Archive: Apr 2019

Today is Earth Day. CityLab has re-posted an interesting article from 2015, “How the First Earth Day Changed How We View Cities.” Check it out!

When hiring faculty or staff one of the final steps of the process is checking references. One frequent question is, “does the candidate have any weaknesses?” Recently an answer to this question when I called a reference was “when younger, she tended to take on too much responsibility — but always met her obligations! As she gained more experience she learned to strategically say no to requests when appropriate, or to delegate tasks more effectively.” That “weakness” is actually a strength…I’ll have to use it the next time I’m serving as a reference for someone!

Pacific Standard magazine has a new series on understanding Generation Z. The intro to the series notes,

We hear a lot about how Gen Z represents a new kind of generation: digital natives drastically different even from Millennials, who already had the Boomers scratching their heads. Are they really any different? How have they been shaped by—and responded to—new technology, recent history, and a shifting economy?

This project—a collaboration between Pacific Standard and Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS)—draws on Stanford’s “Understanding iGen,” for which researchers did deep interviews with college students in the United States and the United Kingdom, while also drawing on behavioral data, consumer trends, and a series of surveys. Through publishing the results of these efforts, we hope to approximate a portrait of this generation, and an idea of where they’re leading us.

Each week, we’ll publish a new series of stories looking at a particular area of focus in our efforts, considered from different perspectives. Sign up for our daily newsletter to follow along and let us know your thoughts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Should be interesting…even though my generation — Generation X — was skipped in the intro; it seems that Gen X is the omitted generation.