I want to share an article a friend of mine sent to me. She lurks here and I
occasionally give her those friendly kicks that I offer my friends in the PhD
process to keep them going.

http://www.decisionsciences.org/DecisionLine/Vol32/32_3/32_3phd.pdf

I usually tell people to start working on their dissertations from day one, use
all course assignments along the way to prepare sections of their dissertations
or publications, and to do their best to herd the cats they have on their
committees - this article goes into more detail and I think it is useful not
just for those in the PhD trajectory but for those of us in other roles as well.

It is easy to imagine, because we are one and the systems we are in involve many
competing demands, to assume that we are going to be buffeted by the winds
around us - and there is some truth in that - but failing to have a clear focus
for our own work is a far greater problem than the competing demands from the
environment...

If we know what our real focus is and work hard at it - we run a pretty good
chance of achieving it - but even if we try to achieve the demands we perceive
from the environment - which have little to do, if they are not actually
antithetical to the achievement of our own goals, the likelihood of achieving
them is pretty slim.

We can try to meet the needs of all our students - and that is desirable - but
not all students know what they want or need so we are likely going to fail to
meet some of our students needs regardless of how much effort we expend.

Likewise, we can try to meet the needs of our colleagues - but the same
applies...

We can try to meet the needs of superiors in admin capacities - but that is also
probably going to be doomed to failure...

So, there is a min-max solution that is desirable - we want to maximize our gain
(meeting our own realistic goals and expectations, and minimize the number of
people we are going to disappoint. But we are unlikely to achieve optimal gains
and minimal dissatisfactions on the part of others - so we just have to live
with it.

I just remembered my response to John Phillips post about the nursing student in
the Reader's Digest... We train students to assume that their inability to keep
up with their nursing studies is a personal fault. This helps keep nurses
mollified in the workplace when excessive demands are made on them. But it is
also what we do with our peer nursing faculty members and ourselves. The
problems of a nursing shortage - those that are even amenable to reduction as a
result of increasing throughput of nursing students, are complex and market
forces play a significant role - if there is really a demand for more nurses,
market nursing salaries should compensate people for going to nursing school and
nursing faculty salaries ought to be growing by leaps and bounds to attract more
people to teach in a market sustainable way.

While it is a hallmark of disciplines like nursing and social work to seek to
correct societal ills by producing more of themselves, the periodic
retrenchments are a direct effect of ignoring the sensitivities to market
conditions. We are, I believe, at a pivotal moment in time when technological
advances will dramatically reduce/alter the need for the kinds of nurses we have
been producing and if we fail to anticipate the next wave of change we will
likely be dooming nursing for another generation...

So, perhaps we ought to be thinking - given the inevitability of failing on some
fronts - what are the fronts we are willing to fail on???

bear


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