Challenges in my discipline

Sociology is currently facing lots of challenges and situations to improve, related to areas like technology, social matters and education. Some of them are getting ideas and attempts to solve them.

In technology, the challenges are related to methodology instruments. Sociologists in general have several instruments to produce and process information, and they're very sofisticated and developed, but only who has the money to afford them can access to manipulate them. Sociologists who has no budget or sociology students like us must resign and use old technologies, with less options to work with, slower and more deficiente progrmas, like old versions of SPSS. The specific problem in our faculty about this specific program is that there are only a few licences to use it, and the courses are generally more numerous than licences that are available. The only solution is to invest in this and pay for more licences. Or use pirate versions, but I thinkthis option is impossible.

In social area, I think is important to be considered the social origin of the students and the schools they come from. In the first years of the career, the differences are important and remarkable. The grades in general (althought, like everithing, there are exceptions) are higher for people who went to private and high society schools. It´s funny to see the differences between knowledges and even in the quantity of books they have read. The challenge could be, in this case, to nivelate the students in the first years. Obviously, this proposal is presented only in the actual educational system`s scenario. If the structural problems of education area solved, this subject would be not a challenge anymore.

In the education area, there are several challenges, most of them are being tackled nowadays, with the carrer profile discusions, the MECESUP program, and the different comissions of students, that are working to propose new teachers and subjects, changes of old teachers and subjects and, the most important, to establish a new carrer profile by general consent. Also, is very important to stimulate and promote the interdiscinplinary team work with the other career in the faculty.