Mental health, feedback for the boss, doing hard things, and more!
RWL #362
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! I’m back from Portland (Maine, not the other Portland; pic above is Portland at night) and had a great time at the New England Alliance fall conference.
I had a chance to give a brief presentation on emerging adulthood, the school-to-work transition, and its relevance to the long-term care workforce. I’ll probably make a YouTube of the presentation when things slow down a bit and share it. I actually brought a whole team with me to give a 3-hour symposium on things related to long-term care.
We had representatives from nursing, recreational therapy, social work, Northeast Passage, and the UNH Institute for Excellence in Health and Social Systems. And our college dean. It was fun to hear each of them speak from their different disciplinary lenses.
First round of exams in my classes are coming up next week. Students are starting to pay attention. Let’s hope they have been keeping up!
I think this weekend’s essay will be titled, “For everything else, there’s Wal-Mart.” See you Sunday! As usual, willing good for all of you!
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Read
What: Junxiu Liu, PhD, Zhiyang Zhou, PhD, Xi Cheng, MPH, and Nita Vangeepuram, MD, MPH, Geographic and Sociodemographic Variations in Prevalence of Mental Health Symptoms Among US Youths, 2022
Why: Short academic paper looking at correlations between various demographic and economic factors and the prevalence of mental illness in young people.
Some interesting correlations:
Non-hispanic, white children had highest prevalence
Children of college-educated parents had higher prevalence than children from families without college educated parents
Children with food insecurity also had highest rates of mental illness
I couldn’t get to the appendix, but apparently New Hampshire has the highest rate of all of the states (46.4%). Not the superlative our great state is looking for. Meanwhile, Florida had the lowest rate (27.9%). (Those stats from here.)
Other interesting details in the article.
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What: WSJ, How Candid Can You Really Be With Your Boss?
Why: This is a short piece. A couple of key points:
Use concrete observations without summative judgment.
Clarify what they are looking for and how it will be used.
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Watch
What: Conor Neill, Setting Coherent Goals: Learn to do Hard Things (love the journey) (4 min)
Why: The pursuit of challenging goals transforms us. The value is mostly in the journey, not the goal itself. Quick listen.
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Listen
What: The Daily, Is College Worth It? (28 min)
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/20/podcasts/the-daily/is-college-worth-it.html
Why: The Daily is a NYT production. This is a good investigation into why parents are starting to steer their kids away from college. The bottom line is the price of college has risen so much that the additional earnings one gets from a degree now may not outweigh the cost of college.
Factors like major and ranking of the college still matter. But this is exactly what I have been thinking for a long time. There are things that one gets out a college education that don’t have immediate economic value in the sense of higher earnings. Like actually being educated. But students typically resist being educated. All the incentives are to do as little as possible to get the desired grade. And this isn’t just at state schools like UNH. Most young people just aren’t all that curious about all the books and articles that get put in front of them. It’s the rare student who willingly reads anything beyond what is required. At the graduate level, I found students had more curiosity. On the flip side of that, you don’t need to go to college to get a good education if you are curious. It’s just easier. But with the internet and libraries, you have access to everything you need if you want to be an educated person.
Sigh. Makes me feel old.
(hey kid - get off my lawn!)
(Thanks to VB for the pointer)
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What: a16z Podcast, The Engineering Challenge of Rapidly Reusable Rockets (56 min)
https://a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/the-engineering-challenge-of-rapidly-reusable-rockets-UUCEmmiA
Why: I used to not think much about the reusable rockets Blue Origin (Bezos) and SpaceX (Musk) have been developing. But it appears their innovations have driven down the cost of launching a satellite dramatically. That means as we continue to drive these costs down, we will be able to have more satellites, which will make access to satellite services less costly. Think satellite phones in everyone’s pocket instead of relying on cell towers. But this technology also gives us an advantage in space for defense. If we can blanket a contested area with satellites, we can ensure greater accuracy, coordination, and communication - vital for command and control to win battles. This is very interesting.