You are most welcome, dear Najla! There’s so much in that last sentence…I will be thinking about your carefully chosen qualities of “meaningful learning” for a long time. Thank you for that, and for all you did to create and build the community that nourished our learning this semester. I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with this group!
What an important and powerful reminder, Akin. We humans are a diverse and interesting lot. Appreciating that fact by recognizing the validity of different perspectives and experiences keeps us humble as individuals and helps cultivate the compassion and empathy we badly need if we are going to get this broken world to a better place. Thank you for this.
I agree that with the great influence of social media on us we somehow want to extend it to every aspect of our daily life. However, using Facebook or Instagram for academic purposes has its own disadvantages. Mixing the private life with professional career has negative consequences.
I am sure we all PhD students have similar concerns as you. The way I look to the PhD is like a job I got for a 3-4 year period which was my own choice, it is happy on the sense that it is what I choose to do. Under this perspective, I question myself permanently if a regular person at any job is always happy or sad with their job?. Well, for sure not sad, at least the majority, a good amount will be happy, and maybe a good number of people will feel between happy and satisfied with their job; so, one of the last two is the path where I want to be while doing the PhD and after that. It is a constant battle in my brain until get used to this idea, but at least keeping this as a goal gives me hope.
There's definitely room for improvement in student surveys, I know the ones I have taken in the past were only interested in how I rated the professor on whatever that department thought was buzz-worthy.
There's definitely room for improvement in student surveys, I know the ones I have taken in the past were only interested in how I rated the professor on whatever that department thought was buzz-worthy.
Great job!!
You have a good idea with the implementation of more loan forgiveness programs to help those going into certain careers that do not have high starting salaries.
Great post. Ahh I remember that class. I believe that refining the way we communicate is imperative to the advancement of our different fields of study in the future. Better communication well support more interdisciplinary collaborative and innovate discoveries..
I agree! Communication is crucially important. I too love the quote you stated above - we have to be able to explain what we do and WHY...to anyone. At any time. It think it's far too easy to get wrapped up in what's going on and forget about the importance of outreach - not just that outreach exists but HOW to actually disseminate that information to others in a useful and meaningful way.