sum.ology

Welcome to sum.ology. Thank you for stopping by.  If this is your first time here, I invite you to check out a few of my favorite posts. These selections give a good taste for the flavor of this blog. You can also read below for a description of the motivations behind my writing.

Must reads:

on breaking bad email habits

on my man crush; or why we need mentors

on getting beyond destructive criticism

Why write this blog?

Over 15 million students make the trek back to campus each autumn. Yet, hardly any of us writes about what makes the journey worth it. Why haven’t we blogged about the trials and triumphs of the student life?

My hunch is that students think they don’t know enough, which is probably why we went to school in the first place. This self image as “lesser than” is a major barrier to being great.

Part of sum.ology’s mission is to learn to think in a new way about our student experiences.  The central question that drives this blog is, how can we take what we learn from our degrees and apply that learning in other aspects of our life? To answer this, I hope to share with you some of the observations I’ve made while trying to squeeze the most from my years on campus.  I have come to find that the key to a good education is in how we understand our own learning:  we cannot think of ourselves as sponges, sitting back and hoping to absorb all that our teachers throw at us.  Instead, we need to practice the skill of extrapolation, pulling out the most from each activity, each assignment, each opportunity and building a set of skills we can carry with us beyond the boundaries of the university. This behavior is crystallized in the concept of the professional student, he or she who recognizes that schooling is more than an education–it is a training.

What does sum.ology mean?

Upon graduating, many students realize they did not get a degree in how to live. (Maybe this is why the graduation ceremony is called “commencement” and not “completion.”) Sum.ology means “the study of how to be”–and one of this site’s major goals is to foster learning, working, playing, giving, and living. well. You won’t find a “how to” manual for life. There are few courses on personal development. Sum.ology attempts to establish a curriculum for this course of study.

What kind of posts will I find?

This blog is dedicated to my pursuit of a Ph.D. in the Department of History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The posts will be a blend of reflections on the graduate student life, tips & tricks to managing people and paperwork, and random thoughts of the hour.

More than that, this blog will explore ways in which we find meaning in the student life. What do we care about? What do we complain about? Are we professionals, slackers, refugees from “the real world”? Where do we go for help? These questions, and many more, drive my explorations of the university universe. Along the way, I will keep a keen eye toward several skill-sets, or competencies that I think are critical to success on and off campus: facilitation, communication skills, group process, and personal branding.

In addition, this blog will have a certain green hue. My research will focus on the roles of science and local knowledge in shaping environmental change in the Canadian Arctic. Hence, I will add the occasional post that gives the down-low on what’s going on up North, in discussions on the environment, and in the academic fields of environmental history and history of science. In addition, I will post some useful tips I’ve found on how to live cheap, green, and healthy. On all of the above, I hope you will share your advice with me.