Graduate School discussion

Scott Loveridge will present the essentials of graduate school this Friday (October 19) at 2:40 in Dewing 103. Scott is a professor in MSU's department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics and director of the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development. He graduated from Kalamazoo College in 1980.  Many recent K alums have benefited from his advice.

Topics for his session include:

Broad trends in grad education
Why grad school?
How to find a program
Academic vs. professional advanced degrees
Basics of standardized tests for grad school in the social sciences
How admissions committees look at standardized test scores (not as straightforward as you might think)
Pros and cons of “taking a break” from your education
Funding sources
Finding an advisor & advisor relationships
Application best practices & common mistakes
How to structure a visit to programs of interest
Best practices after you are admitted

More information on Scott Loveridge, see his MSU webpage.

He and other alums plan to participate in the CCPD's PDI Networking Reception later that afternoon.

Value of a college education

About a hundred years ago, a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford, John Alexander Smith, got to the nub of the matter.  "Gentlemen," he said to the incoming class (the students were all men in those days), "Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life-- save only this-- that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education."  Americans tend to prefer a two-syllable synonym, bullshit, for the one-syllable Anglicism rot-- and so we might say that the most important thing one can acquire in college is a well-functioning bullshit meter.

Andrew Delbanco
College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be
2012

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Winter Schedule 2013

Our updated plans for Winter:

101 Principles of Economics

150 Principles of Accounting

160 Business Statistics

205 Principles of Management

215 Managerial Accounting

295 Topics: Fiscal and Monetary Policy in Time of Crisis

295 Topics: International Trade

305 Intermediate Microeconomics

3XX Advertising and Promotion

355 Investments

490 Senior Seminar: Innovation