u/101010110101101111

Folks - the course was on the History of Propaganda and its Contemporary Iterations.

Time for a long walk.

Edited to add because I got time (and found a bench):
The framing that general/humanities courses are useless for STEM students assumes that technical skill exists in a vacuum, and history has shown over and over that it doesn't. The engineers who designed the Therac-25 radiation machine killed patients because nobody on the team had been trained to think about how human beings actually interact with systems under pressure. The physicists at Los Alamos split the atom and then spent the rest of their lives wrestling with what they had done, because the technical problem turned out to be the easy part. Today's STEM graduates are building algorithms that decide who gets a loan, who gets parole, and whose face a camera recognizes, and the people writing that code are making moral, historical, and political decisions whether they realize it or not. A coder who has never read a page of history is not a neutral technician. They are someone making consequential choices with no framework for understanding the consequences.

Beyond the ethics, there is the simple matter of competence. STEM work requires writing grant proposals, communicating findings to non-specialists, leading teams of human beings, navigating institutions, and persuading people. Every senior scientist will tell you the bottleneck in their career was never the math. It was the writing, the politics, the ability to read a room. Humanities courses are where you build those muscles.

Further-bleeping-more, the entire premise that a degree should only teach you what is "relevant to your job" misunderstands what a university is. A university is not a vocational training center. If all you want is to be trained for a specific job, trade schools and bootcamps exist and are often cheaper and faster. The university promises something different: a person who can think across domains, situate their work in a longer human story, and recognize that the problems worth solving are rarely contained within a single discipline.

So, miss me with that bull.

I'm hoping to get some insight from others who may have navigated federal or federally-affiliated hiring processes.

I recently went through a competitive application process for a position at a NOAA-affiliated institution and made it to the final round as a top candidate. I was then informed that, while they want to move forward with me, a qualification issue with the position as written is preventing them from extending an offer. This qualification was not listed as a requirement in the original posting, which raises some questions for me about how positions like this are structured and vetted before they go public.

The path forward, as it was explained to me, involves a new position being posted, a new application, a new interview process, and then a new decision period. I have a lot of respect for the team and the work, so I want to approach this with an open mind, but I also want to be realistic.

For those familiar with this kind of hiring environment: is this a known procedural occurrence, or is it more of a soft "no" dressed up in bureaucratic language? I want to make an informed decision about whether to re-engage with the process. Any perspective from people who have been through something similar, on either side of the table, would be genuinely appreciated.

I'm revising my syllabus for undergrad courses and want to make my policies as clear and unambiguous as possible. I'm looking for advice on: how specific should policies be? (specific percentages, exact deadlines, hard deadlines vs. flexibility?) What language actually prevents misunderstandings vs. just makes things wordy? Which policies do you find students actually follow vs. which ones get negotiated away? Any policies you've revised after realizing they created problems?

Been seeing some jobs posted with a short application window - does it make sense to apply to them or are these likely to be internal hires or something?

I applied to 1 and made it through the screening to then never hear back.