the 1995 film Clueless.

Continue reading Deserve the grade just because you paid?

Butler (Dontworry/Wikimedia Commons)

Every convocation season, some group somewhere in Canada protests an honoury degree recipient or commencement speaker. This year, the controversy is over the honourary doctor of letters that McGill University will bestow upon feminist scholar Judith Butler on Thursday.

Butler is well-respected by those who follow gender theory and perhaps equally despised by supporters of Israel because she calls the nation an “apartheid state” and seemed to sympathize with the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah when she called them anti-colonial and anti-imperialist forces. She later clarified that she doesn’t support “violent resistance,” but that’s not good enough for McGill Hillel and McGill Students for Israel who want the honour reconsidered.

The fact that these students are speaking out against her degree is a healthy sign. Nonetheless, the honourary degree should go ahead. I say bring on the controversial thinkers. That’s what university is all about. Or supposed to be about, anyway.

Continue reading Bring on the controversial convocation guests

LIORA K PHOTOGRAPHY/The Militant Baker

Journalism student Gemma Michael, in a recent opinion article in The Charlatan student newspaper at Carleton University, wrote that “fat-shaming” is “society’s final ‘ism.’” According to her, “ideas about beauty, and the outrage and disgust that persists when someone in media doesn’t fulfill that idea, is a social issue.”

It’s an example of how activism against those who promote smaller body sizes has gained ground on campuses. Last week the idea of “sizeism” entered the mainstream consciousness when blogger Jes Baker’s letter addressed to clothing-maker Abercrombie & Fitch’s CEO Mike Jeffries went viral. The Militant Baker, as she’s known on her blog, also posted provocative pictures of herself and a parody of the brand’s logo: “Attractive & Fat.” Some of these pictures have her posing nude, others in an actual A&F t-shirt and one has her flipping both middle fingers at the viewer—or perhaps at an imaginary Jeffries.

What did the CEO say that so offended her? “In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids,” he told online magazine Salon in 2006. “We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.”

Jeffries’ comment was undeniably offensive, but is being overweight really the next “ism?” Can the experience of fat people really be compared to racism or sexism? Or is this an overreaction?

Continue reading Being big isn’t exactly a civil rights issue

Will Guest (Martin Dee)

Will Guest, a 25-year-old University of British Columbia student, has earned an M.D. and a PhD and will soon patent an algorithm that could have implications for Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). In case you’re wondering, he skipped fifth grade, finished his undergraduate at the University of Manitoba in three years and completed his combined M.D./PhD a year ahead of schedule. After just returning from a vacation in China, we spoke about his route to success, the Canadian university system and how others can succeed.

In high school, what was your typical day like?

I went to high school in Winnipeg. We were able to work independently in our math courses so we could work ahead and complete our high school curriculum as quickly as possible and then we could take AP (Advanced Placement) courses. When we’d finished the AP courses, we could go on and actually take university courses in high school through the University of Manitoba. Fortunately, it was a pretty normal schedule. I wasn’t working day and night by any means. I enjoyed it.

In university, how tightly did you pack your schedule?

It depended on the semester. Generally, I would take six courses per term. There was one term when I was taking seven courses and that was a little uncomfortably busy.

In university, did you have time for a social life and extracurriculars?

I did but to a reduced extent. Most of my social life did revolve around school one way or another but that suited me just fine. I wasn’t that involved in sports, which is something I probably did miss out on early on, not because I didn’t have the time for it, but because it was something whose importance I didn’t realize until later. I remember, really clearly, that hitting home when I was in first-year medicine sitting in a lecture on exercise physiology and learning just how important regular physical activity was. That’s when I clued in that I should pay more attention to it. Vancouver is a city where it’s very easy to be physically active whether it’s running, biking, being outdoors, hiking, skiing.

University life, for many, involves late night parties and alcohol. Did you do any of that?

The truth is, I kind of skipped that phase. When I had my eighteenth birthday party—18 is the legal drinking age in Manitoba—I got drunk that night, which is sort of customary. Other than that I was not a big late-night partier. That’s not something I ever particularly enjoyed doing.

How hard have you had to work compared to the average student?

In the 60 hours per week range in undergraduate. At UBC, the pace has been as fast or faster. In this program it does feel like you’re working two jobs, which essentially you are, because the two streams of training are relatively parallel. It would fluctuate between 50 and 70 hours per week.

Any tips for university success for an undergraduate just starting out?

Recognize that you can dedicate yourself to your studies while having fun at the same time. As much as possible, it’s good to set your goals at an earlier stage. I was looking at the M.D./PhD program when I was in between high school and university so I had a reasonably clear idea of what I wanted to do and that enabled me to work toward a specific destination and not get confused or bogged down along the way. Ultimately everything is just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. Often, it does seem daunting and overwhelming but the answer to that is to just focus on what’s in front of you. Don’t get to alarmed by looming exams. Work on what you can do. Put it aside when you’re tired. Once you have no energy left, it’s best to relax and try again the next day.

Did you ever have so much stress from your workload that you couldn’t sleep?

The stress level was usually moderate. I, fortunately, didn’t ever have any trouble sleeping. The exception to that was when I was on clinical service. When we have our on-call shift, we spend up to 36 hours working in one go and you’re exhausted and you have to keep going.

What’s your approach to studying?

My approach to studying is sitting down and reading the textbook. Sometimes the explanations in the textbook are hard to understand at first but through perseverance and coming back to it, usually it’s the best way to study. There has been very much a movement away from using textbooks as a sort of antiquated way of doing things but my personal experience is that it really is the best way to comprehensively know a field, rather than sort of new-aged or more sophisticated ways.

What surprised you about university?

There was a certain amount of busy work that had to be done, which was a little disappointing. What comes to mind are lab reports in certain courses that were a little tedious, not very educational.

There’s a debate about the value of universities considering that Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and David Karp of Tumblr all dropped out of school. Why did you stick with it?

Those are all entrepreneurs who developed a very good idea at an early stage of their career. They essentially needed to devote their full-time energies to it very early on. Ultimately, the goal of university is to train an individual to be able to do something like that. I think they were people who had already achieved what university was intended to offer them. For me it’s essentially necessary to complete the full course of training up to a PhD. That’s just the expectation. What’s more, the training environment to become a researcher is really only available in an academic setting.

As for the utility of taking university courses and then finding a job, I do think it’s a matter of the field pursued. There has been a lot of encouragement of people to go into the so-called STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and I think that is something really worthy. In my physics graduating class there were, unfortunately, only three of us. In general, the physical sciences suffer from a lack of student interest and I think it would be beneficial for people to be encouraged to go in those directions because that does lead to better job opportunities.

How can you make students interested in STEM fields?

I think this comes down to their high school or junior high school experiences. So often you hear people say, “I’m not any good at math” or, “I just don’t understand physics.” They’ve written off these entire fields when the reality is that, with perseverance and, particularly with a teacher who motivates or inspires an interest in the field, I think that pretty much anyone is able to understand and make progress in these fields. It’s kind of socially accepted in our society to write yourself off.

Going forward your plan is to stick with research obviously?

That’s right, as much as possible. The next thing I need to do is residency training. I’m matched to radiology at UBC so that’s what I’ll be doing the next five years. The goal of the M.D./PhD program is to train someone as a clinician-scientist so that they can be seeing patients while also having an active research interest. At this stage, I’d like to do a neuroradiology fellowship afterwards, specifically the interpretation of films of the brain and spinal cord. That’s an additional two years.

The patent-pending discovery you made, how did that come about?

That relates to one of the main areas of work in my PhD thesis which is trying to understand the process by which proteins misfold in neurodegenerative diseases. We developed a computational tool that allowed us to calculate the free energy of unfolding different regions within a protein, which is part of the process of a protein ultimately misfolding in disease. If we knew which regions would lose their structure early in the misfolding process, these were areas that could presumably be targeted by antibodies that could ultimately recognize the confirmation of the misfolded protein over the folded confirmation. I came from more of a computational background so I was more familiar with the modelling necessary to develop this into a more general computational prediction tool.

Do you think Massive Open Online Courses will lead to the downfall of residential universities?

I could see that, at some time in the future, online universities could play a pretty substantial role in our university system. But, by and large, I think the Canadian university system delivers excellent value for money and there are really few barriers for people who want to pursue post-secondary education. I think in Canada the current system will remain dominant for quite some time. I can understand why, in other countries where the cost of education is much higher than it is in Canada, those emerging potentially disruptive technologies will play more of a role early on. But who knows?

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Rhetoric class at the University of Winnipeg (Jessica Darmanin)

The unemployed university graduate is everywhere these days, from CBC’s Generation Jobless documentary to the cover of Maclean’s.

Since the recession, so the story goes, almost all 27-year-old university graduates are sitting in mom’s or dad’s basement playing Guitar Hero, firing off job applications and ranting on Facebook about how they’d be better off as plumbers.

This has become such accepted wisdom that when Allan Rock, president of the University of Ottawa, argued in a speech last week that it is, in fact, a myth, the Ottawa Citizen saw it as news.

Newly-released Statistics Canada charts of unemployment rates by education among 25 to 29-year-olds back up Rock’s point. Last year, university graduates were more likely than anyone else in that age group to be employed and just as likely to be working as the same age group was back in 2005 when no one fretted about jobs.

Continue reading The myth of the unemployed university graduate