On Wednesday I am going to take a crack at organizing these questions into topics, subtopics, and talk pages. If anyone would like to collaborate (in person) in that process, please send me an email (arc2129@columbia.edu) and we can figure out a time and place. Hopefully, once this list is a bit more manageable, we can all collaborate on getting some answers - particularly to those pressing questions about registering for classes, the writing competition, and using the summer effectively. -- AdamCarlis 08 May 2008

It would be productive to first construct categories into which we can sort out the topics and subtopics. I guess I will start, but please add on because I cannot be as complete and thorough as possible right now. -- JesseCreed - 10 May 2008

1. Professional Goals and Skills
a. Short-term goals
b. Long-term goals
c. Productivity Skills

2. Academic Goals and Skills
a. Courses
b. Journals

A resonating comment from the April 9 lecture:

The consequence, again, that I’ve seen, is that people decompose the question, "How do I use my skills to have a good life?" into a series of competing questions: Do "I use my skills to get … a meaningful life? paid enough? achieve a work-life balance with respect to the non-work parts of my life I care about?"

I see these categories as being counterproductive to our purpose, which is to view seemingly separate phenomena as wholes.

-- AndrewGradman - 15 May 2008

Andrew, I don't disagree with you comment, but with almost 200 discrete questions I think there must be some organizational scheme for us to effectively work on different people's issues. I am not wedded to the scheme I proposed. If you have a different way of organizing the questions and are willing to put the time into doing so, I would be willing to help.

-- AdamCarlis - 15 May 2008

perhaps moving all of the questions onto one page, but keeping the formatting of separate sections would solve your concern? My concern initially was that doing so would create such a gigantic page that it would be difficult to navigate.

What do people think?

-- AdamCarlis - 15 May 2008

I agree with Adam - a mass of questions are not going to be helpful. While I appreciate not wanting to draw artificial lines, there is no way we can work with so many questions without imposing some structure.

I think the structure is good. I might make the titles a little more specific: "Short-term goals" into something like "Jobs after law school," and long term goals into something like "Possible career paths." I think it would keep things more on track and functional, even if it necessitated the formation of another category or two...

Let me know if you want to split up the organization work, and I will take a few topics

-- TheodoreSmith - 16 May 2008

Ted,

I organized the questions into 10 topics and posted the topics in the forum. What do you think of that structure? Clearly it isn't great since you didn't see it! Perhaps everything on one page with a strong TOC would be better? Maybe we can get that page stickied on the top? Any thoughts?

-- AdamCarlis - 16 May 2008

I think having all the questions on one page with a TOC would be more valueable than having to navigate around to different pages to see the different topics. A single page will encourage browsing of topics that people may not have thought they were interested in, and also be better for addressing Andrews concern about splitting up the topics. If we want to keep the multiple page format, then we should put the list with links found on QuestionsThatNeedAnswers on the top of each one of the pages.

I also think that perhaps there should be a link to the final revision of all the unedited quesions. That page is here.

Also, I added a link from the QuestionsThatNeedAnswers page to here to encourage further discussion. -- JustinColannino - 16 May 2008

I think that is a good idea. Let's wait before making any changes to give folks a chance to weigh in. Perhaps Saturday afternoon we can go with whatever the consensus seems to be.

-- AdamCarlis - 16 May 2008

I am going to take silence as consent to Justin's suggestion and move all of the questions onto one page. Given people's lack of participation in the separate threads, this, at least, won't discourage participation. I will keep the old threads in case people want to revert back.

-- AdamCarlis - 18 May 2008

I like the way you have split it up, Adam. Now all we need are answers...

-- TheodoreSmith - 20 May 2008