As I reach the end of my time in Ann Arbor, I’m doing a lot of restrospecting, so it was fortuitous that the Rackham blog team asked me to write about my experience of being a blogger. I started blogging in the fall of 2012, which means that I have been writing for...
Earlier this semester, I attended a writing workshop organized by Jacqueline Stimson, who is not only my cohort-mate in the Department of Classical Studies, but also a very skilled writer and someone who has thought (and continues to think) deeply about the process of...
Studies paint a pretty bleak picture for student evaluations, as I noted in my previous blog post. An instructor’s race and gender have well-documented effects on evaluation scores, and that doesn’t even scratch the surface of the ways that sexuality and gender...
Now, before anyone breaks into their best Edwin Starr impression, let me preface this by saying that I don’t think the answer is “absolutely nothing.” But, I do think we need to consider what student evaluations are really measuring, because evidence suggests that it...
I’ve been having a lot of conversations with fellow graduate students, both at Michigan and elsewhere, fellow classicists and non-classicists, and there’s been a topic of conversation that comes up a lot: in one form or another, many of us want to grow up to be some...
We have to do a better job dealing with mental health in the academy. We really, really have to. The most recent information suggests that almost half of Michigan students, at the graduate and undergraduate level, have felt overwhelming anxiety or severe sadness or...
Every few weeks or so, someone writes another article about how humanities Ph.D. programs are a bad choice and how grad students are either victims who have been bamboozled into a dead-end career in a dying field or are the children of privilege or—my personal...
