By Liz Homan. Interdisciplinarity is a hip thing these days. I can’t begin to count the number of interdisciplinary workshops, institutes, grants, and fellowships that have come across my email inbox or that I have applied for during my four years of graduate school. I even chose my graduate program because I wanted to work at the intersection of English and Education – and my program, a joint program, was quite literally the only program in the country that placed an equal emphasis on both. Read more...

By GradHacker. My graduate school recently invited an alumna with an MA in professional counseling to talk to us about careers outside academia. She talked about different reasons for switching fields and the ways we could translate our studies into marketable skills. Above all, she stressed, we needed to network. She herself had learned to enjoy networking despite once being a “socially retarded introvert.” I know I’ve got that phrase correct, because she said it twice. Read more...

By Emily VanBuren. I’m wrapping up the second year of my PhD in history, and it’s been a big one. This year, I figured out what I'm writing my dissertation about. I finally identified how all of my research interests fit together and pinpointed the specific question I'm trying to answer. I persuaded my advisor that this project matters and makes sense. I assembled a committee. I tackled a mountain of reading in order to situate my project in the existing literature. I pored over dozens of archival databases and library finding aids and bibliographies to identify the relevant primary sources. I came up with a catchy working title. Read more...

By Joshua Kim. I’m worried that our community is going to draw the wrong lessons from the Dedoose crash.
The wrong lesson would be that cloud services are inherently less secure than local services. 
The right lesson would be that the purchaser of cloud services needs to pay very close attention to a number of factors when deciding to source any critical education function. Read more...

By Joshua Kim. So I’m excited about Andrew Ng, Coursera’s co-founder, becoming the chief scientist at Baidu.
The rest of the world can’t follow the Western model of higher education development. 
The countries of the emerging world, especially China and India, have both the opportunity and the necessity to things differently. Read more...