While it left very little time for personal processing, I'm proud that our leadership team worked for hours last night to prepare guidance for staff today. These are a few of the points. (LPS educators, your building teams have shared/will be sharing more specifics!)

Dear postgraduate students

Everyone says selecting your supervisor(s) will make or break obtaining your degree with a sound mind. This is true. So here are a few of my own tips on just how to do that. I hope it helps.

(Thread)

1. Know what you need from the get-go. As people, and as students, we need different things to succeed. Ensure you know what this is for you and make your search and eventual selection of a supervisor based on that.

2. How do you know which academic does what? Either email a number of potential academics or organise a quick in-person/online meeting with them to discuss their respective research interests. You can either align yourself to these or ask if they’re willing to take you on but...

...supervise a topic outside of their own research interests. It’s not unheard of but just depends on them.

3. Ask them about their supervision style, what works for them and assess whether that sounds like it would work for you. You can love their research topics but if you feel like they won’t be a good enough supervisor, find someone else. Remember you’re going to be spending...

I often say to grad students: a reasonable thing to aim for in grad school is ~2-3 essentially complete and posted papers, alongside your JMP. This often looks like your JMP, plus your 2nd-yr paper, a paper from RA'ing for a faculty, or from working with classmates

Of course, some people get top jobs with only one very, very good paper. This is very risky though - you don't know ex-ante whether your paper will be very good! Most schools care about productivity, so having a couple of completed papers helps

Even if the papers are not change-the-world papers. Also, it exercises your paper-writing muscle. Not everyone comes into grad school ready to write ECMA's!

One "mistake" I sometimes see is some students don't take the 2nd year paper seriously enough. That's basically your only big milestone other than your JMP, so if all the time you put into the 2nd year paper doesn't produce a draft, that's a pretty big time sink

Another mistake, ironically, is taking field class paper requirements too seriously. If you take 3 field classes a quarter, 3 quarters, that's 12 papers! There's no way you can write a different one for each class

This thread is for parents of teenagers. I have something for you: the first chapter of @ronlieber’s THE PRICE YOU PAY FOR COLLEGE. Because ye gods, here’s what we and our kids are facing.

Beyond obvious changes, like $$$ tuition prices, the system has changed from when we were in school. Nearly all colleges use so-called “merit-aid” to pay kids for good grades.

This is NOT need-based financial aid, and it’s not about expanding college access for the poor... it's an arms race by schools scrambling for US News rankings.

Tuition list prices are misleading at this point. College seats are more like airline seats, and your kid's actual price is calculated based on everything from his zip code... SAT scores... how much interest he and his cohort have shown in school X (yes they can figure that out.)

Ron has seen NYC high school classes in which three kids were offered admission to the same small school at three different prices-- and *none* of them had applied for need-based financial aid!

Now, what exactly is an applied epidemiologist, and why are they needed? In the late 90s- early 2000's there were a series of articles in AJPH, AJE, JECH, and IJE dedicated to answering these questions. I'll focus on Stephen Thacker's review.

He states, “The applied epidemiologist is by definition an activist, moving rapidly from findings to policy, putting epi knowledge to good use. The 21st century epi must do all these things while maintaining a foundation of high-quality epi research and practice.”

Susser warns the field of what he considers “the black box paradigm… the current international focus on risk factor epidemiology.” He advocates for expanding our academic training to include socializing epis to “keep the improvement of the public’s health as a primary value”

Morabia argued that epidemiology has historically found its balance in the tension between the search for causal relations and the improvement of public health; overemphasis on either perspective puts epidemiology at risk of losing its value.

How does this play out in real life? I’ve been an applied epi for 13 years, working mainly in local, state, and federal health agencies. My work has focused on conducting cool analysis that lead to policy or systemic change.

What is the Quincy Institute?
What was the purpose of its establishment?
Who is the Mastermind behind it ?
I’ll explain in the following that Quincy institute was founded by the most powerful and famous Islamic regime lobbyist @tparsi based in the United States of America .

1. @QuincyInst for Responsible Statecraft
An American think tank founded in 2019
Location: Washington DC, USA
The initial budget of this institution; Includes half a million dollars from the Soros Foundation (George Soros)
And the Cook Foundation (Charles J. Cook).

2- George Soros,Hungarian-American businessman and a Billionaire, investor, political activist, and an author.Soros is the Chairman of the Board of the Open Society Foundation and Soros Capital Management and is the founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Soros Capital.

3- Charles J.Koch, a businessman, entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is the Chairman and CEO of Cook Industries.
He is the eldest child of Fr. Cook, the founder of Cook Industries, member of the Cook family and one of the main inventors of the new gasoline refining technology.

4- As described by the founders of Quincy; The purpose of the Quincy Institute (Research Institute and Office of Studies and Research) is to promote ideas to redirect the American foreign policy from endless wars around the world .