Opinion

Terri E. Givens reflects on a year in which issues of balance and stress received renewed attention -- amid growing worries about the future of academic careers.

The dean of the Health division -- which includes nursing -- and I took a field trip to a local health care provider to talk about working together to give nursing students some exposure to what goes on there. These wouldn’t be full-fledged clinical placements -- we already have those -- but a sort of structured introduction to a part of the health care system that isn’t always top-of-mind for nursing students.

We are all, in some sense, curators of our cultural lives, and always have been. Commonplace books were a popular means of arranging nuggets of valuable material selected by the compiler. Marginalia is another time-honored form of highlighting and annotating texts, personalizing them and noting the most meaningful bits. In a digital era, this activity is social. But "anthological copying" that libraries claim can be a fair use is something three major book publishers find illegal and indefensible.

Did anyone outside of New York City happen to catch this story about Baruch College? In the scope of international Internet policy it is a proverbial drop in the bucket. But for higher education information technology policy it is an important story. And a good step that administrators there made in how they handled a challenge that in the past has stymied administrators and angered students.

My girls will head off to college in 2015 and 2017. They are in the 10th and 8th grade of our our local public high school and middle school. We are already getting glossy university brochures in the mail (I guess from my older daughter's PSAT scores).

If you want to be "in" DH, you need to build. This is privilege.

As I drove home from work a few weeks ago, I listened to a podcast episode of Writer’s Voice where the show’s producer Drew Adamek interviewed Junot Diaz. The focus of the interview was Diaz’s latest book, This Is How You Lose Her, and his process of writing the book. Anyone who knows me knows I am a big fan of Junot Diaz, and I recently finished This Is How You Lose Her. I also enjoy reading and hearing about the writing process of others, not just because of my job but because you can tell so much about a writer by how they approach their writing, and this particular podcast episode did not disappoint in that regard.

Social media is often stereotyped as a frivolous, navel-gazing enterprise, and completely antithetical to the deep thinking and thoughtful questioning of academia. However, most gradhackers know that academia and social media are not at all incompatible. Used well, social media can be a vibrant and fruitful space for networking, exchanging ideas, and--dare I say it--building supportive friendships.