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The disgrace of my inbox

Posted by $ SarahMontalbano 9 years, 5 months ago to Education
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I checked my email today, and as a high school student looking to go into college soon, I get a lot of information about different colleges. This was a snippet from University of Notre Dame, telling me about pre-college programs I could enroll in:
Confronting Poverty: Bringing Service to Justice—Through an interdisciplinary lens, this course aims to answer the enduring question: Why are people poor? Students will explore the forces that maintain poverty and the forces that resist it. This unique course will also offer students the opportunity to engage in the local community to understand poverty through facts and lived experience. By the end of the course, students should have a sense of the history of poverty and of how poverty could become history.

How is THAT supposed to attract me?

(I just had to share this one, but there's been quite a few of a similar strain from different universities - goodness, public education is a mess!)

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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 9 years, 5 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Make sure that the community service is in your self-interest. Outreach to the public is officially a minor part of my job, so I don't really consider it community service. However, how I outreach to the public is my business. I choose to use it as an opportunity to recruit talented, likeminded individuals to achieve my research goals. The one research project I am working on that might interest you is the development of 3D-printed scaffolds on which we grow either small diameter blood vessels or the interfaces between tendons or ligaments and bone. I am usually looking for someone to handle the cell culture aspects. I am better at the engineering than the biology.
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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 9 years, 5 months ago in reply to this comment.
    In fact, molecular biology is one of our stronger areas. Dr. Charles Polson teaches our molecular biology class and several follow-on electives.
    http://www.fit.edu/faculty/profiles/p...

    http://www.fit.edu/programs/7025/bs-b...

    There are very few liberal faculty at Florida Tech and some Objectivists. I enjoy educating future Galts. Our next open house is on Saturday the 21st. The weather is wonderful right now. About 80, going up to 84, with a low of 68. This place really is paradise.

    Regarding molecular biology vs. biomedical engineering, if you get tired of school after a B.S. degree, then the engineering degree will be enough for a lifelong career. To be a molecular biologist, you really have to get the Ph.D. to open up your career possibilities. But then again, you wouldn't be in the Gulch unless you enjoyed education.
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  • Posted by $ SarahMontalbano 9 years, 5 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Exactly! I haven't fulfilled my requirements yet, but as part of a club I'm in, I have to complete a small amount of community service. I'm not looking forward to it.
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    Posted by $ jbrenner 9 years, 5 months ago
    Please consider a non-tenure-granting, private university that provides value-for-value exchange. I am a professor of chemical and biomedical engineering at Florida Tech. You can check out my nanotechnology minor program in the Marketplace.
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  • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 9 years, 5 months ago
    There was and is a lot to be said for the off campus programs of completing degrees. I had a choice of any university or college and taking any course that fit the degree requirements. One of the best to which I drove a hundred miles each way twice as week as a night school course featured a professor who was simultanously faculty adviser to "YAF and SDS. He had students from both debate each other on on questions the class submitted.The class was all over 30 and as old as 60 and all had Bachelors...Some were extemporaneous or impromptu some were advance warning. We never did figure out who the Professor would vote for int he upcoming election. One guest politician (it was a polysci course was G. Bush the first.) prior to his election. His opening remark? What do you want to talk about?

    The degree was issued by a university at the other end of the country.
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  • Posted by khalling 9 years, 5 months ago in reply to this comment.
    well Hello,mama!
    I was appalled that my kids had to do a semester project (for entrance into college) of community service. It included a project at the end where they had list off what they learned about the poor and disadvantaged in the community-NOT anything about what the community was doing well. The Food bank, which I used to sit in some committees for, loved the slave labor. The most eye-opening experiences my kids witnessed had to do with people convicted who had community service as part of their sentencing. gah!
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  • 13
    Posted by Mamaemma 9 years, 5 months ago
    Sarah, my daughter excitedly signed up for a college freshman seminar course on individualism, only to discover that the whole course was about the evils of individualism and the goodness of collectivism. It was all she could do to barely pass the course, because you can imagine how open minded the professor was!
    She says she was afraid to speak up in college because all the students were such hopeless liberals (expensive private college), so she didn't realize until senior year how many conservatives there actually were on campus! She is a big Rand fan. So seek out like minded people when you get there, and remember that it is young people like you who matter!
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