Journal Reflection #1 Academic Life and Scholarship Class: What did you learn?

 Journal Reflection #1

Academic Life and Scholarship Class

What did you learn?

There were many takeaways from the first class in Academic Life and Scholarship.  I gained a basket full of knowledge:

One aspect is that different schools differ in how they are categorized based on how much funding they receive.  A good resource on how schools are categorized is through the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.  I learned that there are R1 institutions, R2 institutions, and D/PU, which are Doctoral / Professional Universities.  R1 universities have very high spending and very high doctorate production.  R2 is considered high spending ($5 million) and high doctorate production.  And then, below that level, research colleges and universities may spend around $2.5 million.

I asked a couple of questions to my professor and students.  How do we know what schools to apply to?  Will I get a job in academia at the end of my program?

  A good resource to find what schools to apply to is the website Higher Ed Jobs.  If a school only has a Baccalaureate program, it is considered a liberal arts school.  So, Baccalaureate and Masters-only schools may seek only teaching for tenured positions.  The difference is that they do not have doctoral students. Thus, their teaching load is a lot more.

Next, to answer the other question, being a competitive job market candidate includes at the Ph.D. student level--publishing, teaching, presenting, doing research, and having a focused research agenda.

A great resource our professor guided us to is a book called—The Professor is In by Karen Kelsky.  Academia is not the only path.  I could be a lecturer, seek a better or higher paying job in the field that I am already in or go into consulting.

I now think that universities are built on the same foundations as governments.  Borrowing from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”  It is good that faculty from all over the university serve on Dean Search Committees, as well as Tenure/Promotion Committees, and that it is a Democratic process with self-governance.

I also learned a few more things: it is beneficial to apply to jobs outside of the one you get your degree from.  Schools look for diversity of academic thought, and thus, do not want people all from the same school or background.  

Next, academic freedom is novel to me but sounds like a good concept.  Professors seek tenure to be able to reach the point one day where they can speak their minds without repercussions.  This concept is at the heart of higher education thought processes.

Finally, I would like to elaborate on my possible dissertation topic.  I want to study the support families give to adolescents with chemotherapy-induced alopecia and how the support improves their self-esteem.  Right now, in Advanced Statistics, we are going to choose a robust data set for this research.  I would like to use the Rosenberg Scale for Self-Esteem for the adolescent and adult population and see which demographic factors play a significant role in self-esteem.