Sink or Swim

Williams, T.M., R.W. Davis, L.A. Fuiman, J. Francis, B.L. Le boeuf, M. Horning, J. Calambokidis, andD.A. Croll (2000). Sink or swim Strategies for cost-efficient diving by marine mammals. Science288 133-136. 

W. Sue Shafer, University of California, San Francisco I want to return to the philosophy of how departments view their young, untenured faculty. When I was applying for jobs in academia (I didn t actually go there but ended up going to government), there was a philosophy that the department hired you, but you were on trial. You had to make your own way, and either sink or swim. 

Mentoring and support are extremely important (see Figure 6.15). The faculty have to be willing to help those students who may have a little trouble with some of the courses at the start of their careers. If a student wants to do chemistry and if he or she has had some experience and has been nurtured at a good school, the faculty have to be willing to help them along. In short, the sink or swim attitude has proven to be very counterproductive. 

The college or university chemistry teacher is also ready to vote for having all his students know how to use the library but there is no agreement on the best way to attain this knowledge. About 400 institutions require an orientation course in the use of the library for some or all students. In fact, this is a common course in high schools, too, and there is a considerable literature on it. One has only to look under the entry, Libraries, instruction and use, in the Education Index to find some hundreds of entries. Such instruction is apparently almost entirely an American development European students learn to use their libraries by the sink-or-swim method. The usual library orientation course is of very general nature and not at all specialized toward chemistry or even science, but it may be supposed to make students library-conscious. Indeed, it made them too much so--critically so--at Maryland, where Wedemeyer (13) conducted a survey, reported in College and Re-... 

The plankton themselves have the ability to leave the waters in which they form (by sinking or swimming). 

Reichhardt, T. Will Souped Up Salmon Sink or Swim. NatureAdB, 10-12 (2000). [A description of genetically modified oversized salmon.]... 

Considers management development as a "sink or swim " situation for the employee... 

The drawbacks to this type of employment were however that they were thrown in at the deep end and it was a case of sink or swim. There was often little structured mentoring and many young professionals tended to learn by their mistakes ... 

The beauty of tumble testing is that it is an all-encompassing test. It is a rock-and-roll, take-no-prisoners, sink-or-swim, do-or-die kind of test. It is the engineering equivalent of playing No-Limit Hold Em poker, looking at your cards, evaluating the bets on the table, and then declaring, I m all in (Tables 5.1-5.2). 

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