[PRL] Fwd: TP Msg. #1109 Translating 'Grad Student' Into English

[Mitchell Wand]

A useful exercise for your hiring dossier!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rick Reis <reis at stanford.edu>
Date: Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 9:53 AM
Subject: TP Msg. #1109 Translating 'Grad Student' Into English
To: tomorrows-professor <tomorrows-professor at lists.stanford.edu>


So in 2010 the university's marketing and public relations department
intervened. The office asked Ph.D. recipients to boil down their
dissertations to about 100 words that summarized their research and
explained its impact, all in a way that "a friend who wasn't in their field"
could understand.
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Folks:

The posting below by Kevin Kiley looks at Emory University's program to make
dissertation research more understandable and accessible to those outside
the particular area of specialty. It is from the May 13, 2011, issue of
INSIDE HIGHER ED, an excellent - and free - online source for news, opinion
and jobs for all of higher education.  You can subscribe by going to:
http://insidehighered.com/.  Also for a free daily update from Inside Higher
 Ed, e-mail [scott.jaschik at insidehighered.com]. Copyright (c) 2011 Inside
Higher Ed Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis at stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Kegan's Theory of the Evolution of Consciousness

Tomorrow's Research

---------------------------------------- 940 words
-------------------------------------

Translating 'Grad Student' Into English

Several years working on a Ph.D. in the back corner of a chemistry lab or
lost in a library's stacks can make anyone a little detached from reality.
So it's not surprising that when graduate students emerge from their years
of close study on a topic, their dissertation titles can be a little
unwieldy to the average graduation attendee or website visitor.

Paging through the 2011 graduation guide at Emory, one encounters the
following dissertation titles:

"Suppression of Calcineurin Signaling and PGC-1α Expression During the
Chronic Skeletal Muscle Atrophy Associated with Diabetes Mellitus:
Implications for Muscle Function."

"Statistical Methods for Robust Estimation of Differential Protein
Expression."

"Hearing What You Expect to Hear: Investigating the Social and Cognitive
Mechanisms Underlying Vocal Accommodation."

While those are valuable undertakings, and significant enough to earn
Ph.D.'s from a research university, they're all a little unwieldy to the
untrained eye.

So in 2010 the university's marketing and public relations department
intervened. The office asked Ph.D. recipients to boil down their
dissertations to about 100 words that summarized their research and
explained its impact, all in a way that "a friend who wasn't in their field"
could understand.

"We wanted to show how that knowledge generation has an impact on the
world," said Jan Gleason, executive director of university marketing. "This
isn't some esoteric work. These students' dissertations have applications
and can inform other ideas."

So history Ph.D. Leah Weinryb Grohsgal's "Reinventing Civil Liberties:
Religious Groups, Organized Litigation, and the Rights Revolution" becomes
an exploration of how Jehovah's Witnesses helped spark the modern civil
rights movement and shows that "religious liberty, far from being an
afterthought, was integral to the 20th century transformation of civil
rights." [http://www.emory.edu/home/research/dissertations/index.html#H]
Psychology Ph.D. Pavel Blagov's "Personality Constellations in Incarcerated
Men Who Scored High on Psychopathy" highlights two subcategories of
"psychopaths" that could help prevent, diagnose, treat and rehabilitate such
individuals.

In 2010, the university had 14 of its about 250 Ph.D. recipients explain
their research in the humanities, natural and social sciences, and
professions.[https://zm02.pobox.stanford.edu/zimbra/mail#13]  This year, 24
of Emory's 225 Ph.D. recipients participated.[
https://zm02.pobox.stanford.edu/zimbra/mail#13]

The exercise is certainly difficult. Not only does it require boiling down
years of research, it also requires the student to step out of his or her
discipline for a minute and try to relate to others. A look down the list
shows that most can't quite eliminate all the complexity from their
descriptions. There are still some big words and terms in each "translation"
that laymen likely wouldn't understand, such as "Enantioselectively" [
http://www.emory.edu/home/research/dissertations/index.html#C] and "Taylor
rule fundamentals." [
http://www.emory.edu/home/research/dissertations/index.html#E]. But the
descriptions are certainly less complex than the list of dissertation
titles.[
http://www.emory.edu/home/research/dissertations/dissertations-2011-list.html
]

Some students took to the exercise naturally. Jongwoon "Willy" Choi, whose
business dissertation explored the effects of signing bonuses, and the labor
market they are made in, on worker motivation, said he is constantly trying
to explain his research to those outside his field. He titled his
dissertation "When Are Signing Bonuses More Than Just 'Pay to Play'? An
Experimental Investigation." He said if his wife, mother, and sister can't
understand what he's working on, he needs to rethink how he's describing it.

"In a field like business, it's important to get people to understand that
the work academics do has a lot of applications to real-world business
settings," he said. "We're exploring why we do these prevalent business
practices, what might be wrong, and how things can be done better."

Choi, who's taking a job at the University of Pittsburgh's Katz School of
Business next year, said he encourages all academics to think of an
"elevator speech" about their research.

But the task wasn't so easy for all students. Some deal with abstract
concepts or very specific scientific processes. Alyssa Dunn, a Ph.D.
recipient in Emory's education school who "studied the recruitment and
pedagogy of international teachers hired for U.S. urban schools and the
policy context in which such recruitment unfolds," was one student who
struggled to meet the marketing office's criteria.

Her problem was not converting her language to something that was
comprehensible to readers: she has the kinds of findings that yearn to be
made public, and because the findings are concrete examples of the problems
that such programs create for students and teachers, the language doesn't
deal with abstract theories or statistics.

Her problem was boiling down her 250-page dissertation of diverse findings
into a 100-word statement. Because it was a case study instead of an
exploration of a single hypothesis, there were multiple topics to discuss.
"With so many different findings, you really have to think about which are
most important now," she said. "What do people need to know about?"

Emory's dissertation project falls amid a bigger push nationwide to
encourage researchers - particularly scientists - [
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/12/06/alda]  to become better
communicators and develop the skills necessary to share their findings with
the public.

The university engages in several other techniques to help graduate and
undergraduate students, as well as professors, learn how to communicate
research goals and findings. David Lynn, chairman of the chemistry
department, runs a class where graduate students teach their research
findings to freshmen and seniors.[
http://www.gs.emory.edu/about/special.php?entity_id=93]

Researchers at the university have even explored alternative forms of
communication, such as pairing with artists, to reach even broader
audiences. One program teamed science researchers with the Atlanta-based Out
of Hand Theater.[http://www.outofhandtheater.com/index.php?referer=internal].
Together they designed a flash mob to help people understand molecular
behavior.[http://www.outofhandtheater.com/groupintelligence/performances/].

"We're living in a world where, in all areas, information is changing so
quickly," Lynn said. "When things change so quickly, people become fearful
and recalcitrant. We need be able to share new information to make
justifiable decisions, or as a community we can't go forward."


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