Skip to main content

First!

Welcome to my new blog. I've noticed that lots of grad students start a blog describing their research interests and impressions at the beginning of their first year. It reminded me of the fresh new diaries I used to resolve to write in diligently every year, with entries that grew fewer and further-between as enthusiasm invariably waned. Since this, my grad school blog, is 18 months late, I hope it will have a different fate. This is not an official website, although you can find out about my work here and here and about my awesome department where I've been for the last 3 semesters, after my lengthy stretch here.

This blog will be a space for the ups and downs (mostly ups so far) of my time at the IHPST and links to exciting things happening in philosophy of biology (like this big-deal conference where I gave my first paper) and HPS generally. Since I spend (waste) lots of time online putting off my work, you'll also see the coolest things I find. This way, you can procrastinate too.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to attend a conference with a baby

Preamble: the title of this post officially "gives it away": I'm ABD with a B-A-B-Y. Most everyone I interact with professionally knows this, and I wasn't keeping it secret from the internet , but there's still a disadvantage to being a  mother in academia , and many hesitate to talk about being parents publicly. I think that's unreasonable, and I hope that this and similar posts can be helpful to other academic parents facing similar issues. Last week my family attended HSS / PSA in windy Chicago, and it was a great example of a conference that took families with babies into consideration. My next post will be about the good choices those conference organizers made, but this one is directed towards the parent(s) conferencing with a baby in tow (note: some of these tips may not apply to multiple/older children or other types of dependent care, areas in which I'm not experienced). 1. Be baby-travel savvy.   There are plenty of usefu

Ross Geller is a terrible palaeontologist.

When all of the seasons of Friends were released on Netflix this winter, many of us took the opportunity to catch up on a show from our 90s childhoods. But when I did I couldn’t help but be struck by how awful its characters could be to others within the TV universe, Ross most of all. Many of Ross’ shenanigans were related to his job as a palaeontologist, first at a natural history museum and then as a lecturer (later tenured ) at NYU. Ross is a terrible person, and that bleeds into him being a terrible palaeontologist & professor. Binge-watching the series really drives this home, as you can see from this parade of professional nonsense: -He has an after-hours date, then sex , in the museum and gets caught the morning after by kids on a field trip. -He yells at and threatens his museum coworkers, leading to a forced leave of absence while he undergoes anger management training. -His papers are widely discredited . -He forgets to attend his own classes (this runni

Thinking about Generous Thinking

Everyone is talking about Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s new book Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University . Mark Largent, our Interim APUE & Dean of Undergraduate Studies, just blogged about it here . Fitzpatrick gave a keynote about generous thinking at the #ITeachMSU Spring Conference on Student Learning and Success . And it’s the next pick for the Hub’s monthly book club . I haven’t read the whole book yet, but the ideas are so exciting that this is a book pre-report, as one of my favorite colleagues Bre Yaklin remarked last week. I first learned about Generous Thinking at the Envisioning the Future of Academic Work at MSU  workshop in April, where Fitzpatrick led a breakout session called “Generous vs. Competitive Thinking in the Academic Environment.” Anyone who knows me knows I’m the opposite of competitive, so this title jumped out of the schedule for me. In essence, thinking generously means rescuing academia from paths that seem to relentlessly incre