The Fora: A Higher Education Community

General Category => Suggestions, Comments, Questions => Topic started by: filologos on May 18, 2019, 06:59:18 AM

Title: Grad School Life?
Post by: filologos on May 18, 2019, 06:59:18 AM
Any chance of recreating the Grad School Life subforum? It hadn't gotten much traffic for a while, but occasionally I and others found it useful.
Title: Re: Grad School Life?
Post by: eigen on May 18, 2019, 07:02:19 AM
I think that's part of the larger discussion about number of forums. The idea floated was to separate by area (teaching, research, service) rather than tier (grad school, tenure track, contingent).

I think we might need a general academic category, separate from general chat, for inquiries that cover unspecified academic life whether it's grad school, the TT cohort threads, etc.
Title: Re: Grad School Life?
Post by: mamselle on May 18, 2019, 01:31:30 PM
I was also wondering if, with the recent-ish loss of GradCafe, it might not serve a function as well in that sense.

M.
Title: Re: Grad School Life?
Post by: Parasaurolophus on May 18, 2019, 05:20:55 PM
Quote from: mamselle on May 18, 2019, 01:31:30 PM
I was also wondering if, with the recent-ish loss of GradCafe, it might not serve a function as well in that sense.

M.

Could do, if they can find their way over (from what I could tell, the GradCafe funnel wasn't great at the best of times). But TGC isn't dead at all (yet); they just lost most of their moderator staff. From what I can tell from my own limited use of the site, the unfortunate changes mostly haven't been implemented yet.
Title: Re: Grad School Life?
Post by: namazu on May 18, 2019, 10:45:20 PM
Quote from: eigen on May 18, 2019, 07:02:19 AM
I think that's part of the larger discussion about number of forums. The idea floated was to separate by area (teaching, research, service) rather than tier (grad school, tenure track, contingent).
I like this more parsimonious approach, but the general categories of teaching, research, and service don't cover some major grad student concerns like dealing with advisors, courses, oral/comprehensive exams, etc., so there would be a gap there.

Quote from: eigenI think we might need a general academic category, separate from general chat, for inquiries that cover unspecified academic life whether it's grad school, the TT cohort threads, etc.
Good idea.
Title: Re: Grad School Life?
Post by: polly_mer on May 19, 2019, 06:16:39 AM
Quote from: namazu on May 18, 2019, 10:45:20 PM
Quote from: eigenI think we might need a general academic category, separate from general chat, for inquiries that cover unspecified academic life whether it's grad school, the TT cohort threads, etc.
Good idea.

I second the idea to start with a more general academic board and then see what needs to be split into its own board.
Title: Re: Grad School Life?
Post by: eigen on May 19, 2019, 06:29:58 AM
Ok, slight board reorganization. See what you think of the changes.

We now have 3 broad categories: Help (which has our only guest-post access), General (includes non-academic discussions, as well as discussions on articles), and Academics (which includes all of our topic specific boards as well as a "general" academic discussion forum).
Title: Re: Grad School Life?
Post by: polly_mer on May 19, 2019, 07:01:34 AM
I like the new classifications.