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Study Finds Imposter Syndrome Higher Among First Generation Students

Imposter syndrome describes the unfounded belief that one is unworthy of his or her accomplishments, and according to new research, first-generation college students are more likely to suffer from it.

Elizabeth Canning.
Canning

The study by Elizabeth Canning, assistant professor of psychology at WSU, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, focused on a group of 818 freshmen and sophomore students pursuing science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. The students completed surveys, which included questions surrounding imposter syndrome, immediately after their STEM classes for a two-week period and at the end of the semester.

In classes that students considered highly competitive, first-generation students were more likely to agree with statements such as, “In class, I felt like people might find out that I am not as capable as they think I am.”

However, in classes that students didn’t perceive as competitive, there was no difference in the levels of self-reported imposter syndrome between first- and continuing-generation students.

“We found that when students think their class is competitive, they feel more like an imposter on a day-to-day basis and this is most problematic for first-generation college students,” Canning said.

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PsyPost

U.S. News ranks WSU Global Campus online degrees among nation’s best for 2020

Three online programs at Washington State University have been ranked among the best in the nation by U.S. News & World Report.

WSU is the only university in Washington state to rank in the top 25 of U.S. News’ Best Online Bachelor’s Degree Programs.

WSU’s Global Campus offers 20 undergraduate and 12 graduate degrees in many disciplines, as well as numerous minors and certificates. New degrees this year include a BA in Anthropology, BS in Biology, BA in English, BS in Earth and Environmental Sciences, and BA in Political Science. Additional degree programs are currently in development.

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WSU Insider

Who Killed the Knapp Family?

Across America, working-class people are dying of despair. And we’re still blaming the wrong people.

We Americans are locked in political combat and focused on President Trump, but there is a cancer gnawing at the nation that predates Trump and is larger than him. Suicides are at their highest rate since World War II; one child in seven is living with a parent suffering from substance abuse; a baby is born every 15 minutes after prenatal exposure to opioids; America is slipping as a great power.

We have deep structural problems that have been a half century in the making, under both political parties, and that are often transmitted from generation to generation. Only in America has life expectancy now fallen three years in a row, for the first time in a century, because of “deaths of despair.”

William Julius Wilson.
Wilson

In the 1970s and ’80s, problems in African-American communities were often blamed on a lack of “personal responsibility.” William Julius Wilson, a Harvard sociologist who earned his doctoral degree in sociology at WSU, countered that the true underlying problem was lost jobs, and he turned out to be right. When good jobs left white towns like Yamhill, Oregon, a couple of decades later because of globalization and automation, the same pathologies unfolded there.

Men in particular felt the loss not only of income but also of dignity that accompanied a good job. Lonely and troubled, they self-medicated with alcohol or drugs, and they accumulated criminal records that left them less employable and less marriageable. Family structure collapsed.

It would be easy but too simplistic to blame just automation and lost jobs: The problems are also rooted in disastrous policy choices over 50 years. The United States wrested power from labor and gave it to business, and it suppressed wages and cut taxes rather than invest in human capital, as our peer countries did. As other countries embraced universal health care, we did not; several counties in the United States have life expectancies shorter than those in Cambodia or Bangladesh.

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The New York Times

Remembering Kelvin Lynn

Kelvin Lynn.
Lynn

Eminent Faculty and Regents Professor Kelvin Lynn passed away unexpectedly while skiing in Salt Lake City on Jan. 2, 2020.

Nationally renowned in the fields of materials science, physics, and positron and crystal growing research, Lynn was the Boeing Chair of Advanced Materials Science and a faculty member in both the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He had a wide variety of research interests, including muon, high energy, and atomic physics; antimatter for defects in mono-energetic beams; electronics development; radiation detectors; high-power laser materials; computer modeling and theory development; and materials, including metals and alloys, silicon, silicon carbide, diamond, solar cells, and gemstone-quality synthetic rubies.

Lynn was an international leader in crystal growth, developing methods to produce high-quality crystals used in industry, academia, and federal agencies. Manmade crystals inspired by Lynn’s innovative research power an astonishing range of devices from the sensors that control electronic functions in cars to the semiconductors driving computers and smartphones. In recent years, he and his colleagues made a key advance in cadmium telluride solar cell technology, overcoming a practical voltage limit that had been pursued for six decades.

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WSU Insider

WSU researcher joins international call to halt massive insect decline

From bees to butterflies, ants to wasps, insect populations of all kinds are at risk, according to a growing scientific consensus. Their decline also threatens the many ecosystem services that depend on them, including food production.

Cheryl Schulz.
Schulz

“It’s clear that we’re experiencing massive insect declines both in species and in abundance,” said WSU conservation biologist Cheryl Schultz. “We are becoming increasingly aware that species that were once common across the landscape are now rare.”

To avert this potential disaster, Schultz recently joined more than 70 scientists from 21 countries in issuing a “Road Map for Insect Conservation and Recovery” in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

In their road map, the scientists outlined steps to slow and help reverse the decline in insect populations. They propose immediate “no regret” solutions, steps that can only help insects recover while they work to build more scientific knowledge of the problem. These immediate steps include increasing landscape heterogeneity in agriculture; phasing out synthetic pesticides and fertilizers; and enhancing “citizen science” as a way of obtaining more data on insect diversity and abundance.

Longer term actions include creating large-scale assessments of insect populations, conducting new research to better understand human-caused stressors on insect survival and starting a global monitoring program. (For the full list of solutions see the image at the link below).

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WSU Insider