Once upon a time, someone told me that senior year is easier. And by once upon a time, I mean everyone has lied to me for the last four years about what my life senior year would be like. I have been swimming in piles of class work, trying to sort through grad school applications (PLEASE SOMEBODY WANT ME), and dealing with the fact that with senior status comes a large amount of responsibility within student organizations.
When did I sign up for this?
I think, to some extent, the idea that seniors don't have to work hard is rooted in the way we, as underclassmen, saw seniors behave in personal contexts. It always seemed like the seniors were the ones who always had time for a party...and can anyone say Cellar Wednesdays (the Cellar is our on-campus bar)?
I'm starting to wonder, though, how much of that culture was perpetuated by the sheer amount of work and stress which comes with senior year -- if maybe that's how people are choosing to cope.
All I know is that I'm jealous of the students whose Wellness classes involve taking naps. That's just not fair.
Senioritically yours,
Rachel Leigh
This is a blog about things, about thinking about things, about talking about things, and about being as snarky and poignant as I can manage. I hope you enjoy it.
Showing posts with label university. Show all posts
Showing posts with label university. Show all posts
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Thursday, August 8, 2013
On Ranking Season
It’s that time of year again. The annual college rankings are starting pour in (ranking every aspect of college life from the biggest party schools to the most sober schools, overall happiness, attractiveness of both campus and students…), in anticipation of the next round of applicants for whom this is the time to really narrow down the list of schools they’ll be applying to over the next couple months.
If you’re in college and pretending you haven’t been stalking where your school falls on these lists, you’re lying to yourself.
Love it or hate it, everybody has something to say about where their school ranked. In my case it’s something along the lines of “who forgot to tell The Daily Beast that the University of Richmond and the University of Virginia are not the same school?”*
There are a lot of reasons to be curious – gloating rights, for one. Plus, high rankings in certain areas mean prestige for the school, a more competitive incoming class, and donor money. All typically good things. But being ranked too high or too low on the party school rankings is probably not a good thing.
Case in point, last year’s top-rated party school (according to the Princeton Review, although Playboy also does a ranking) was WVU, which saw a crackdown this past year on campus drinking, drug use, and partying in an attempt to clean up its image. Make it all shiny and new for the incoming class of parents who may not want their kids at the top-ranking party school. But let’s face it, if your academics can even reasonably match your social scene, and you make it on that list, you’re going to see a rise in applicants. People spend most of their young-adult lives being told that college will be the best four years of their lives, and they look to these kinds of rankings as a way to ensure they’re not wasted.
Are they always accurate? Not really. The Princeton Review, for example, generates their entire list based on self-reported student surveys about campus life, which means scores can be artificially inflated or deflated, and that the standards aren’t exactly what you’d call objective.
But it’s still pretty interesting to check out.
#45th Happily Yours,
Rachel Leigh
Thursday, May 23, 2013
On Digital Humanities and My Job
I don't often talk about my work, but seeing as I'll be doing it 40 hours a week for the next seven weeks, maybe it's not such a bad idea to give everyone a little 'splaining.
If you followed the other blog linked to this account, you probably know I'm a writing consultant, as I used that blog to discuss the training process and the challenges I expected to face as a writing consultant. But what you may or may not know is that for the last three years, I have worked at the UR Digital Scholarship Lab.
The DSL is a Digital Humanities research lab. To a lot of people, digital humanities sounds like something of an oxymoron, because the humanities (history, philosophy, etc) tend to be pursuits we naturally link with neo-Luddism. Okay, no, most people don't think it's an oxymoron -- mostly, they just kind of look at me like "huh?"
Our work in the lab is some bizarre hybrid of historical research and computer science skills that come together to create interesting historical resources which match the modern age -- interactive maps, updated digital archives, things which make often inaccessible research or concepts modern and graspable.
My pet project since I've worked there has to be Visualizing Emancipation -- an interactive map of the emancipation process during the Civil War. A lot of people think (and we're certainly taught) that Emancipation happened when Lincoln made the Emancipation Proclamation and, like a magic spell, all the slaves were free. Maybe, if your education was a little more in-depth, you were taught that what gave the emancipation of slaves legal teeth was the passing of the 13th Amendment. Yay no more slaves!
What VE shows is the fact that the process was much more complex than that, and also precisely that -- it WAS a process. Every emancipation event in the database corresponds to a primary or secondary source which can point to the exact date at which a slave ran away, was liberated, was re-enslaved, or any number of other major events which focus on the fact we're not just talking about a historical or political moment in time. We're looking at the lives of people with real agency and whose freedom was not simply given to them.
This is not even to touch on the continuing plight of slaves and human trafficking victims which persists in a country that points to a point in history as the time when Americans stopped owning other Americans. But that's a topic for another day.
For the time being, if you want to check out what I've been up to or the Visualizing project, you can go to http://dsl.richmond.edu, http://dsl.richmond.edu/emancipation, or follow the project on twitter at @vizemancipation.
Historically (and digitally) yours,
Rachel Leigh
If you followed the other blog linked to this account, you probably know I'm a writing consultant, as I used that blog to discuss the training process and the challenges I expected to face as a writing consultant. But what you may or may not know is that for the last three years, I have worked at the UR Digital Scholarship Lab.
The DSL is a Digital Humanities research lab. To a lot of people, digital humanities sounds like something of an oxymoron, because the humanities (history, philosophy, etc) tend to be pursuits we naturally link with neo-Luddism. Okay, no, most people don't think it's an oxymoron -- mostly, they just kind of look at me like "huh?"
Our work in the lab is some bizarre hybrid of historical research and computer science skills that come together to create interesting historical resources which match the modern age -- interactive maps, updated digital archives, things which make often inaccessible research or concepts modern and graspable.
My pet project since I've worked there has to be Visualizing Emancipation -- an interactive map of the emancipation process during the Civil War. A lot of people think (and we're certainly taught) that Emancipation happened when Lincoln made the Emancipation Proclamation and, like a magic spell, all the slaves were free. Maybe, if your education was a little more in-depth, you were taught that what gave the emancipation of slaves legal teeth was the passing of the 13th Amendment. Yay no more slaves!
What VE shows is the fact that the process was much more complex than that, and also precisely that -- it WAS a process. Every emancipation event in the database corresponds to a primary or secondary source which can point to the exact date at which a slave ran away, was liberated, was re-enslaved, or any number of other major events which focus on the fact we're not just talking about a historical or political moment in time. We're looking at the lives of people with real agency and whose freedom was not simply given to them.
This is not even to touch on the continuing plight of slaves and human trafficking victims which persists in a country that points to a point in history as the time when Americans stopped owning other Americans. But that's a topic for another day.
For the time being, if you want to check out what I've been up to or the Visualizing project, you can go to http://dsl.richmond.edu, http://dsl.richmond.edu/emancipation, or follow the project on twitter at @vizemancipation.
Historically (and digitally) yours,
Rachel Leigh
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
On My Fake Major
It's no secret that I'm a Political Science major -- I blog pretty often about politics (although I do try to keep it non-partisan (...I said "try," people, no writer is without bias!)), and it even says in my bio that I'm an "aspiring political activist." I am quite proud of my studies and the work I hope to do in the future, and I'm not ashamed of my major.
Which is why I get really annoyed when people treat me like my major isn't real. I almost feel like I didn't even really choose my field; Political Science chose me. By the time I came to college, the gravitational pull in that direction was so strong that no one I went to high school with even has to question what I decided to major in. I chose my major because it's what I'm passionate about, because the work I do for it is good, and because I'm very excited about what doors it may open for me when I graduate.
So let's get down to the nitty-gritty of why people seem to think my major is "fake."
My favorite question, by far, is, "What are you planning to do with that? Become the President?"* Now, if you're an Actuarial Studies major, an Astrophysicist, or studying Chemistry with plans to take up Pharmacology later in life, feel free to ignore this part of the discussion -- your unemployment rates are literally zero and you are therefore pretty much exempt from this whole issue. You will always have jobs because your fields are either too depressing, too boring, or too complicated for the vast majority of students, so we will always need people like you! Go you! But if you are planning to major in pretty much anything else, you can expect your job prospects to be pretty grim. Almost every field sees an unemployment rate of around 7%. Interestingly enough, the unemployment rate for students with Political Science degrees? 6%, according to a study done by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce**.
Let's face it, there are only so many Fortune 500 companies in the world to run (incidentally, there are 500 of them), which I'm pretty sure means that, even if everyone in charge of every one of those companies either retired or died, there STILL wouldn't be enough available positions for all of the Business School graduates from just my tiny University alone from the last three years. So I guess that makes your "job prospects" question a moot point. I appreciate your concern.
The other major (get it?) question I get a lot in relation to my major's legitimacy comes down to the number of units in my major. My major has a 10 unit class requirement (which equates to about 35-40 credits for all you crazy credit-system students out there), which is, admittedly, on the lower end.
There are a few reasons I think this complaint lacks legitimacy. First, we're all still required to complete the minimum 32 classes to graduate that everyone else is. We don't suddenly get to call it a day after a year and a half. Second, part of the reason the major is so small and flexible is because they encourage us to pick up minors, second majors, research, or study abroad semesters, and they want the major to be flexible enough to accommodate that. I actually feel bad for some of my friends in the hard sciences or business programs who just don't have the flexibility to go abroad. Third, and in my opinion, most importantly -- trying to take an entire semester of Political Science courses is crazy. If your brain doesn't explode from all the readings (which often contradict each other because theories contradict other theories and often those contradict practice), your fingers will probably freeze up and develop early-onset carpal tunnel from all the papers you'll write.***
It's not that I think other majors don't deserve credit -- I absolutely do. Most students I know work hard and get stressed, and everybody has their own skill sets. I, for one, am glad my best friend from high school is the Engineering major and I am not, because I would build bridges that would collapse and kill people. But while most people I know in my field recognize and respect the legitimacy of other majors, it makes me sad that we don't get the same respect in turn. Our skills are different than yours and our paths and passions took us in a different direction. Why does that make us any less worthy?
Studiously yours,
Rachel Leigh
* Leaving aside the fact that very few of the Political Science majors I know want to become politicians. That's a post for another day (one which is currently in the works).
** Source: http://graphicsweb.wsj.com/documents/NILF1111/
*** Shout out to Dr. Dagger and Dr. McDowell for combining to make me write more papers as a first semester freshman than many of my friends will write their entire time in college!
Which is why I get really annoyed when people treat me like my major isn't real. I almost feel like I didn't even really choose my field; Political Science chose me. By the time I came to college, the gravitational pull in that direction was so strong that no one I went to high school with even has to question what I decided to major in. I chose my major because it's what I'm passionate about, because the work I do for it is good, and because I'm very excited about what doors it may open for me when I graduate.
So let's get down to the nitty-gritty of why people seem to think my major is "fake."
My favorite question, by far, is, "What are you planning to do with that? Become the President?"* Now, if you're an Actuarial Studies major, an Astrophysicist, or studying Chemistry with plans to take up Pharmacology later in life, feel free to ignore this part of the discussion -- your unemployment rates are literally zero and you are therefore pretty much exempt from this whole issue. You will always have jobs because your fields are either too depressing, too boring, or too complicated for the vast majority of students, so we will always need people like you! Go you! But if you are planning to major in pretty much anything else, you can expect your job prospects to be pretty grim. Almost every field sees an unemployment rate of around 7%. Interestingly enough, the unemployment rate for students with Political Science degrees? 6%, according to a study done by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce**.
Let's face it, there are only so many Fortune 500 companies in the world to run (incidentally, there are 500 of them), which I'm pretty sure means that, even if everyone in charge of every one of those companies either retired or died, there STILL wouldn't be enough available positions for all of the Business School graduates from just my tiny University alone from the last three years. So I guess that makes your "job prospects" question a moot point. I appreciate your concern.
The other major (get it?) question I get a lot in relation to my major's legitimacy comes down to the number of units in my major. My major has a 10 unit class requirement (which equates to about 35-40 credits for all you crazy credit-system students out there), which is, admittedly, on the lower end.
There are a few reasons I think this complaint lacks legitimacy. First, we're all still required to complete the minimum 32 classes to graduate that everyone else is. We don't suddenly get to call it a day after a year and a half. Second, part of the reason the major is so small and flexible is because they encourage us to pick up minors, second majors, research, or study abroad semesters, and they want the major to be flexible enough to accommodate that. I actually feel bad for some of my friends in the hard sciences or business programs who just don't have the flexibility to go abroad. Third, and in my opinion, most importantly -- trying to take an entire semester of Political Science courses is crazy. If your brain doesn't explode from all the readings (which often contradict each other because theories contradict other theories and often those contradict practice), your fingers will probably freeze up and develop early-onset carpal tunnel from all the papers you'll write.***
It's not that I think other majors don't deserve credit -- I absolutely do. Most students I know work hard and get stressed, and everybody has their own skill sets. I, for one, am glad my best friend from high school is the Engineering major and I am not, because I would build bridges that would collapse and kill people. But while most people I know in my field recognize and respect the legitimacy of other majors, it makes me sad that we don't get the same respect in turn. Our skills are different than yours and our paths and passions took us in a different direction. Why does that make us any less worthy?
Studiously yours,
Rachel Leigh
* Leaving aside the fact that very few of the Political Science majors I know want to become politicians. That's a post for another day (one which is currently in the works).
** Source: http://graphicsweb.wsj.com/documents/NILF1111/
*** Shout out to Dr. Dagger and Dr. McDowell for combining to make me write more papers as a first semester freshman than many of my friends will write their entire time in college!
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