I think the entire country (US) has a weird obsession with varsity sports, football, basketball, and hockey in particular. Now I am not saying that sports are a bad thing but when it starts getting priority over other important matters such as lives of other people or research/teaching at the university, it rings an alarm in my mind. Also, I was talking to my colleagues about how it says so much about the society that the highest paid person at VT is (or should I say was now that Beamer has retired?) the football coach, and not the president or a department head or a dean or a senior researcher.

I teach the first year engineering classes at Virginia Tech, and I have an open social media (or Internet) policy, that means anyone (I guess except me?) in the class can use social media (or Internet) if it does not disturb others or the flow of the class. I do so because I believe that I cannot force students to pay attention in class. A will to pay attention has to come from them. And a lot of times, we need the Internet to look up stuff in class. So, having a no Internet might be a hindrance in the flow of the class.

I agree with you. Even when we do not have open access, there are a lot of journal papers that are badly written. One of the recent papers I wrote had numerous grammatical errors to the extent that it was difficult to make meaning out of the written text at some places. The author’s worldview did not align with the methods adopted to answer the research questions.

I think open access will make research access to many more people who can benefit from that knowledge. Kudos to open access!

I think part of the reason engineering seems so difficult to many people is because it uses a very esoteric lingo. If one looks at the research papers published in any discipline of engineering, one would realize it is difficult to understand just the title if one is not familiar with the discipline. When I think of the last (and the only) technical paper that I published in engineering (renewable energy systems to be precise), I realize that many of the terms used in the title of the paper would be unknown to people if they do not have an electrical engineering degree. On the other hand, if I look at my last engineering education publication, I find the words that I used in the title to be very familiar to most of the people. I wish engineering could adopt a better communication strategy. It will draw more people to engineering.

In my country, India, the cut-offs to get into college to pursue some majors like economics, Physics, commerce are really high, especially if one wants to go to a good university. Hence, I am not really surprised at the high cut-offs for entry to medicine and engineering schools. However, I think that it is problematic as 1) It restricts many students to pursue some majors. This is a loss to both the student who is unable to study what they want to and the country as they are missing on some good quality doctors and educators who were denied education. 2) Such a system might put a lot of stress on high school students to get a good grade. A very high emphasis on grades kills creativity and is detrimental to learning.