modifying Guy Kawasaki's Silicon Valley employment how-to...for academics
I will bet good money that the academic folks who read this blog don't know Guy Kawasaki. That's ok. The short answer is that he's a venture capitalist. But the longer answer is that he's one of the few business and technology folks
I like. Actually, I think he's pretty cool. Take that for what it's worth, or
read his "about" page and check out the
list of books he's written. A long, long time ago (6 years) when I was embarking on an ill-fated build-a-company project with a liar and a cheat, I used a significant amount of the Guy Kawasaki/
Garage.com info that was available. It's where I learned about the
elevator pitch, which has served me well
even in academia!
Let me digress and tell the story...
Briefly, an elevator pitch is an overview of a project (or an idea for one) that can be delivered in the time span of an elevator ride. For instance, Jane Entrepreneur has a great idea for a business and
stalks runs into a venture capitalist
at their office in a random office building. Seizing the opportunity but constrained by the elevator ride from the ground floor to, say, the third floor, Jane pitches her idea from start to finish. The door opens at the third floor, but the venture capitalist doesn't step out immediately—instead, the VC reaches for a business card and tells Jane to call the office for an appointment. Money flows, everyone is happy, they change the world, and it's all because of the elevator pitch.
During the final class period of my lovely seminar in the American Romantics, as we handed in our seminar papers the prof said we should chat about them if we had time at the end. I said, "hey! we can do elevator pitches."
[crickets...]
[people looking at me like I have three heads...]
So I explained the elevator pitch and then made it applicable to a bunch of grad students in English: "limited to 30 seconds (or so) each, it'll only take 10 minutes and boy won't we look like experts by being able to distill our papers in just 30 seconds." My thinking was that if we bled, sweat, and cried over these essays for a semester, we damn well better be able to present our thesis and findings in 30 seconds or less!
You will not be surprised to learn that the people who ended up with As on their essays were those able to complete the elevator pitch, and those who were still talking when the elevator was on the 48th floor and we still didn't know what the paper was about...well, they didn't do so well.
Back to my point...A few days ago, Guy wrote a post called
Everything You Wanted to Know About Getting a Job in Silicon Valley But Didn't Know Who to Ask. Having spent several years in the mid-90s being a contractor, meaning every six or eight weeks I was off on an interview with someone or another, I can tell you his post is spot-on.
THE CHALLENGE...All you academics who have been through the job market, how would you amend his list for academics?
For instance,he says:
1. Love what the company does. Passion for what a company makes or does is the most important factor in getting a job in Silicon Valley. Companies here are built on passion—indeed, perhaps more passion than reality. Hence, they hire passionate people who are already in the Reality Distortion Field. The question is, How do you show your passion?
The best way is to profess your love of the company's product or service, and I literally mean "love" not "read about," "have used," or "looked at the web site." If the company is at all enlightened, passion can overcome the lack of a "perfect" educational background and work experience.
How do you do this in academia without looking like a crazy person? I'm thinking "OMG, the undergrad requirements for the major is teh r0x0r" won't go over well.
I assume Guy's point #4, "Expect the funny farm," is the easiest to modify.
Discuss.
Labels: academia, valleylife
via Inside Higher Ed :: Anger Over Coeducation Plan
An article at Inside Higher Ed, "
Anger Over Coeducation Plan," reports that the board of trustees at
Randolph-Macon Women's College is "
set to vote Sept. 9 on a strategic plan that includes allowing men to enroll and expanding the global studies program."
I am ambivalent on the issue of coeducation, because I've been a student at both a women's college and also co-ed colleges and universities (I've been around) and feel each have an equal number of pros and cons. Bottom line, was the educational experience at the women's college a good one? Yes. At the co-ed university? Yes.
Moving on to the reason for my post...it's to call bullshit on these statements:
"Our decision to embrace a coed environment is not because we think a women’s college isn’t a good form of education," said Virginia Worden, interim president of Randolph-Macon. "We are proud of 115 years of being a women’s college, but we have come to a difficult conclusion that to attract more women, we need to attract men." [...] Worden said that fewer than 5 percent of college applicants are willing to look at a women’s college, and that most students "don’t come because, but in spite of, the fact that it’s a women’s college."
A comment on the article by a RMWC alum says it best: "I suggest that if the board wants to “attract more women” they concentrate on increasing the excellent faculty, campus, overseas programs, and courses available to the students. Don’t use men as 'bait' to get the girls!!!" No kidding.
RMWC is in Lynchburg, VA. Within a 2-hour radius of RMWC are at least three other women's colleges:
Hollins,
Sweet Briar, and my undergrad school,
Mary Baldwin. I'm probably forgetting a few. We played them all in sports and eventually the schools all ran together..."oh yeah, another small liberal arts college with beautiful old buildings and lush fields and legacy students." I don't see any of those places going co-ed, calling on the need to use men as bait. Unless something's changed in the last fifteen years since I was there, there's a very strong social network between the women's colleges and the neighboring institutions (
VMI,
Hampden-Sydney,
W&L,
Roanoke,
Lynchburg, etc.). There was never a lack of men around, that's for sure.
It's sad that the administrators at a perfectly fine institution negated its value by (essentially) saying that they don't have the people or resources to compete for students. If I were a student or faculty member, I'd consider that a slap in the face. "We're not good enough as-is. We have to let guys in. That will make us better." Great message.
[My own undergrad institution allows men to take classes/get degrees in their non-traditional (e.g. non-residential) adult program, because it fits the needs of the community. The number of men are so few that I daresay it wasn't about the money or using them as bait.]Labels: academia
non-traditional students
[warning: there's no thesis in this post. I realized that at the end. It's just stream of consciousness with links in it.]
I've
always been a non-traditional student. When I went to college the first time, it was as a non-traditional student in an
extremely pretentious-named program. When I went to grad school the first time (and lasted all of half a semester) I was thus four years younger than everyone else, so while not officially designated "non-traditional," I was. (That wasn't why I left.) When I went back to school a few years ago, first to
community college and then in the
business department at SJSU, I was a good seven to ten years
older than almost everyone. Now, when doing the
MA in English I'd say I'm probably the average age, because we have a lot of people who took time off, or who are secondary school teachers and have been working for awhile, or they've come back to school because they like the intellectual environment (my friends Tim and Annie, for example, are a lovely married couple in their 50s, dutifully working their way through the program. Tim's the prez at a local Bryman College and Annie works at SJSU in the student services/financial aid/something like that office).
In other words, I've been or seen numerous types of students over the years (I hope this will help make me a good teacher, eventually). For instance,
the three types of "A" students Dead Dad talks about. But in my little cosmos of education there's a significant portion of people who are "A" students inside, who
want to be dutiful or
can be brilliant and can't always maintain it because of external forces (family, job, etc) and then end up being maniacal at the end and it all blows up in their face and they don't end up being "A" students. In other words, people in the cracks between the three types he talks about.
I know the point of his post is this:
But I worry sometimes that academia is too geared towards the Dutiful, and too quick to punish or shame the Maniacal. The “overall” gpa as an indicator definitely favors the dutiful over the maniacal, even though the maniacs’ best work is almost always better. ‘Distribution requirements’ were written by and for the dutiful. The concept of ‘prerequisites’ has Dutiful written all over it.
As someone who has operated in all three camps (I know which one I fall in for real, feel free to guess although it shouldn't be that hard) my transcripts look like a train wreck. I do think there's a sort of black hole that can suck in students—good ones and bad ones—while they're attempting to fulfill distribution requirements before getting on to "the good stuff," students who might hit a really bad patch of taking courses they don't want to take, and do poorly for a number of reasons both internal and external, and end up just dropping out entirely. Then again, if the school has a wide range of courses to fulfill requirements, and the student has a decent advisor, that black hole can be avoided—but how many students really have a good advisor for these things?
My friend Kate is a non-traditional student. She flunked out of SJSU a lifetime ago, when she was eighteen or nineteen (I won't tell you how old she is now, but I will say she's old enough to have been my babysitter when I was a kid). She got the spark of going back to school a couple years ago, and did it. She took all her lower-division stuff at community college and this fall she's "
moving up to big kid school" and will be a a Behavioral Sciences/Psychology double major at SJSU. Go congratulate her.
My friend DeeDee is also a non-traditional student. She's a bit older than me as well, and her original degree was at a christian school which ended up being non-accredited somewhere along the line. Basically, DeeDee has spent the last eighteen years teaching English and Spanish in junior high...religious schools which looked at her degree and where it was from and not the lack of her actual state teaching license. In short, DeeDee went back to school a few years ago to get a "real" BA and ended up with three. She triple majored in English, Spanish, and Linguistics and
now she can get an emergency teaching credential in California and teach/sub—at the first-year teacher level of pay. She's also doing the credential program at SJSU so in a year or two she'll be exactly where she should have been twenty years ago. She's a great teacher, the kind every parent would want for their kid.
I have a great deal of respect for non-traditional students, and I truly hope there will always be a place for the people who fall through the cracks or take a really long detour to get where they're going or decide they want to go somewhere completely different. If there's not always a place for these folks, I'll start my own damn school!
Labels: academia
