This post kind of describes why you are in graduate school. A lot of people are happy with just doing their 8 hours of work, handing a report to their boss, and going home. The majority of people are just in it to get a paycheck and don’t care who gets credit for what at the end of the day. Managerial structures are often going to lead to narcissism. I’ve worked in warehouses with people who go on an ego trip because they went from shipper to assistant shift manager or something else trivial and think they get to have a ton of power. The kind of bosses who are like the one’s described above are the one’s people are always going to whisper behind their back, and the ones who people are never going to defend if people ask about them. The best leaders to me are the one’s who only use their superior position when they need to, and spread credit to their team whenever possible.

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Thanks for the reflection.

Do you still disagree on the issue but with better understanding of the other side? Or have you reconsidered your own perspective? Just wondering 🙂

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Don’t be sad. There’s a new generation of scientists/engineers emerging and having these conversations. Pretty soon we’ll push all the line-drawers out 😉

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Sorry for the late reply… It’s been a very busy week!

Thank you for the additional information about the IAT and how they score implicit bias… I find this whole topic and research area fascinating! On the subject of the dot-probe task, I’m curious to know how the results from that kind of IAT test compare to the results from the test that we took. I would assume that the results are very similar (it is a rather similar study design after all), but, again, this whole subject is rather interesting to me, so I can’t help but wonder if results would come out differently and, if so, how different?

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Thanks attaching the link. I thought it was interesting that the disciplines highlighted in this article were economics, history, journalism/communication, law, and psychology. I wonder how those numbers look in STEM.

I’m actually curious to know what you think the implications are of the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in Academia?

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Sorry for the late reply– it’s been one of those weeks!

Yes, I agree that the IAT seems to have its flaws, and prior to class last week, I had more doubts about the IAT’s ability to uncover implicit bias than I did when I wrote this. I would still be interested to learn more details about what data they use and how they use it to determine whether implicit bias exists and how strong that bias is.

And talk about a flash back to the past!! I loved Kim Possible as a kid– it was a great show!

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I think it’s exciting that UPenn is offering a degree that is completely online! I’ve never taken a MOOC, but my mom has had some experience with them. My mom went to Stanford for her undergrad in Mechanical Engineering and worked in industry for a few years before becoming a stay at home mom with me and my sister. After my sister and I grew older, my mom wanted to go back to work, but it was hard for her to get a job because she had been out of the industry for a while. So, my mom took some online courses from Stanford online since we lived in Pennsylvania. These courses allowed her to get some more experience and get a job. Although I don’t think I’d like MOOCs very much, I think they provide valuable options to people like my mom who can’t leave all of their commitments to go back to school full time. Furthermore, I think that if prestigious universities only admit students to traditional in-person classes, then it’s sort of discriminating against non-traditional students who maybe already have jobs or families. I think UPenn’s online bachelor’s is a great step into providing access to a quality education for everybody!