Academia and the World Beyond
Academia and the World Beyond

Author: Christopher R. Madan

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-08-23

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 3030826066

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A common question posed to PhD students from friends and family is, “What will you do after?” But many students are too focused on the PhD itself and have not yet had a chance to sufficiently think about post-PhD life. This book is a collection of 22 interviews with those have completed a PhD and then are now in an academic position or another career path. In either case, they have all been successful and have a multitude of insights to share with those who are interested in considering a variety of careers. Academic careers share many commonalities with many non-academic careers, with skills learned within academia being valuable in other career paths as well. Nearly all the individuals interviewed here have been on the job market recently and understand today's job climate. No other book on the market includes the diversity of perspectives presented here. In particular, the focus on psychology and neuroscience draws from a variety of individuals that have similar training but have nonetheless taken divergent paths.

Academia versus the World Outside
Academia versus the World Outside

Author: Bruce Fleming

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-08-06

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1040116078

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Academia versus the World Outside lays out the givens of the knowledge industry located within the ivory tower, colleges and universities. It then moves outside academia to consider this restricted world the way most people see it. The contrast between these two views of academia explains and is at the basis of the left–right animosity of our day. The knowledge industry, a creation of the post-Enlightenment modern age along with other industrial and post-industrial enterprises, is based on creating and adding to a store of knowledge as its own end. This makes academia alien to the more random and personal nature of knowledge acquisition in our everyday lives, as indeed every industry is alien to everyday life in the modern age. Yet most academics are so immersed in the peculiar project they have chosen as their life’s work that they are either unaware of or unsympathetic to the fact that people outside live very different lives with very different presuppositions. Most non-academics, for their part, find academia strange, and for very good reason. Academia versus the World Outside makes this contrast and conflict clear from both directions. This book is aimed primarily at academics, most of whom so take for granted the givens of what they do that they fail to understand why the vast majority of people outside find academia alien. This has led to an increasingly hostile and utterly predictable left–right political conflict, academia tending increasingly left and the world outside increasingly right. The goal of this book is to reduce the tension between both sides: if read by non-academics, this book may help these understand the givens of a world as strange to everyday life as any other specialized industry in the modern age.

Beyond the Veil of Knowledge
Beyond the Veil of Knowledge

Author: Piki Ish-Shalom

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0472131206

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Calls on the academy to rethink constructivism and its interpretations of the sociopolitical world

Leaving Academia
Leaving Academia

Author: Christopher L. Caterine

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 0691200203

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A guide for grad students and academics who want to find fulfilling careers outside higher education. With the academic job market in crisis, 'Leaving Academia' helps grad students and academics in any scholarly field find satisfying careers beyond higher education. The book offers invaluable advice to visiting and adjunct instructors ready to seek new opportunities, to scholars caught in "tenure-trap" jobs, to grad students interested in nonacademic work, and to committed academics who want to support their students and contingent colleagues more effectively. Providing clear, concrete ways to move forward at each stage of your career change, even when the going gets tough, 'Leaving Academia' is both realistic and hopeful.

Survive and Thrive in Academia
Survive and Thrive in Academia

Author: Kate Woodthorpe

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-06-19

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1351690760

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A pocket mentor for the early career academic learning to strategically navigate the demands of an academic role, this book is a friendly and constructive companion providing hands-on advice about how to balance teaching responsibilities alongside other duties. More than just a ‘how to’, the text is a timely commentary on changes in higher education. Discussing contemporary developments and offering guidance on how to negotiate this evolving climate, the book uniquely captures the political, social, economic and cultural forces at play, taking into account the issues which influence and shape an academic’s career trajectory. Organised around the three main tasks within a conventional academic post – teaching, research and administration – the book includes tips, pauses for thought, author reflections and sources for further reading, and provides insight to help the reader reflect on what they are doing, why, and where to go next in their career. Crucially, it shows that in order to survive and flourish, the early career academic needs to take a strategic view as to their function, purpose and contribution both inside and beyond the intellectual establishment. From establishing a research niche to getting stuck into administration Survive and Thrive empowers the early career academic, helping them to build their academic reputation both internally and externally and maintain a sense of personal fulfilment and accomplishment within an increasingly commercialised environment.

The Professor Is In
The Professor Is In

Author: Karen Kelsky

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2015-08-04

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 0553419420

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The definitive career guide for grad students, adjuncts, post-docs and anyone else eager to get tenure or turn their Ph.D. into their ideal job Each year tens of thousands of students will, after years of hard work and enormous amounts of money, earn their Ph.D. And each year only a small percentage of them will land a job that justifies and rewards their investment. For every comfortably tenured professor or well-paid former academic, there are countless underpaid and overworked adjuncts, and many more who simply give up in frustration. Those who do make it share an important asset that separates them from the pack: they have a plan. They understand exactly what they need to do to set themselves up for success. They know what really moves the needle in academic job searches, how to avoid the all-too-common mistakes that sink so many of their peers, and how to decide when to point their Ph.D. toward other, non-academic options. Karen Kelsky has made it her mission to help readers join the select few who get the most out of their Ph.D. As a former tenured professor and department head who oversaw numerous academic job searches, she knows from experience exactly what gets an academic applicant a job. And as the creator of the popular and widely respected advice site The Professor is In, she has helped countless Ph.D.’s turn themselves into stronger applicants and land their dream careers. Now, for the first time ever, Karen has poured all her best advice into a single handy guide that addresses the most important issues facing any Ph.D., including: -When, where, and what to publish -Writing a foolproof grant application -Cultivating references and crafting the perfect CV -Acing the job talk and campus interview -Avoiding the adjunct trap -Making the leap to nonacademic work, when the time is right The Professor Is In addresses all of these issues, and many more.

The World Beyond Your Head
The World Beyond Your Head

Author: Matthew B. Crawford

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2015-03-31

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0374708444

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In his bestselling book Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford explored the ethical and practical importance of manual competence, as expressed through mastery of our physical environment. In his brilliant follow-up, The World Beyond Your Head, Crawford investigates the challenge of mastering one's own mind. We often complain about our fractured mental lives and feel beset by outside forces that destroy our focus and disrupt our peace of mind. Any defense against this, Crawford argues, requires that we reckon with the way attention sculpts the self. Crawford investigates the intense focus of ice hockey players and short-order chefs, the quasi-autistic behavior of gambling addicts, the familiar hassles of daily life, and the deep, slow craft of building pipe organs. He shows that our current crisis of attention is only superficially the result of digital technology, and becomes more comprehensible when understood as the coming to fruition of certain assumptions at the root of Western culture that are profoundly at odds with human nature. The World Beyond Your Head makes sense of an astonishing array of common experience, from the frustrations of airport security to the rise of the hipster. With implications for the way we raise our children, the design of public spaces, and democracy itself, this is a book of urgent relevance to contemporary life.

How Universities Can Help Create a Wiser World
How Universities Can Help Create a Wiser World

Author: Nicholas Maxwell

Publisher: Andrews UK Limited

Published: 2014-03-18

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 1845407474

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In order to make progress towards a better world we need to learn how to do it. And for that we need institutions of learning rationally designed and devoted to helping us solve our global problems, make progress towards a better world. It is just this that we lack at present. Our universities pursue knowledge. They are neither designed nor devoted to helping humanity learn how to tackle global problems - problems of living - in more intelligent, humane and effective ways. That, this book argues, is the key disaster of our times, the crisis behind all the others: our failure to have developed our institutions of learning so that they are rationally organized to help us solve our problems of living - above all, our global problems. Having universities devoted almost exclusively to the pursuit of knowledge is a recipe for disaster. Scientific knowledge and technological know-how have unquestionably brought great benefits to humanity. But they have also made possible - even caused - our current global crises, above all the impending crisis of global warming. In this lucid and provocative book, Nicholas Maxwell argues convincingly that we need urgently to bring about a revolution in universities round the world so that their basic aim becomes wisdom, and not just knowledge.

Memories That Matter
Memories That Matter

Author: Christopher R. Madan

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-03-28

Total Pages: 817

ISBN-13: 0429628188

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What makes some experiences more memorable than others? How can you better remember specific information later? Memories That Matter addresses these questions and more. The book is divided into three main parts, with each part focusing on a different aspect of memory. After the introductory first part, Part II discusses everyday uses of memory and why we remember, establishing a foundation for how memory is structured and stored in the brain. Part III dives into what makes us remember. Emotional and rewarding experiences are both more memorable than mundane experiences but are often studied using different approaches. Self-relevance and objects we can interact with are remembered better than less relevant information. The author explores these motivation-related influences on memory and considers whether a common mechanism underlies them all. Part IV changes the focus, discussing how we sometimes want to remember specific information that does not automatically capture our attention. The book considers evidence-based learning strategies and memory strategies, whilst also exploring real-world applications, with discussion of professions that accomplish amazing memory feats daily. The book concludes with a reflection on how the role of memory is changing as our world makes information increasingly accessible, particularly with the ever-expanding influence of the internet. Drawing from a variety of literatures and perspectives, this important book will be relevant for all students of memory from psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and related health backgrounds.