Academic Advising Quotes

Joseph Campbell affirmed life as adventure. “To hell with it,” he said, after his university adviser tried to hold him to a narrow academic curriculum. He gave up on the pursuit of a doctorate and went instead into the woods to read. He continued all his life to read books about the world: anthropology, biology, philosophy, art, history, religion. And he continued to remind others that one sure path into the world runs along the printed page.

Amateurs are fond of advising that all practical measures should be postponed pending carrying out detailed researches upon the habits of anophelines, the parasite rate of localities, the effect of minor works, and so on. In my opinion, this is a fundamental mistake. It implies the sacrifice of life and health on a large scale while researches which may have little real value and which may be continued indefinitely are being attempted… In practical life we observe that the best practical discoveries are obtained during the execution of practical work and that long academic discussions are apt to lead to nothing but academic profit. Action and investigation together do more than either of these alone.

There is no wall between a tactical and a strategic nuclear exchange, just a fuzzy line in the imagination of the amateurs and academics who advise their political leaders.

The many Asian-American success stories have forced developmental psychologists to revise their theories about proper parenting. They used to warn against the “authoritarian” style, in which parents set rigid goals and enforced strict rules without much overt concern for the child’s feelings. Parents were advised to adopt a different style, called “authoritative,” in which they still set limits but gave more autonomy and paid more attention to the child’s desires. This warmer, more nurturing style was supposed to produce well-adjusted, selfconfident children who would do better academically and socially than those from authoritarian homes. But then, as Ruth Chao and other psychologists studied Asian-American families, they noticed that many of the parents set quite strict rules and goals. These immigrants, and often their children, too, considered their style of parenting to be a form of devotion, not oppression. Chinese-American parents were determined to instill self-control by following the Confucian concepts of chiao shun, which means “to train,” and guan, which means both “to govern” and “to love.” These parents might have seemed cold and rigid by American standards, but their children were flourishing both in and out of school. The

A PhD student approached me after a writing workshop to recount his tale of woe. “I write these messy, incoherent first drafts,” he lamented. “They’re absolutely awful! Then I have to work on them for hours and hours to bash them into shape. It’s such a frustrating process, and so discouraging. My PhD adviser is a really good writer; she makes it all look so easy. I wish I were more like her.” I didn’t get a chance to interview the student’s supervisor; but if I had, I can guess what she might have told me. Probably something like this: “I write these messy, incoherent first drafts—they’re absolutely awful! Then I have to work on them for hours and hours to bash them into shape. Writing can be a hard and frustrating process, but for the most part, I really enjoy the challenge of honing and polishing my sentences until I get them just right.” Same story, different spin.

See especially academia, which has effectively become a hope labor industrial complex. Within that system, tenured professors—ostensibly proof positive that you can, indeed, think about your subject of choice for the rest of your life, complete with job security, if you just work hard enough—encourage their most motivated students to apply for grad school. The grad schools depend on money from full-pay students and/or cheap labor from those students, so they accept far more master’s students than there are spots in PhD programs, and far more PhD students than there are tenure-track positions. Through it all, grad students are told that work will, in essence, save them: If they publish more, if they go to more conferences to present their work, if they get a book contract before graduating, their chances on the job market will go up. For a very limited few, this proves true. But it is no guarantee—and with ever-diminished funding for public universities, many students take on the costs of conference travel themselves (often through student loans), scrambling to make ends meet over the summer while they apply for the already-scarce number of academic jobs available, many of them in remote locations, with little promise of long-term stability. Some academics exhaust their hope labor supply during grad school. For others, it takes years on the market, often while adjuncting for little pay in demeaning and demanding work conditions, before the dream starts to splinter. But the system itself is set up to feed itself as long as possible. Most humanities PhD programs still offer little or nothing in terms of training for jobs outside of academia, creating a sort of mandatory tunnel from grad school to tenure-track aspirant. In the humanities, especially, to obtain a PhD—to become a doctor in your field of knowledge—is to adopt the refrain “I don’t have any marketable skills.” Many academics have no choice but to keep teaching—the only thing they feel equipped to do—even without fair pay or job security. Academic institutions are incentivized to keep adjuncts “doing what they love”—but there’s additional pressure from peers and mentors who’ve become deeply invested in the continued viability of the institution. Many senior academics with little experience of the realities of the contemporary market explicitly and implicitly advise their students that the only good job is a tenure-track academic job. When I failed to get an academic job in 2011, I felt soft but unsubtle dismay from various professors upon telling them that I had chosen to take a high school teaching job to make ends meet. It

It is striking that our society has forgotten how critical LSD was in the early stages of the development of psychopharmacology, and that it continues to be a seminal contributor to the field today. It is reminiscent of the patriarchy “forgetting” the role of psychedelic plants in spiritual and religious settings. During the late 1940s through the late 1960s, hundreds of scientific papers and dozens of books, monographs, and scientific meetings discussed the latest in psychedelic drug research. Many of the key figures of academic psychiatry and pharmacology began their career in this field. Presidents of the American Psychiatric Association, chairmen of psychiatry departments, advisers to and members of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—all cut their teeth in the psychedelic research field. It was an exciting, well-funded, and creative time.

Never in the history of the community college has such a goal had so much financial support from philanthropic organizations; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation alone has allocated $500 million to this effort.

The purpose of academic advising is to help students select a program of study to meet their life and vocational goals.

The process of academic advising includes the following dimensions or steps: (1) exploration of life goals, (2) exploration of vocational goals, (3) program choice, (4) course choice, and (5) course scheduling.

If a college wants to improve the opportunities for student success—in a student’s first term and through completion—the student must experience all five steps of the academic advising process.

The work now focused on providing support to students after they had successfully completed fifteen credit hours but before completing forty-five hours and nearing graduation.

A thirty-credit-hour required advisor check-in milestone

Achieve their first fifteen college-level credits.

At Valencia, like many colleges, the highest student attrition occurs within the first fifteen credit hours of a student’s experience with college; most student failures (and institutional failures) are at the “front door” (Shugart, 2016).

Staff must intentionally employ advising theory and best practices from across the country whenever possible.

Students are required to participate in activities that result in the selection of their major, program, and career.

In addition, colleges may want to consider structure, processes, and attitudes when planning for change.

Ross’s “arbitrage pricing theory” and Rosenberg’s “bionic betas” posited that the returns of any financial security are the result of several systematic factors. Although seemingly stating the obvious, this was a seminal moment in the move toward a more vibrant understanding of markets. The eclectic Rosenberg was even put on the cover of Institutional Investor in May 1978, the bald, mustachioed man depicted as a giant meditating guru with flowers in his hair, worshipped by a gathering of besuited portfolio managers. The headline was “Who Is Barr Rosenberg? And What the Hell Is He Talking About?”8 What he was talking about was how academics were beginning to classify stocks according to not just their industry or their geography, but their financial characteristics. And some of these characteristics might actually prove to deliver better long-term returns than the broader stock market. In 1973, Sanjoy Basu, a finance professor at McMaster University in Ontario, published a paper that indicated that companies with low stock prices relative to their earnings did better than the efficient-markets hypothesis would suggest. Essentially, he showed that the value investing principles espoused by Benjamin Graham in the 1930s—which revolved around buying cheap, out-of-favor stocks trading below their intrinsic worth—was a durable investment factor. By systematically buying all cheap stocks, investors could in theory beat the broader market over time. Then Banz showed the same for small caps, another big moment in the evolution of factor investing. Follow-up studies on smaller stocks in Japan and the UK showed similar results, so in 1986 DFA launched dedicated small-cap funds for those two markets as well. In the early 1990s, finance professors Narasimhan Jegadeesh and Sheridan Titman published a paper indicating that simply surfing market momentum—in practice buying stocks that were already bouncing and selling those that were sliding—could also produce market-beating returns.9 The reasons for these apparent anomalies divide academics. Efficient-markets disciples stipulate that they are the compensation investors receive for taking extra risks. Value stocks, for example, are often found in beaten-up, unpopular, and shunned companies, such as boring industrial conglomerates in the middle of the dotcom bubble. While they can underperform for long stretches, eventually their underlying worth shines through and rewards investors who kept the faith. Small stocks do well largely because small companies are more likely to fail than bigger ones. Behavioral economists, on the other hand, argue that factors tend to be the product of our irrational human biases. For example, just like how we buy pricey lottery tickets for the infinitesimal chance of big wins, investors tend to overpay for fast-growing, glamorous stocks, and unfairly shun duller, steadier ones. Smaller stocks do well because we are illogically drawn to names we know well. The momentum factor, on the other hand, works because investors initially underreact to news but overreact in the long run, or often sell winners too quickly and hang on to bad bets for far longer than is advisable.

Some of the professors were great scholars, but dry as bone. I had no personal contact with any of them, except for the woman teacher, who led our seminar and was my thesis adviser. Since I had no exams, the contact with the teachers was non-existent. All were lecture classes, with great numbers of students - candidates for masters and ph.d. degrees. The seminar group had some cohesion, as we were all preparing for the same final exam and also presented topics for class discussion. Of the dozen participants in the seminar, about half were Jewish. After the Second World War, all those returned from the service were entitled to free education, under a new G.I. bill of rights. The soldiers of yesterday became the students of most colleges and universities, including the Ivy League schools. That law opened widely the doors of academic institutions to students of all social and religious backgrounds.

We wondered if there was research on stand-up meetings, and to our delight, we found an experiment comparing decisions made by fifty-six groups where people stood up during meetings to fifty-five groups where people sat down. These were short meetings, in the ten- to twenty-minute range, but the researchers found big differences. Groups that stood up took 34 percent less time to make the assigned decision, and there were no significant differences in decision quality between stand-up and sit-down groups. Stand-up meetings aren’t just praised in cute academic studies. Robert Townsend advised in Up the Organization, ‘Some meetings should be mercifully brief. A good way to handle the latter is to hold the meeting with everyone standing up. The meetees won’t believe you at first. Then they get very uncomfortable and can hardly wait to get the meeting over with.

What are you looking for when you read students’ essays? • What are some of the things you hate to see in an application? • Is demonstrated interest a factor in your admission decision? • Are admission decisions need-blind? • What kind of student does well here? What kind of student doesn’t do well here? • Did you attend this college? What has changed since you’ve been here? • What changes do you see taking place on campus in the next five years? • What are recent alumni doing? • What do you think your school is best known for? • How would you describe the typical student here? • How does the school help freshmen adjust to college? • How is academic advising handled? • Are there on-campus jobs available for students? • How are roommates assigned? • What is the Internet situation? Is the entire campus wireless? Do you support Macs or PCs? • How do meal plans work? • How much of a role does the surrounding community play in students’ daily life?

also trying to act in good faith and also becoming useful idiots for big business and the rich. Another of them was Martin Feldstein, the conservative Harvard superstar who became the new president’s chief economic adviser—but only nominally, because Reagan ignored him. Feldstein actually hated deficits, as true conservatives did, and called his supply-side colleagues “extremists.” Stockman’s chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget—who left in 1983 to earn a fortune on Wall Street, then become a cocaine addict and TV pundit—said that Feldstein “has failed at making the transition from academic economist to political economist.” That was thirty-six-year-old Larry Kudlow, defining political economist to mean not an expert on political economics but an economist willing and eager to dissemble and lie to suit his political masters, thirty-five years before he returned to government work as Trump’s director of the National Economic Council.

The head of research for Sesame Street in the early years was a psychologist from Oregon, Ed Palmer, whose specialty was the use of television as a teaching tool. When the Children's Television Workshop was founded in the late 1960s, Palmer was a natural recruit. “I was the only academic they could find doing research on children's TV,” he says, with a laugh. Palmer was given the task of finding out whether the elaborate educational curriculum that had been devised for Sesame Street by its academic-advisers was actually reaching the show's viewers. It was a critical task. There are those involved with Sesame Street who say, in fact, that without Ed Palmer the show would never have lasted through the first season. Palmer's innovation was something he called the Distracter. He would play an episode of Sesame Street on a television monitor, and then run a slide show on a screen next to it, showing a new slide every seven and a half seconds. “We had the most varied set of slides we could imagine,” said Palmer. “We would have a body riding down the street with his arms out, a picture of a tall building, a leaf floating through ripples of water, a rainbow, a picture taken through a microscope, an Escher drawing. Anything to be novel, that was the idea.” Preschoolers would then be brought into the room, two at a time, and told to watch the television show. Palmer and his assistants would sit slightly to the side, with a pencil and paper, quietly noting when the children were watching Sesame Street and when they lost interest and looked, instead, at the slide show. Every time the slide changed, Palmer and his assistants would make a new notation, so that by the end of the show they had an almost second-by-second account of what parts of the episode being tested managed to hold the viewers' attention and what parts did not. The Distracter was a stickiness machine. “We'd take that big-sized chart paper, two by three feet, and tape several of those sheets together,” Palmer says. "We had data points, remember, for every seven and a half seconds, which comes to close to four hundred data points for a single program, and we'd connect all those points with a red line so it would look like a stock market report from Wall Street. It might plummet or gradually decline, and we'd say whoa, what's going on here. At other times it might hug the very top of the chart and we'd say, wow, that segment's really grabbing the attention of the kids. We tabulated those Distracter scores in percentages. We'd have up to 100 percent sometimes. The average attention for most shows was around 85 to 90 percent. If the producers got that, they were happy. If they got around fifty, they'd go back to the drawing board.

would advise you to read with a pen in your hand and enter in a little book short hints of what you feel that is common or that may be useful; for this will be the best method of imprinting such portcullis in your memory.” – Benjamin Franklin[26]

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45. Remember that advanced placement doesn’t necessarily have to mean early graduation. Our two older children were talented in math and science, and easily completed more than the required number of secondary credits in sciences and humanities well before their peers. We drove our oldest son two hours away to live in a dorm at a state university the week before his 18th birthday, and our second-born graduated from high school when she was 15. Her college adviser mapped a plan where she could have finished her PhD in nursing by the time she was 21! Academically, they were fine. But socially and emotionally, it was tough to transition to the rigors of full-time college life (even junior college) one or two years before their traditionally-schooled friends. Because of that, their younger brother, a scholar in his own right, was not given the option to graduate early. Although he was frustrated with this limitation, it has alleviated a lot of pressure the other kids were forced to deal with before they had reached appropriate emotional maturity.