I am currently at the 24th annual conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychologists (SIOP). I think most non-academics think of conferences as something like a roving wedding or auto show, but the reality is something much more sinister.
You see, academics rely on networking and connection-making just as much as business-people. As much as we in the ivory tower like to think that business is something altogether different (and dirty), it’s really in many ways quite similar. In order to collaborate across institutions, programs, or areas (to get a wider perspective or gather additional resources to tackle any particular research question), you have to know people, and networking is how that happens.
I have only once made a concentrated effort at SIOP to network, and it didn’t go terribly well. I was trying to make a connection with a researcher from Japan that one of the Minnesota faculty happened to know, and after several rounds of phone tag and much worrying on my part, no connection was ever made.
Networking = a lot of these... Image courtesy businessweek.com
So you can imagine my surprise when this year, quite suddenly, I realized that I had a network. I have connections to practitioners and academics. I have connections for potential jobs for future graduate students. My wife was even approached about a potential job by a friend of a friend, and she’s not even an I/O psychologist. Stepping onto the registration floor of the conference hotel, we stopped about every 30 feet or so as we got pulled into conversation after conversation for about half an hour.
Now, admittedly my network is pretty small in the grand scheme of things, and (hopefully) will expand as my career continues. But the fact that this network grew without my conscious effort has told me that before, I was going about this incorrectly. Making networking into a task that needed to be completed, at least for me, was the wrong approach. It’s stressful and unproductive. Perhaps a new goal: be who I am and let the connections come to me. If there isn’t a connection to be made, a connection won’t be made. If there is, one will. Allowing serendipity to take its course – taking advantage of opportunities as they present themselves instead of seeking them out – seems to be the much wiser (and less stressful) path.
But even as I write this, I think – perhaps that’s naive. Don’t I really need to make the effort? Isn’t that what I’ve been told in high school, college, and grad school – connections only happen with concentrated, machiavellian effort? Seek people, use people, move up in the world? Something about that just doesn’t feel right to me, but it’s hard to let go…
RYS
I’ve been following a recent exchange over at RYS. For those of you that don’t know, RYS is a sort of sounding board for disgruntled academics, created in partial response to ratemyprofessors.com, referred to on the site as “The Site That Shall Not Be Named.” It seems to be primarily inhabited by humanities professors – or perhaps, humanities professors simply complain the most – or perhaps, humanities professor are just more likely to write in. It’s hard to tell. In any case, it is an often entertaining and enlightening look into the minds of academics.
One on-going exchange has caught my attention. First, Nila writes in to talk about what she calls the “The Male Student Egomaniac” archetype, describing a common kind of student: a smug, over-confident, argumenative jackass. I’ve had these students before – I find it best to simply ignore them. But Nila says “As someone new to teaching, a woman, a minority and being short-ish, I feel like I’m under attack.” I’m not sure why being any of these things makes one feel like they are under attack, but since I am none of these, I suppose I will never really understand the perspective. So I will just take her word for it.
Next, Suzanne responds that “It’s well documented that (tall) apparently white, apparently hetero men speaking unaccented English embody many students’ image of ‘college professor’.” I am unfamiliar with this research, but again, I will simply assume this is true. She says that conforming to this image as much as possible is the key to respect in the classroom, adding, “I always teach in professional dress, which appears to me to be best exemplified by a blazer, slacks, a shoe with a heel, minimal jewelry. I wear makeup because I look a little younger without it. I’ve found very comfortable shoes that have (non-stiletto) heels – height conveys authority. Slacks convey masculinity in a sense. Costuming is vital.”
Frankly, reading this makes me a little depressed. But again, I am male, so perhaps I simply can’t relate. But it seems that I am not alone. Racquel responds to say that she neither costumes nor has problems with student behavior. She says, “According to traditional advice this combination is a recipe for disaster. I have very few problems in my classes. I do lay out the rules the first day of class and I am a hard ass. They get that the very first day. I don’t put up with shit. You are disruptive, inappropriate or whatever else, I kick you out of class for the day.”
Drawing courtesy midwaysailor.com
Why does Nila cower under the assult, Suzanne recommend costumes, and Racquel stand strong? I think the answer is one of leadership. Racquel proactively sets firm guidelines and establishes authority over the class. Nila only reacts; the students “assault” and she responds. And Suzanne is somewhere in the middle; she dresses to look like what she thinks a classroom leader should look like.
A window into Suzanne comes later: “I have to be honest and say that I rarely (any longer) get the sort of student you describe, mainly because he is not at all drawn to the subjects I teach, so I am a little out of practice in dealing with the Male Student Egomaniac. But I used to get him and his cousins all the time, when I was younger and felt less of my own authority (nothing like earning tenure). They whipped out everything on me: standing while in my office so that he towered over me, clearly a dominance move, complete with pounding on my desk; threatening me with reports to the dean, the chair, the president of the college; email whines and rants; nasty course evals about me being a “feminazi” (highly original); making sexual comments about me to other students, covertly, during class, as a way to demean me and try to put me in my place, and on and on.”
I think the reality is that this kind of student is still in Suzanne’s classes. But as time has gone on, as she has become more confident in her teaching, this confidence has shined stronger and better controlled the atmosphere of her classes. Perhaps the clothing helped; perhaps it hindered. But the real difference is attitude, as a result of, in this case, experience.
As an instructor, you must lead. You are not there simply to spew knowledge all over your students. A book can share knowledge just as easily as you can. You are there to provide a living model of scholarship – someone who has dedicated their life to “knowing,” and whose job it is to share that experience – not just the knowledge itself.
Professorship is a profession that people have historically respected. I remember reading a report recently that the only title that people had more respect for than “Doctor” was “Professor.” But will this continue? It seems more and more students graduate having experienced many of their professors cowering from them. Is that how it should be? Or should the ivory tower be filled with living examples of the value of lifetime learning – instructors brimming with confidence in their ability to understand the world around them, inspiring their students to do the same?
The goal of my dissertation is to identify underlying differences between traditional and web-based training programs. To do this, I went back through hundreds of published and unpublished articles, dissertations, and assorted scholarly sources that have attempted to examine such differences. By aggregating results across all of these studies (using a statistical technique called meta-analysis), I am better able to capture the true differences between the two modalities. Without such aggregation, statistical forces are at work that make the interpretation of a single study in this domain a little difficult to interpret.
The problem is that in order to examine anything across studies, you have to read and record information from those studies. That’s not so bad if you’re only looking at a handful of studies or are looking at a handful of variables of interest. It’s more of a problem if you are looking at, for example, 132 studies with up to 250 pieces of information per sample, and each study may contain multiple samples. That’s tens of thousands of pieces of information that have to be recorded by hand, not including the articles that you think have data you can use but ultimately do not. This process is called “coding.” Coding is, generally speaking, not something that can be automated – expert human judgment is needed to quantify the words in the article .
So as you might have guessed, I coded 250 variables across 132 studies for my dissertation, which produced 30,859 pieces of data. All of which I coded by hand. It was painful. And took forever. But now it’s done! You can see a zoomed-out shot of about 40% of my Excel spreadsheet above. Yes, I had to enter every character that you can (barely) see there.
Of course, my wife has to do a 20% reliability recode (to ensure that the values that I’m finding for each study aren’t entirely arbitrary), which means she gets to code the same 250 variables, but only across 26 studies. It still takes forever.
On the bright side, while I wait for her to finish, I get to put together my posters for the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) conference in New Orleans. To save about $300, we are driving to Madison, WI on Tuesday night to catch a flight early Wednesday morning, which is where I will be for the rest of the week. Only a week after the conference, I hope to have my first draft of my completed dissertation to Paul, hopefully so that I can defend in the first few weeks of May.
It’s going to be a busy couple of weeks…