Jesse comments on “Aspiring Academics” – Part 3

Apologies for the delay in getting Part 3 of this series up. Parts 1 and 2 of my comments on Aspiring Academics: A Resource Book for Graduate Students and Early Career Faculty from the AAG focused on the sections on Career Planning and Personal Management and Developing and Enhancing Teaching and Advising Skills respectively. The last section of the book covers Research Opportunities and Responsibilities. The importance of this section of the book is relative to each persons position, or at least it used to be. The focus of even teaching universities is quickly shifting to include additional scholarship responsibilities and that the almighty grant dollar means more in any institution.

Chapter 11 – Preparing Competitive Research Grant Proposals
-Writing a grant is no longer about the individual or even about the perfect project. There are tons of individuals out there with impeccable CVs and there are piles of great project ideas that are proposed every day. This chapter offers several insights into how to make your project proposal stand out, from assembling a project group to ways to show reviewers how you will ensure productivity during your grant.

Chapter 12 – Private People, Secret Places: Ethical Research in Practice
-Many of our GIS or physical geography friends might think that this chapter doesn’t apply to them…they are wrong of course, but they think it. Ethical issues arise in any research venture whether they are subject related (as this chapter discusses), object/phenomena based, or researcher related. This chapter deals primarily with issues that arise in the Internal Review Board (IRB) process and discusses some of the (often internal) thought processes researchers should walk through in considering the impacts of their work on others.

Chapter 13 – Academic Publishing
-The age old adage of ‘publish or perish’ holds as true today as ever. The problem is that while there are more venues to publish in, the number of people (and the number of papers per person) has increased even more. This chapter hits on some of the key issues such as submitting to a journal where your topic is relevant and appropriate, as well as a quick overview about the editorial/peer review process. There is also a fairly extensive checklist for authors that might be of used to ‘old hats’ as well as new authors.

Chapter 14 – Working Across Disciplinary Boundaries
-This one should be a cinch for Geographers as many of us started out in other disciplines, use literature and methodologies from other disciplines, etc. But it turns out that once we are in the entrenched in our map world, we sometimes stick to it a little too tightly. This chapter offers great suggestions regarding interdisciplinary approaches to research and teaching.