Zoe Schurman

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on the atlas · 177

highlights · 239

At its best, Hampshire produces people who can walk into a room of specialists and talk comfortably with all of them. So don’t talk about Hampshire’s lack of departments, and don’t call Hampshire interdisciplinary. Instead, say Hampshire trains generalists. Say:
How to Market Hampshire College - by Ethan Ludwin-Peery
Mashing two fields together makes something interdisciplinary, but it doesn’t make it good.
How to Market Hampshire College - by Ethan Ludwin-Peery
But honestly, my time as an advisor was mostly spent trying to convince students to take fewer classes, so they wouldn’t burn themselves out.
How to Market Hampshire College - by Ethan Ludwin-Peery
Hampshire’s lack of majors encourages this kind of development. You can say “no majors”, but you can also say, “you’re on your own kid, you figure it out”. Those who are able to figure it out get a very good education indeed, in figuring it out. It’s harsh, it’s a little sink-or-swim, but it gets results. And you have a faculty advisor so you have someone to go to when you’re at risk of drowning.
How to Market Hampshire College - by Ethan Ludwin-Peery
The good news is that narrative evaluations are hugely undersold.
How to Market Hampshire College - by Ethan Ludwin-Peery
Hampshire you’re treated as a scholar and given advanced classes right away
How to Market Hampshire College - by Ethan Ludwin-Peery
I think the message that Hampshire is the scrappy weird one is a lie. My experience has only ever been that Hampshire gave me a better education than anything else I have seen.
How to Market Hampshire College - by Ethan Ludwin-Peery
Hampshire ranks in the top 40 nationally for PhD attainment, an average of 8.68 of every 100 alumni go on to earn a doctoral degree Two-thirds of graduates earn an advanced degree within ten years of commencement. One in five Hampshire science students who complete their thesis are invited to present at a peer-reviewed conference. Five percent of Hampshire science students are lead authors on published, peer-reviewed journal articles as undergraduates. A quarter of Hampshire alumni start their own business or organization, placing Hampshire #6 on Forbes’ 2015 list of most entrepreneurial colle…
How to Market Hampshire College - by Ethan Ludwin-Peery
Appendix: One Hundred Seventy-Five Million US American Dollars
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
An existing institution
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
Petitioning NECHE for a teach-out-and-continue arrangement rather than a full new-institution review would make a lot more sense.
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
why write the bylaws before I know who my business partners will be
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
Having faculty be in charge of faculty hiring decisions seems like it caused a lot of harm last time. When faculty have total choice over their membership, the school eventually comes to serve the needs of the faculty over the needs of the students, which leads to collapse. I wouldn’t give students total control of faculty hiring decisions, but you would need a more open process.
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
Maybe these ideas made sense in some context, but if so you would have to read pretty hard between the lines, because the college’s justifications for such decisions don’t hold up to scrutiny.
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
Faculty who could leave usually did,
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
he school could not hold on to a single game design professor.
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
I could tell you how we should offer a 5-year BA/MA program — other colleges already offer these, and everyone at Hampshire already does a senior thesis, so why not make the senior thesis two years long and have the tuition go to Hampshire instead of some lesser MA program? But I won’t bore you with the details now.
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
We had student EMTs, and when I was sent to the hospital after my freak blacksmithing accident (blacksmithing is normally very safe), a student EMT was first on the scene.
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
My vision for Hampshire would be extremely online, with a special focus on learning how to share and market your work.
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
If you hate credentialism, this is the model for you
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
Every year there are a few hundred 18-year-olds who are ready to do graduate-level work in their field,
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
I taught Hampshire College Butchers the Psychology Classics, where we replicated several classic psychology studies with only two weeks of time allotted to complete each, and somehow succeeded. These replications were real contributions to the psychology literature, and some of them even had larger sample sizes than the originals.
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
eriously, Hampshire alumni are often surprised when they take their first Ph.D. seminar, because it’s identical to the classes they were taking at Hampshire, only slower and easier.
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
because of its insanely high grad school placement rate (an average 8.4 out of every 100 Hampshire alums earn research doctorates, placing Hampshire in the top 1.4% of colleges nationwide),
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
“to know is not enough”.
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
Any system that is not explicitly pro-Weird Nerd will turn anti-Weird Nerd pretty quickly.”
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
faculty were able to teach whatever they wanted
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
Better Teaching Is Available
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
In contrast, Hampshire students make knives. Sometimes professionally, like Emiliano Carrillo, who you may have seen on season 3 of Forged in Fire. They can fix a power hammer, they can lay a bead, they can cut a lime. (Specialization is for insects.) They can even sell hot dogs out of the window of their first-floor dorm room. The senior thesis that every Hampshire student has to complete to graduate demands that you do something real, even if it sucks. Not write about something real. Do it.
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
It doesn’t make sense when you don’t have grades. Submit something mid, who cares. Your eval will say, this student’s writing was mid.
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
“Yes they are really like that,” I said. “They are all like that.”
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
So he transferred to Hampshire, where no one would keep him from working as fast as he wanted.
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
Hampshire has had a high transfer rate, especially in the last decade,
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
STEM research opportunities has never gotten enough credit
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
It is one of the few colleges on earth that still has a fully equipped machine shop that any undergraduate can walk in and use.
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
Students who thrive at Hampshire are a specific type who find conventional academic structures frustrating because conventional coursework moves too slowly.
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
you can often get a good grade simply by avoiding attention
Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
It is a little annoying that there aren’t any signs on the toilet doors, so it would be tempting to put up a sign. But you have to think about the second-order consequences, and if you do that, you realize that toilet signs work against the aims of this community.
How can we rejuvenate the social fabric?
Working with people you really respect, and are secretly worried are much better than you and will figure out how dumb you are, is the best.
principles - Nabeel S. Qureshi
Doing things is energizing, wasting time is depressing. You don’t need that much ‘rest’.
principles - Nabeel S. Qureshi
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”
The Inside Story Of Leverage Research 1.0
Find out how to fight animal cruelty, without changing your life 👉
Offset your diet's impact on animals - FarmKind
Your preferences do not need to be legible to be valid, and you should never feel like you need to justify or defend them to others. Models and predictions, certainly! Actions even more so, if they affect other people! But again, things you want are just extensions of positive and negative valence qualia. "I like vanilla ice cream" and "I dislike chocolate ice cream" are not a matter of rationality or irrationality, and neither are any other preferences you have.
You are not too "irrational" to know your preferences. — EA Forum
No, he cannot tune out the garbage.
Miniver Cheevy: Scott Alexander Siskind & Slate Star Codex
I signed up to do a writing residency. I did not sign up for this shit. This is real work and it ain’t my job—shit, maybe it should be.
Genderslop and Astroturf - Anna Mattinger
“This community desperately needs something like HR, and doesn’t seem to have anything approaching it.”
Genderslop and Astroturf - Anna Mattinger
I regretted what I’d packed. Clothes that would’ve been a nothingburger to wear at home—that no one would consider “skimpy”, draw inferences from, or take me less seriously for—took on a new valence here. At Lighthaven, everything I wore felt like a politicized choice to either capitulate, or default to defiance: fuck it, I’m gonna wear this anyway. I relearned self-consciousness: tens of thousands of people have seen me naked.
Genderslop and Astroturf - Anna Mattinger
“What OMB is proposing is not a reform of grants management. It is a complete political control apparatus layered over every stage of the federal science funding lifecycle,”
White House proposes new rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants
“We warned of this exact form of government overreach in science a year ago,” says Colette Delawalla, founder of the science advocacy group Stand Up for Science. “It replaces expertise with political appointees, globally decouples the U.S. and completely guts our scientific ecosystem.”
White House proposes new rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants
These proposed Office of Management and Budget regulations would render the federal research grant review process opaque
White House proposes new rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants