The National Labor Relations Board has conceded the obvious: that graduate students can have two roles at once.
For students, the incentive of pro bono work is obvious: with graduate unemployment at a 17-year high, it's a way to add sparkle to CVs.
A hero of the civil rights movement, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, once said, "Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?'" The answer feels relatively obvious for graduating medical students and for physicians in general, but before you rest on your new laurels, let me share some concerning statistics about physicians -- as citizens.
It might seem obvious, but few graduates seem to do it until they start getting nasty letters from their bank.
Its failure has become obvious: the directionless graduates are dramatic evidence that the long crisis in the legitimization of social hierarchy based on the credentials of an education has come to a head.
This is less obvious for male graduates due to the low proportion of part-time workers in this group.
There are the obvious gains for graduate employability (as some 90% of jobs in the UK require IT competency), student experience (with much of student learning being delivered through virtual learning environments) and, as Dr Abhay Adhikari explores in his blog, there are also personal development gains for students and academics.
"This is very obvious when you graduate college, move to a new town, or pick up a new hobby.
It's not always obvious what career paths graduates who studied an arts or humanities degree can pursue.
Last month, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) released a report* with some grim news that confirmed what is painfully obvious to recent Ph.D. graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields: Unemployment for this cohort is on the rise (at 2.4% in 2010, up nearly a percentage point since 2008).
