170 likes | 318 Views
Life as an Academic Running a Different Race. Richard Hoshino Keynote Presentation CUMC Kingston July 2005. Warm-Up Question. See if you can determine the next two letters of this sequence. U, D, T, Q, C, S, S, H, ?, ?. Year 2020 Question.
E N D
Life as an AcademicRunning a Different Race Richard Hoshino Keynote Presentation CUMC Kingston July 2005
Warm-Up Question See if you can determine the next two letters of this sequence. U, D, T, Q, C, S, S, H, ?, ?
Year 2020 Question Take five minutes and think about the question on your handout. Write your response on the handout.
The Academic Path • Masters Degree (2 years) • Ph.D. Degree (4 years) • Post-Doctoral Fellowship (4 years) • Assistant Professorship (5 years) • Tenure (Associate Professorship and Full Professorship)
North American Values • The average Canadian watches 22 hours of TV a week. • On average, working couples talk with one another only 12 minutes a day. • 1 in every 8 undergraduate students plays online poker for money. • Only 29% of young adults volunteer.
Publish or Perish • A commonly accepted value among young academics that the only way to succeed is to publish, publish, publish! • Often as a consequence, teaching gets neglected and administration/outreach gets ignored.
A Different Race • Making a commitment NOT to conform to the “Publish or Perish” game. • Striving for a healthy balance between Research, Teaching, Administration, and Outreach. • Let me share with you some specific strategies to help you flourish in each of these four areas.
Research • Working on Puzzles and Contest Problems (Sudoku, Cryptic Crosswords, Putnam Contests) • Creating Problems for Math Contests (Euclid, Canadian Math Olympiad, CRUX, High School Math League)
Teaching • Attend workshops organized by your university’s Office of Instructional Development (or equivalent). • Form a “Math Education Study Group” for faculty members, graduate students, and honours students to get together and discuss teaching issues.
Administration/Service • High School Math League (Saturday morning competition for teams of four students) • Math Circles Outreach Program (high school students coming to your university for an evening of free pizza and fun mathematics)
A Math League Problem Determine the number of rectangles (of all sizes) that appear in the following diagram. Don’t forget that a square counts as a rectangle!
Outreach • Math Coaching (e.g. Putnam Training, Math League, Waterloo Seminar, IMO Training Camps) • Volunteerism (e.g. mentoring high school students, tutoring with the JUMP Program in Toronto)
Thinking of Life as Service • Academics serve their colleagues through research, serve their students through teaching, serve their university through administration, and serve their community through outreach.
Humanities/Math 101 • Free university program in the humanities for underprivileged people. • Three prerequisites for enrollment • Must live below the poverty line • Must be functionally literate • Must have a passionate love for learning
In Closing We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. - Winston Churchill