Robert M. Pirsig
Well-known member
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2017
- Messages
- 1,717
- Reaction score
- 574
teaching public speaking online is gonna be real fun this summer.
I'm sure that administrators will try to shit on workers, but the on-the-ground experience of educators seems to suggest that remote teaching is a disaster without a lot of remote pedagogy training and students who were interested in remote learning in the first place.
Summer enrollments at my institution have plummeted in large part because students aren't interested in paying for credits that are basically youtube videos with chat rooms attached. It's almost impossible to facilitate a larger discussion-based class when the platforms can't even fit all of the screens on an instructors full screen.
Brasky, what platform are y'all using? Zoom is a mess from my experience, though definitely the best interface like this that I've used before.
teaching public speaking online is gonna be real fun this summer.
If schools don’t figure out a way to have students on campus this fall, there will be a lot pursuing gap years. That would be disastrous financially for said schools coupled with other lost income sources.
First example of seen of this. Probably won't be the last.
https://sociology.princeton.edu/graduate-program [h=2]A NOTICE TO PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS[/h] We regret to announce that Princeton Sociology will not accept applications during the 2021 admissions cycle. In order to ensure that the department has resources to adequately support its students during the covid-19 pandemic, we will hold off on bringing new students to the program until 2022. The decision to eliminate a cohort of future students was not an easy one, but we have decided that our priority during these unsettled times is to take care of those who are already matriculated in the department. We look forward to reading applications again in the fall of 2021 for the 2022 cohort.
Strick, how much do you think this has changed your research?
My current project is adding a third round of longitudinal interviews to get a before, during, and (hopefully) after the COVID-19 crisis. It’s on employment pathways so we have to take this crisis into account.
It doesn’t seem like it comes from outside of the program. They know their own resources. Some departments go into a cycle knowing they can only take a smaller cohort. Maybe they’ve had a few large cohorts. Maybe they have more students than usual in their 5th or 6th years.
Seems like they were probably in that situation anyway. This crisis has made it harder for some PhD candidates to collect data. Some may have had to change their topics all together.
In light of that, it’s responsible to make sure they have the resources to support the 2020 cohort. And they won’t waste the time of potential 2021 applicants or their own faculty.
Princeton is at the top of chain. They do Fall applications. They probably don’t have a ton of classes taught by grad students. They won’t take a hit to their reputation. This won’t impact future applications.
From the outside, this is a smart move and I expect other programs to weigh the risks and do the same. It definitely sucks overall though. It’s an early trickle down of the hiring freezes and such.
We have two tenure track lines on hold from last year. Really hope we can get both of them based on the logic that we first asked for them two years ago, we’ve had three faculty retire and one scooped up by administration, and it’s a chance to be aggressive while other programs aren’t hiring.
I think the real trouble for grad students in the social sciences is going to be the job market in two years. Weirdly, I think this year is going to be the best of the three similarly to how 2008 was a bad job market year, but 2009 and 2010 were just brutal because of the backlogged job applicants. I'm hoping that my advisers can step up in a big way to help me navigate this, though, so we'll see (social capital and whatnot).