Opinion

An interview with Charles Wheelan on his unlikely advice to graduates.

Some of you reading this will be starting graduate school this coming fall. Congratulations! You are just beginning what will be one of the most difficult and rewarding processes of your life. Those of you going into PhD programs will likely do rotations in various labs during your first year before settling in lab where you will do your thesis research. Choosing this laboratory is extremely important as you will end up spending more time with these people than your family and establishing good working conditions is critical to finishing your dissertation in a timely fashion.

A new correspondent writes: "I'm willing to do just about anything to prepare myself for the job market in May, but I'm really getting discouraged. I want to be able to make a decent living (I'm talking $45K as the dream salary, here) while teaching theatre. How do I go about making myself an attractive candidate, even without a PhD under my belt?"

Full title: New Routines, Old Routines; Good Routines, Bad Routines. Yes, my life has become one sad, sad Dr. Suess book, but with fewer rhymes.

"Radical activism" taking over the University of California? I wish.

Social media increases student engagement. How do I know this? Well, let's try an analogy. Let's say that you are a carpenter in the early 1900s. You have a certain toolkit that you use to go about your work. You build houses with said toolkit. Now, let's hop in a DeLorean to 2012. Carpentry is a totally different gig. The tools have changed…a lot. Big box stores provide ample selections of tools and all sorts of gadgets. Carpentry has evolved, in part, because the tools have made increases in efficiencies possible. In the sense that Student Affairs practitioners are like carpenters - instead of building houses - we build community, increase student engagement, and foster opportunities for student development.

What can we learn in higher ed from the new TEDBooks initiative? I have no idea, but I do have some questions:

With all the talk about how our attention spans are suffering from our collective technology addiction, perhaps there is at least one positive consequence of thumb-typing and 140-character limits.