Education

Dear Freshman: Welcome to college!! Here’s your first lesson: College is not a stepping-stone to life, but an exciting part of life. College is your first professional position! Your instructors are your new bosses, as well as your teachers, your collaborators, and your mentors. Let me explain the implications of your new position as a college student, and this new way of thinking about college: Your official job title is “College Student.” Although this sounds a lot like “High-School Student,” it is very different. For example: In high school your teachers shared some responsibility for making sure your assignments were completed and for saying in class everything that would be on tests. As a “college student,” you now have full responsibility for completing your assignments,...

Dear Professor Høj, I was struck by a recent paper published in Environmental Research Letters with John Cook, a University of Queensland employee, as the lead author. The paper purports to estimate the degree of agreement in the literature on climate change. Consensus is not an argument, of course, but my attention was drawn to the fact that the headline conclusion had no confidence interval, that the main validity test was informal, and that the sample contained a very large number of irrelevant papers while simultaneously omitting many relevant papers. My interest piqued, I wrote to Mr Cook asking for the underlying data and received 13% of the data by return email. I immediately requested the remainder, but to no avail. I found that the consensus rate in the data differs from...

Dear newbie graduate students, To all of you about to start on the exciting, confusing, rollercoaster-of-emotions path of graduate school, I’d like to share some advice and lessons I’ve learned (and am still learning!) during my own experience as a graduate student in biological sciences. Own your project Graduate school is going to be vastly different from your undergraduate experiences. As an undergrad, you most likely helped out on another person’s project, running a few PCRs here, taking population samples there. You were a helper of sorts, learning a little of this and that as you went along. It was a great opportunity to get your feet wet in research. If you worked in a lab after your undergraduate studies, you probably had more responsibilities but most likely were still an...

Dear Troll, Since I started blogging about my son Quinn and his disability, I knew this day would come. There’s no shortage of trolls on the internet who hide behind the anonymity of a screen name with the intent to be cruel, and I’ve seen their hostility many times before. In fact, just last week, in the wake of a robbery at the Down Syndrome Association of Houston’s headquarters, in which $10,000 worth of technology was stolen, there was no shortage of ignorant comments on the news story reporting the incident. One user asked, “how will they learn to count to potato?” Another claimed that wasting computers on “retards” was stupid anyway and that the organization deserved to be robbed. These comments, while offensive, simply serve to showcase people’s hate-fueled ignorance and aren’...