Had someone asked, when I defended my PhD, what my biggest aspiration was, my answer would have been “to get a professorship”. To get there, however, I had to survive my “transitional years” and build a profile. Everyone told me how important it was to show a successful funding track-record and publish well. Accordingly, […] … learn more→

Maybe you are lucky enough to be fluently bilingual or even trilingual and hope to capitalize on these advantages. Or perhaps you just love the challenges of mastering a foreign language and helping people communicate across linguistic borders. Regardless of your motivation, there are best practices, tips and tricks to help you prepare for a […] … learn more→

This is a story, a my story, which leads to eight pointers about writing for publication. I’m currently writing a paper. Well, yes, always writing something. But right now it’s a paper. A paper designed to do some thinking work that will then inform a book. I’m not writing this paper by myself, but I […] … learn more→

The last weeks of January and the first of February are dates that in the university environment are associated with evaluation and exams. This year, in the context of the pandemic, we have observed a debate that has reached confrontation, regarding the adequacy or not of taking face-to-face exams in universities, at the height of the […] … learn more→

My earliest encounters with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are etched into my torn and tattered copy of the The Riverside Chaucer. I have even more indelible memories of my first seminar: sitting around a large table, forcibly holding down the edges of the hefty paperback, and nervously waiting for my turn to read a line of the General Prologue. Out loud. In […] … learn more→

Formal approval of Covid-19 vaccines means that colleges and universities around the world will soon face a fraught choice, if not a Faustian bargain: whether to mandate vaccinations for campus communities. In an era when even the smallest colleges possess a student health infrastructure capable of delivering mass inoculations, the temptation to vaccinate by fiat […] … learn more→

Jodi Benenson and Tara Kolar Bryan are professors in the School of Public Administration at the University of Nebraska Omaha. In the fall of 2020 they coordinated a team-taught graduate-level course called Pandemics, Protest and Policy that centered around public policy and management issues happening in real time. Here, they answer five questions about what they learned. 1. […] … learn more→

At a time when the world has been in chaos, it’s easy to forget young people might have completely different, yet significant and real, worries. We asked children about their sense of safety and what they worry about in their community. In July to August 2020 we used anonymous surveys with 176 young people aged […] … learn more→

Nobody could think 35 years ago that a puzzle would become the best-selling toy in the world , but the fact is that on January 30, 1978, the Hungarian sculptor and architect Hernö Rubik applied for a patent on what he then called “magic cube” . Completing this three-dimensional puzzle, better known as a Rubik’s cube, requires a series […] … learn more→

“School or no school, it won’t matter.” “Young people’s issues are minor compared to those of adults.” As researchers concerned with suicide prevention in youth, we sometimes hear people express sentiments like these about young people in the pandemic. But socialization is an important part of growing up. As much as COVID-19 has affected adults, […] … learn more→