SMP poster/pizza memories

Thanks, everyone, for celebrating the unfolding successes of our seniors.

As always, the evening was filled with passionate conversation about year-long senior projects, the merits of sausage pizza vs. vegetable-covered pizza, and the extraordinary speed with which overexcited scholars can increase the temperature of the lounge from a cool 65 degrees to what felt like a sauna.

Juniors all know, now, that you have to take the prosem in Spring, right?? RIGHT!

Look at those overheated brains at even more length in the facebook album.

SMP poster presentation, Thursday, Oct. 29

From Bjorn Krondorfer:

Join the PHIL/RELG department and your peers for the annual SMP poster session

Thursday Oct 29,
4:30-6pm
in the RELG/PHIL lounge of Anne Arundel

Every Fall, the department of Philosophy and Religious Studies hosts a St. Mary’s Project poster session to showcase the progress of the current SMP students and introduce to current majors and minors in Religious Studies and in Philosophy the beauty of engaging in a project.

Pizza and soft drinks will be available.

At the end of the session, starting at around 5:20, all current PHIL and RELG juniors are invited (and strongly encouraged) to stay for an informal talk about SMPs.

From the APA website, courtesy of Michael Taber:

Philosophy Majors and Jobs: Every year around graduation time we hear the reports of average starting salary of college graduates by major. This data is often used to discourage people from majoring in disciplines like philosophy. Now, however, PayScale.com has released data showing average mid-career salaries of college graduates by major. This data makes the philosophy major look like a much more prudential choice. PayScale.com’s current data on “Best Undergrad College Degrees By Salary (www.payscale.com/2008-best-colleges/degrees.asp) lists starting median salary and mid-career (15.5 years after graduation) median salary for 50 different university majors. Of the fifty, the philosophy major ranks sixteenth in mid-career median salary. Seven of the majors ranking above philosophy are various engineering fields.Of particular interest is the comparison with Business Management. The starting median salary for Business Management majors is $43,000, while the starting median salary for Philosophy majors is $39,900. By mid-career, however, the median salary for Business Management majors has risen to $72,100, while the median salary for Philosophy majors has jumped to $81,200.

SMP students, start your engines!

Sure, you've all been working on your SMP all summer, right? But now it's time to do the real work. Anyone doing an SMP has to meet with their mentor the first week of school, fill out an Action Plan (see the link to download it at the bottom of this page), and set up their schedule of meetings and writing deadlines. Our midterm reports on your progress are due October 19, so aim for a body of writing you can get done in just one month!

If it helps, make a syllabus, just like your professors do. Yes, that's right, say it in Darth Vader's voice: The student has become the teacher. Except you only have to teach one class, in which you're the only student. You lucky duck.

Undergraduate Philosophy Conferences which LIVE!

Philosophy conferences, they come and go. The old list maintained on Earlham’s site includes a lot of dead links, so for those of you really married to inefficient web searches, try Trinity U’s much more recently updated site.

Here are the highlights if you want to be spared web searches, alphabetically:

Arizona held their Third Annual Southwest Student Philosophy Conference on April 4, 2009, if you are dying to trek across the country.

Aporia, the Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Philosophy, in conjunction with the Ethics Institute and the Dartmouth Philosophy Department, hosts the annual Dartmouth Undergraduate Philosophy Conference. Or at least, it’s annual starting in 2008, since the second was just held April 10th-12th, 2009, on the theme of Philosophy and Religion.

The 21st annual Butler Undergraduate Research Conference (URC) was held on April 17, 2009, so that’s still going strong. It’s large and cross-disciplinary.

**Kennesaw State University’s Philosophy Student Association (KSU PSA) held their 6th annual North Georgia Student Philosophy conference in 2009. **St. Mary’s students have participated in this one before, even won awards.

There’s always the Midsouth Philosophy Conference and Undergraduate Philosophy Conference at the University of Memphis. The thirty-fourth annual Midsouth Conference is scheduled for Fri., Mar. 5 through Sat., Mar. 6, 2010, at The University of Memphis. The only person I know in our department who's presented at Midsouth is me!, but I liked it.

Ohio State University held their second annual Undergraduate Philosophy Conference on May 1st and 2nd, 2009. According to their site, they’re not just for commies, anymore.

Pacific University Undergraduate Philosophy Conference is an annual, two-day conference held each spring, and the 13th Annual Pacific Conference was Friday April 17 through Saturday April 18, 2009.

**The 14th annual SUNY Oneonta Undergraduate Philosophy Conference was held April 16-18, 2009. St. Mary’s students have participated in this one before. **Our students have presented and won awards here, too.

There's Aporia, and then there's Aporia

Okay, enough with the emails, I should have noted that there are two Aporia journals. The one I listed originally is published by BYU. They're accepting submissions right now, actually, and up to Sep.25 for the next issue. If you really want to look philosophically engaged while writing only short pieces, note that they are "soliciting short (one to four pages) critical noticies responding to articles in the current and recent issues of Aporia." Let us not neglect Aporia out of Dartmouth, however, which publishes issues twice a year. Since their spring issue is always based on their conference proceedings, I'll cross-list the Dartmouth-Aporia in the list of undergraduate conferences. (And where might that list be, you ask? Look in the labels for "conferences.")

Awards and brags, part two

If you weren't at the Awards Convocation a couple weeks ago, you might be dying to know how many philosophy and religion folks were honored.

Let us no longer keep it a secret! If you didn't know she was excellent already, the Homer Dodge Award for Excellence in Teaching went to Prof. Sybol Cook Anderson. I hear quite the cheer went up when she was announced. The Religious Studies award was granted to Louis Ritzinger, who was trapped, yes, trapped in Paris and could not attend the ceremony. (I know, my heart just bleeds for him.) Double-major Jen Yogi was honored with the Department Award in Political Science, and if you're thinking, "What, she only won one award? What an underachiever," then you'll be pleased to hear she was also given the Community Service Award.

Between this post and the last one, we sure sound busy. If I'm forgetting anyone, let me know!

The 1st annual end-of-year Awards and Brags

Congratulations to all of our graduating majors and minors! Okay, faculty have been holding this in as long as we can, but we can't contain ourselves anymore. So as the 2008-2009 school year gallops to a finish, it's time to roll out the announcements of our students' awards, accomplishments, and graduate school plans.

Our congratulations again to Zachary Cooke for winning the department's Alexander Fraser Award, $430 for scholarly travel which will relate to his SMP, and Megan Roper, for winning the Philosophy and Religious Studies Award, $300 toward the cost of attending a conference in the U.K. They were presented with their awards at the lunch break during SMP day. We applaud Scott Zuke for winning our William James Prize, a book award for a student who demonstrates superior understanding of philosophy in written and oral work in the discipline.

We're also happy to announce that our students are taking us seriously about getting out to academic conferences and presenting their work! We commend Rhett Greenfield for his accomplishment in having a paper accepted to the SUNY-Oneonta conference, and both Rhett and Will Hasek for their acceptances to the 6th annual North Georgia student philosophy conference, at Kennesaw State University. At the latter, Will Hasek won the Best Undergraduate Paper. Colleagues at unrelated conferences have been randomly telling us they're impressed with our students.

On the graduate school application front, the Reverend Doctor Paul Lemley was accepted to the MA program in philosophy at Brock University, where we expect he'll likely be a teaching assistant right away. Good luck, Paul! Ah, to be a teaching assistant again. That crazy cat, Michael Correll, is opting for graduate school in computer science, and leaning toward University of Wisconsin. At last, I have a Badger among our alums!

Updates and additions welcome, since I'll happily edit this post as information rolls in...

We're doin' the Mentor Shuffle

It's no Curly Shuffle, but we're doing something almost as rocking. The following should be the final word on who has which mentor in fall, now that I am mentor to Rich Kolm.

RELG:

Megan Acquaviva: Katharina von Kellenbach
Zachary Cooke: Bjorn Krondorfer
Louis Ritzinger: Dan Meckel
Noel Safford: Devorah Schoenfeld

PHIL/RELG

Dan Schell: Michael Taber

PHIL

Jessica Earlbeck (PHIL/POSC): Kate Norlock
Rhett Greenfield: Michael Taber
Will Hasek: Brad Park
Sydnee Hinton: Sybol Anderson
Richard Kolm: Kate Norlock
Peter Madrodt: Brad Park
Bill Rader: Sybol Anderson
Aaron Siegel: Kate Norlock

Undergraduate Journals that AREN'T dead

The students who actually aim to have a job after college are getting wise to the goodness of publishing. It turns out, though, that just googlin' around is not doing it for the bright young things, as half the pages out there are dead. So here's my rolling, mostly accurate list of currently active publications. I'll update this periodically, so if months go by and you're looking for an update, just hit Journals in the list of labels to the right.

Which one should you try first? Popular opinion online seems to be with Prolegomena, and I know Stance provides written feedback to both accepted and rejected papers, which is good. But there's no consensus out there. Good luck!

Aporia
Cogito
Dialogue at St. Mary’s University
Dualist at Stanford
Episteme
Harvard Review of Philosophy
Interlocutor
Janua Sophia
Prolegomena
Stance
Stoa

Have a good year, Schroeder

Welcome to the blogosphere, scholars. My first duty as the department reporter is to announce that yes, students, you're not seeing John Schroeder on the Schedule of Classes for fall because he's on sabbatical for all of the next academic year! He's got to travel the globe and, you know, work really hard. And not just on his tan, I mean, he's really working. If you think it's so easy, you go to Thailand!