Another academic's blog
A place to discuss academia, especially inclusion and justice, PI life, and teaching
After years of indecision, writing blog posts that only exist on my computer, and a growing frustration with academia’s hidden curriculum, I’ve decided to start writing publicly. The hidden curriculum consists of “the unspoken or implicit academic, social, and cultural messages that are communicated to students while they are in school.” My goal is to try an unpack some of academia’s hidden curriculum. As a first-generation college student, academia was, and still is, a weird place to navigate. Thus, I also aim to catalogue my experience dealing with challenges throughout my career. I plan to interweave my own approaches to these challenges with evidence from the peer-reviewed literature or elsewhere on successful strategies to overcome potential obstacles.
I will write about a variety of topics. I expect most of my posts to focus on issues relevant to those in academia: inclusion and equity, being a new lab leader and assistant professor, evidence-based pedagogy, how universities work, and so forth. I don’t think much of my writing here will be of great interest to those outside of academia. To reach these other audiences, I will continue to write for outlets like The Conversation. I do not anticipate writing a lot about my own research or my specific subfield of quantitative ecology on this outlet. For these topics, you are welcome to follow the happenings of my research lab: https://quantmarineecolab.github.io/
I plan to begin by producing one post per week. I will alternate between original content and another entry that collates interesting links.
I believe we are doing great work at my university. I also know we have a lot of work to do. Thus, I also plan to use this platform to critique the practices of my own university. I believe we can be doing a much better job of serving our students and the community at my university. I also know the challenges we face at UNH are not unique. Thus, I will use my experiences at my own university to speak more broadly about academia.
I enjoy the process of writing. Writing helps me clarify my ideas. I hope my writing serves others in my community. Selfishly, I hope to learn a lot from posting my ideas publicly. Naturally, I have opinions and thoughts on the current state of academia. I look forward to being proved wrong by listening to others. In addition, I am writing to provide an avenue to point those with questions I am asked over and over. For example, I have chatted to dozens of potential graduate students about the process of identifying a PI and lab. Thus, I’d like to document some of those thoughts in writing as I can’t chat with everyone.
Stay tuned!