All Posts Tagged With: "graduate school"
How profs talk about you behind your back
Prof. Pettigrew explains what’s in the reference letter
Sealed letter by zappowbang on Flickr
In Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels, Simon Darcourt takes up the task of writing letters of reference for his students when he happens to be in a bad mood. Worse, his students have irked him by making requests at the last minute and expecting him to pay for postage. So, in a fit of pique, he savages them: “treacherous, never turn your back on him” he says of one; he describes the mind of another as “flat as Holland—the salt marshes, not the tulip fields.”
When I was a student I was always respectful when asking for letters, lest my profs be offended and take out their anger on me in the same way. Now, as a professor who has written dozens upon dozens of reference letters for scholarships, grad programs—once to help a student get an apartment—I can see how nerve-wracking the process must be for those doing the asking.
Considering graduate school in the arts or social sciences?
Here are some job statistics you’ll want to consider
King Henry VIII from Wikimedia Commons
After a steep recession-era decline in hiring of academics in the arts and social sciences, potential PhDs have reasons for optimism—or despair—depending on how you look at it.
The good news is that job listings on the American Historical Association’s website, considered a market barometer for North America, increased from 569 in the 2009-10 academic year to 627 in 2010-11. That’s up 10.2 per cent year-on-year.
The bad news? That figure is still 40 per cent lower than the 1,064 jobs posted in 2007-08, before the recession led to budgetary restraint.
The modest rebound is a common theme across the arts and social sciences.
Continue reading Considering graduate school in the arts or social sciences?
Saskatchewan MLA is a PhD student and a mom
Jennifer Campeau balances motherhood, school and politics
Saskatoon Fairview MLA Jennifer Campeau
Running for office isn’t easy. But how many politicians can say they won their seats while parenting and working on their PhDs?
Not many. But Jennifer Campeau, the newest member the Saskatchewan Legistlature can.
Campeau, 38, is pursuing her PhD in Native Studies at the University of Saskatchewan.
The Yellow Quill First Nation members’ election in Saskatoon Fairview on on Nov. 7 marked only the second time a First Nations woman was elected to the Legislative Assembly in Saskatchewan and the first time an Aboriginal Canadian woman snagged a seat for the Saskatchewan Party, which cleaned up with 49 out of 58 ridings this month.
Despite the rigours of campaigning, Campeau chose not to take any time off from her studies.
“You’ve really got to be out there knocking on doors at least 3 hours a night, if not more,” she says. Still, Campeau doesn’t take the opportunity of post-secondary education for granted. A single mother, it took her a long time to earn her first degree. It was simply too difficult to study full-time while working to support her young daughter. ”It was just the two of us so I didn’t have the support that I could have had to do well in school; I had to work to support us both,” she says.
“[But] when I was 30 and she was old enough to be in school all day, I’d had enough of telling her that education was important when I didn’t have a degree myself,” she says. Sometimes she would bring her daughter to class, explaining “it instilled in her the value of post-secondary education.”
Campeau now has a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Saskatchewan.
She’s pursing her doctoral degree in Native Studies to learn more about aboriginal policy. She says the economic challenges facing Yellow Quill First Nation are part of the reason she chose her field of study.
As an MLA, Campeau hopes to provide a voice for both Aboriginal Canadians and newcomers alike. “The Saskatchewan economy and population is growing, so we have a lot of people new to Saskatchewan in Saskatoon Fairview,” she says. “I want to bring their concerns to the table.”
You’re forigiven if it all sounds tiring. ”In the last eight years, I haven’t really had a life of leisure, I’ve always been working and going to school,” jokes Campeau, “so I kind of got used to a fast pace.”
Should I pursue a master’s degree?
Prof. Pettigrew explains the basics of grad school
Photo by Gibson Claire McGuire Regester
Even if you’ve just started university, you may already be wondering what graduate school is all about. By “graduate school” I don’t mean professional programs like law or medicine or education; I’m talking about continuing your studies in the same academic discipline you’re majoring in now, like Anthropology or Physics at the master’s level. Obviously, every school and program will have unique features, and you should do your own research to decide where to go and what to take. But here are a few thoughts to help you decide whether a graduate degree may be right for you in the first place.
1. Is it hard to get into a graduate program?
Yes. Graduate programs will often give a minimum requirement for admission (say a B or a B-) but in reality, the standards are usually much higher. You will generally need at least an A- average.
Foreign doctorate students could be sent home
Finish in four years or pay for it yourself: Ontario government
Six international doctorate students at the University of Western Ontario are fighting a new rule that forces them to pay up if they take more than four years to complete their degrees. They say that if they get sent home, their education — subsidized so far by Canadian taxpayers — will be wasted.
Saad Anis of Pakistan is one of those students. He told Inside Higher Ed that he may never finish his Ph.D. in philosophy, because he can’t afford to pay the international tuition of $16,000 plus living costs to take a fifth year. Although Ph.D. Humanities students at Western take an average of nearly six years to graduate, international students are funded only for four.
“Transfer is one option,” Anis said. “But I think most likely what is going to happen is I will not be able to finish and I’ll just go back home [to Pakistan] and teach at a high school or something.”
Russell Poole, the associate dean of research and graduate studies for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities said: “I feel very sorry for them that the rules have changed and those rules have changed while they’ve been here.” But, he added that Western doesn’t owe them more funding. “It would be simply wrong to say that any time a student is not completing in four years the university has the obligation to provide funding for the fifth or sixth year,” he said.
Henrik Lagerlund, the philosophy department chair feels that it would be a waste for the students not to finish, but added, “I think I can say with confidence that this program is doable in four years.”
New major in Weapons of Mass Destruction
School partners with FBI to offer master’s
Photo courtesy of Marshall Astor on Flickr
The Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s newest offering is the Master of Science in Strategic Studies in Weapons of Mass Destruction. Students will cover dirty bombs, biological attacks, possible power grid disruptions and more, reports the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
For now, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) will select all of the students from within its own trusted ranks. Eventually, law enforcement agencies will be able to enroll their own recruits for a fee. It’s unclear whether the program will ever be open to the general public.
Two-thirds of new teachers can’t find full-time work
Province reacts with “hard cap” on new enrollments
Photo courtesy of woodleywonderworks on Flickr
Few other graduates in Canada have as much reason for pessimism as those who finished teacher’s college this spring. A study from the Ontario College of Teachers shows that two-thirds (67 per cent) of education graduates from Ontario’s class of 2009 found themselves unemployed or underemployed in the following year. And, the unemployment rate among new teachers has exploded to a staggering 24 per cent — up from just three per cent in 2006.
The job market is bad in western Canada too. In British Columbia, 2,700 new students were certified by the College of Teachers last year. The BC Public School Employers’ Association says that only 1,000 are needed, according to the Victoria Times Colonist. Even in fast-growing Alberta, many school boards are laying off.
The situation has caused Ontario to take an unusual step. In May, it placed a “hard cap” on funding for newly enrolled education students. Caps are usually reserved for medical professions only, but John Milloy, Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities for Ontario, explained that the supply and demand is so out of whack that teacher’s college enrollments needed to be culled.
“We recognize that not every graduate of education programs wants to be a teacher in Ontario,” says the Minister. “But at the same time, we want to make sure that when people leave [teacher's college] they have a realistic chance of getting a job.”
The problem for grads is that Canada has fewer school-aged children, fewer retiring teachers and yet teacher’s colleges have chosen to pump out more grads over the past decade. The new cap in Ontario will force first-year classes to shrink by 885 students overall by 2012-13. That means a maximum of 9,058 new students will start next fall.
But is that enough? The new cap is still far above the 8,077 teachers from Ontario schools who registered with the provincial college in 1999 — a period when an average of 7,200 Ontario teacher’s retired each year, creating many spots for new grads. In the period between 2005 to 2009, average annual retirements fell to just 4,600, meaning thousands fewer jobs per year.
And now? “Teacher retirements are forecast to remain under 5,000 annually over the next seven years,” concluded the College of Teachers’ report. That means the bleak job market for new teachers is unlikely to improve any time soon.
The arts are useless and science is uncreative
Would you want your heart surgeon to be a ‘creative entrepreneur’?
Can a 4.0 GPA be a bad thing? A guest lecturer in one of my courses thinks so. In a lecture about “Mistakaphobia,” he argued that part of life–and therefore a part of being a university student–is making mistakes and growing from your experiences, taking risks and learning how to live in the real world. Perfection isn’t something you should strive for, because without mistakes you can’t learn anything. Instead of aiming for that 4.0 GPA, university students should accept mistakes as “opportunities.” It’s all part of a “creative entrepreneur” mentality.
I don’t have a 4.0 GPA, but it’s not for a lack of trying. And although I don’t know anyone who would disagree with the idea that making mistakes and taking risks are all part of living in the real world, as someone who’s planning on applying to med school next year, I need the highest marks possible if I want any hope of actually making it in. I’m sure anyone else who’s getting ready to apply to graduate school or professional school feels the same way. The problem is, there are plenty of applicants with 3.8+ GPA’s who aren’t nerdy little hermits with underdeveloped social skills and a lack of creativity. Out of the thousands of people applying to med school every year, plenty of them have high marks, but I don’t assume a correlation between high marks and low levels of “creativity.”
In the tutorial that took place after the lecture, where students and TAs were able to discuss the ideas with each other, I found it interesting that a lot of people seemed to think it had to be one way or the other: embracing a 4.0 GPA is somehow a rejection of the arts, and it’s only smug science students who get high grades. Discipline and a work ethic shouldn’t be rewarded–they should be stigmatized. If you have anything higher than a 2.8 GPA, you’re not creative or intellectual. You’re afraid to take risks and live in the real world–a robot who’s just following instructions. Part of a flock of sheep.
Yeah, sitting in that tutorial, I felt like I was in enemy territory. It was very uncomfortable. Kind of like if you were sitting in the middle of a crowded cafeteria and suddenly, everyone started declaring Holy Allegiance to the Underground Mole King, and all traitors should be TORTURED AND MUTILATED AND CHEESE GRATED TO DEATH. It was one of those, “I wish I had a jet pack” kind of moments.
I also found it interesting that some of the students also had obvious contempt for the sciences, and seemed to think that all science students are disrespectful of the arts. Like we all get together in Nerd Conferences and make fun of arts students behind their backs, and say things like, “How can a course in philosophy lead to a viable career? If a textbook doesn’t contain at least a couple equations and words like ‘entropy,’ it’s a joke.” At least, I know none of my friends in the biomedical sciences think that way.
Not to mention, med schools are increasingly embracing non-traditional backgrounds. More and more schools are dropping science prerequisites and MCAT requirements. And every med school across Canada looks at more than just marks. Extracurricular activities, life experience and even essay-writing skills are often evaluated, and although the exact weighting formula varies depending on the school, all of these non-academic criteria are important. Of course, it’s wrong to think that a doctor with a background in the arts would automatically be more creative, innovative and people-oriented than someone from the sciences. Just like it would be wrong to assume that someone with a science background is automatically harder working and more disciplined.
The point is, it doesn’t have to be one extreme or the other. In a field like medicine, the ‘entrepreneur’ mentality is definitely a valuable asset. After all, lots of scientific discoveries were mistakes to begin with. And new, innovative surgical techniques are the result of experimentation. But I’m sure those medical researchers and surgeons had high GPAs.
At least I feel better about my physics and organic chemistry marks now. Apparently I can make a political stance out of it. Any low marks I’ve ever gotten were a deliberate choice. I was learning how to be an entrepreneur.
Mind you, if I was having open heart surgery, I wouldn’t want my surgeon to be a “creative entrepreneur.” I’d want them to be a perfectionist who had a 4.0 GPA. Someone who is afraid to make mistakes.
Planning on writing the MCAT?
Cheaters beware: grad-school tests are ramping up security
According to an article from the Star, entrance tests for many professional programs now require a digital print of students’ fingers, thumbs or palms.
Most Canadian med schools require applicants to write the Medical College Admission Test. With an extremely limited number of seats, a high MCAT score is crucial for med school hopefuls.
The solution for some students? Pay someone else to write it.
“It’s unfortunate some people want to cheat to get the higher scores you need for better-known programs,” said Rick Powers, executive director of the University of Toronto’s MBA program, in an interview with The Star.
The Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) for a MBA program, which is written by 8,000 students every year in Canada, requires an infrared scan of the blood vessels in your palm. Although palm scans are weeding out cheaters, some students aren’t happy with the new security measures. After having to give a palm scan for the GMAT, Toronto student Ajanthy Arasaratnam asked the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada to investigate it as an invasion of privacy. According to the article, the use of digital fingerprints by the MCAT is also being investigated by the privacy commissioner’s office.
The good news for med school hopefuls who want to avoid the MCAT, cheating isn’t the only option. Some med schools don’t require applicants to write the test, including the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Medicine and the Northern Ontario school of Medicine.
-photo courtesy of Jermaine Justice
Are you getting your money’s worth?
Canadians concerned about the value of an education, finds poll
As young people prepare to don caps and gowns this month and take the stage to grab their diplomas, Canadians confess a certain skepticism about the value of an education in this country.
Nearly half of the Canadians polled in a recent Harris-Decima survey said they feel Canada’s educational system does not adequately prepare young people for work in the modern economy.
Albertans are most pessimistic about the system – 52 per cent say they find it inadequate.
Younger Canadians, between the ages of 18-34, are more likely to say it is up to snuff than older respondents.
Nathan Seebaran, a student at Edmonton’s Ross Sheppard High School, says he feels optimistic about the training he’s getting through a registered apprentice program.
He’s studying to become a cabinetmaker and will be doing projects at the University of Alberta as part of his training.
“I was thinking of dropping out of high school because I didn’t really think I needed it, but I’m glad I stayed to do this,” Seebaran said.
Confidence is the hallmark of the so-called “Generation Y,” which is now hitting graduation age, says Harris-Decima vice-president Jeff Walker.
“Part of that self-awareness and self belief of that generation of people is the feeling that they work extremely hard and that the system has been beneficial to them,” said Walker.
When asked to grade different levels of education, Canadians gave high school the lowest marks.
Only 37 per cent felt high school did “very well” or well at preparing young people for the workforce.
Blow up the university and start again?
American prof calls for a graduate education revolution in New York Times article. Did he hit the mark?
Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).
That’s the lead of an angry, entertaining opinion piece published in the New York Times a few weeks back by Columbia University religion professor Mark C. Taylor. Taylor opens with a novel take on one problem facing the modern university — one problem that nobody much wants to talk about.
Taylor’s contention is that the university is broken because it turns out too many graduate students for the job market to support — and in any case, the only job these grad student will be qualified for if one in the professoriat, where they will spend a lifetime producing clones of themselves. The author describes an academy marked by increasing specialization and insularity, where disciplines are carved into increasingly small (and irrelevant) subdisciplines, producing work that no one will read or care about, for the sake of producing work and justifying one’s existence. As an example, he cites a colleague proudly informing him that his best Ph.D. student is doing a dissertation on the use of footnotes by the medieval theologian Duns Scotus.
There’s been push back against Taylor’s proposals, including this response in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (for what it’s worth, the comments following this article, in which various posters join the debate, is better value than the article itself.). One could also argue that Taylor’s critique may be less relevant in fields such as medicine where increasingly narrow research specializations may be necessary for scientific progress.
Should we change graduate schools as Taylor proposes? Should we at least experiment with different models? Good questions, particularly given that nearly every university in Canada has made it part of its core mission to increase the number of graduate students enrolled, and the university sector as well as various governments (notably Ontario) have agreed to fund substantial increases in the number of Master’s and Ph.D.’s produced.
Grad school applications up
Slowing economy prompts more students to stay in school
MONTREAL — With entry-level job postings down as much as 25 per cent, Canadian graduate schools are bracing for an increase in applications for next year as students opt to stay in school longer rather than enter the workforce at a time of economic uncertainty.
The University of Toronto has already received 12,631 grad school applications, about nine per cent more than it had received at the same time last year, graduate studies dean Susan Pfeiffer said.
While applications are still pouring in, Queen’s University MBA director Scott Carson said the prestigious program has thus far received twice the number of applications it had at this time last year.
“In times of economic slowdown, yes, university participation rates tend to go up,” added Tom Buckley, registrar at the Saint John campus of the University of New Brunswick.
“At this point it’s a little too early to tell if we’re seeing an actual increase, but we would sort of be inclined to anticipate an increase. Students will take a look at graduate study and professional programs if the job market is soft in their area.”
Administrators expect competition for scarce entry level jobs will be fierce, but so too will competition for some graduate programs given the increase in applications.
Gregg Blachford, McGill University’s director of career planning services, admitted an influx in grad school applications is common in tough economic times, but he cautions students against staying in school for the wrong reasons.
“There are still jobs and…opportunities out there, especially for university graduates,” he said, adding students can’t just rely on postings but must also reach out to potential employers.
“We encourage students to continue to look for work in the same way, but they’ll probably have to work harder to get a position than previously.”
While his counterparts at the University of Calgary suggest job postings at the school have dipped as much as 25 per cent, Blachford said McGill has experienced just a 10 per cent decline thus far.
Despite a small drop in participants at their upcoming technology career fair, Blachford said employer participation in university job fairs remains strong for most industries.
University of Calgary career services director Voula Cocolakis said the annual career fair that takes place in February was totally sold out by this time last year and she’s optimistic it will sell out again.
Still, she said a few companies have pulled out while others have forsaken taking out ads or sponsorship opportunities related to the event in order to cut down on costs.
As for last year’s graduates, career experts say it doesn’t appear employers are, to any great degree, reneging on earlier offers of employment because of the economic situation.
“The last time that happened it was the 2001 bubble bust… That was the dot-com bust,” said Andre Gagnon, Concordia University’s career services co-ordinator.
“That was really heavy.”
Carson said the number of Queen’s MBA students who’ve already secured jobs is actually on par with last year and he’s heard of just one student who had a job offer delayed before it was ultimately rescinded due to the ailing economy.
According to Statistics Canada figures released last week, more than 34,000 jobs were lost across the country last month alone.
Still, despite the grim forecasts, university administrators and job experts suggest generation Y may well be in the best position to weather this economic storm.
Some suggest most are wrapped up in their studies and haven’t really given much thought to their job prospects just yet.
But while they may get off to a slow start – some might even have to move back in with mom and dad for a time – they will catch up quickly as they’re called upon to replace retiring baby boomers, said Adwoa Buahene, a workplace demographics expert and founder of n-gen People Performance Inc.
She said gen-Yers are also multi-skilled individuals who don’t see themselves staying at the same job or even in the same career for the rest of their lives, which makes them more “adaptable” to the current environment.
— The Canadian Press
Forget grad school!
Why the academic labour market may not be about to open up
For those taking the PhD plunge, the prospect of finding meaningful employment has always been a concern. Despite rosy predictions from the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC), the PhD job market may be heading into another tight period.
From the early 1990s to about 1998, the number of employed university professors (of all ranks) shrunk by 3,000, or close to 10 per cent. Many tenured positions were eliminated through retrenchment policies where universities calculated that paying out professors willing to retire early would lead to a more stable financial footing in the long run.Similar policies were implemented across the country and the average age of retirement for all Canadians dropped precipitously.
The trend eventually reversed, and between 1998 and 2006, about 22 per cent new faculty positions have been added, including a 37 per cent increase in tenured track appointments. The tight 1990s has, however, left the percentage of Canadian faculty aged 55 or older disproportionately higher than it otherwise would have been.
The AUCC assures us that at least 22,000 renewal faculty will be needed over the next 10 years. The lobby group is also certain that hordes of students supposedly entering university over the same period will further drive up the demand for university professors.Seems like a bright future for up and coming scholars everywhere, doesn’t it? I will set aside the claim that university enrolments will continue to increase, as Maclean’s has consistently challenged that assumption (see here and here).
The AUCC is working from the assumption that as the average retirement age normalizes, it will resettle to what it was before the 90s; that is, at 65. However, a number of trends suggest this might not be the case.For starters, mandatory retirement in the Ivory Tower is quickly becoming a thing of the past (see here, here and here).
What’s more, recent “corrections” in the market have threatened retirement savings and stock portfolios both in Canada and south of the border, further suggesting delayed retirement as faculty aim to recoup losses to ensure they will be as comfortable as they had planned.
As Brian Leiter, a University of Chicago philosophy professor, put it recently: “The catastrophic June in the stock markets means that a lot of faculty who might have been thinking about retirement in the coming year are going to postpone given the huge losses most will have suffered.”
Leiter estimates that demand for philosophy doctoral degree holders, the labour market is retracting to what it was about 15 years ago. In the early 1990s “there were 2.3 candidates per job,” and though that number slackened to 1.4 by the beginning of this decade, Leiter predicts that “we will be back at 2.3 before long, if we are not there already.”
While this is not necessarily representative of all disciplines, fields in the humanities such as philosophy are always hardest hit.It is true that even if the economy gets worse in the U.S., things could play out differently up here. However, Canadian and American PhDs compete in the same job market. If the academic labour market tightens in the U.S., that just means more American PhD holders competing for jobs up here.
Of course, none of this means that baby-boomer professors won’t have to be renewed. It simply means that the renewal will be rather flat, as opposed to the explosion the AUCC has apparently predicted. But as anyone scrounging around for a tenure-track position will tell you, there is a limited time frame after one first earns their PhD before their degree is considered “stale,” ultimately condemning them to a lifetime of hopping from one sessional appointment to another.
Add to this the fact that though a good deal of tenure-track positions have been added in recent years, many have been replaced permanently with sessional contract positions—as well as the reality that many who will retire in the coming years never earned tenure to begin with—and the rosiness of the academic labour market vanishes. Never mind if universities feel the need to re-implement retrenchment policies.
In fact, a slacker and easier academic labour market might have already come and gone. We just missed it.
