Quotes About Graduate students

After the Vietnam War, a lot of us [antiwar graduate students] didn't just crawl back into our library cubicles; we stepped into academic positions. With the war over, our visibility was lost, and it seemed for awhile–to the unobservant–that we had disappeared. Now we have tenure, and the work of reshaping the universities has begun in earnest.2

For example, if you believe that 3% of graduate students are enrolled in computer science (the base rate), and you also believe that the description of Tom W is 4 times more likely for a graduate student in that field than in other fields, then Bayes's rule says you must believe that the probability that Tom W is a computer scientist is now 11%. If the base rate had been 80%, the new degree of belief would be 94.1%.

She has decided all university campuses are alike- the sense of possibility and stasis. She thinks this too: all graduate students, if you look closely enough, exude the same aura of privilege and poverty.

Behind Hagedorn's back, Kawakita had nicknamed the administrator "Stumpy." Only Margo and a few of Frock's other graduate students had known the name referred not to Hagedorn's diminutive size, but to Stumpiniceps troglodytes, a particularly mundane kind of bottom-feeder that populated the oceans of the Carboniferous period.

And then there is Pythagoras. The legend is that the founder of theoretical mathematics was so outraged when one of his students, the haplessly gifted Hippasus, discovered irrational numbers21 that he sent the poor fellow out on a raft to drown, initiating a venerable tradition of professors mistreating their graduate students.

By 1954, as an assistant professor with a group of three graduate students, I was able to initiate more complex experimental projects, dealing with the structure, stereochemistry and synthesis of natural products. As a result of the success of this research, I was appointed in 1956, at age twenty-seven, as professor of chemistry.

They're not people at all, they're graduate students, there's a difference. They fuck like bunnies and drink like fish and stay up late worrying that somebody somewhere is getting something that they're not getting. - Erika Jones

The thing that's depressing is teaching graduate students today and discovering that they don't know simple elemental facts of grammar. They really do not know how to scan a line; they've never been taught to scan a line. Many of them don't know the difference between 'lie' and 'lay,' let alone 'its' and 'it's.' And they're in graduate school!

Tracking the intellectual advancement of several hundred graduate students in the sciences over the course of four years, its authors found that the development of crucial skills such as generating hypotheses, designing experiments, and analyzing data was closely related to the students' engagement with their peers in the lab, and not to the guidance they received from their faculty mentors.

Very few parents keep up with who the top professors are or whose classes their kids are taking, partially because most undergraduates interact more commonly with graduate students.

The most important thing is to recognize that research is our seed corn. It's a national security priority. It's not just a way to have enough going on that graduate students can do their Ph.D.s and scientists can publish. We have to do research, or we'll fall behind the rest of the world.

Economics graduate students are far more likely to free-ride than other students.

Evolutionary psychology has often been a field whose most prominent practitioners get embroiled in controversy - witness the 2010 case of Harvard professor Marc Hauser, whose graduate students came forward to say he'd been faking evidence for years.

I expressed skepticism, in the first chapter, about the utility of time machines in historical research. I especially advised against graduate students relying on them, because of the limited perspective you tend to get from being plunked down in some particular part of the past, and the danger of not getting back in time for your orals.

I had wanted to write The Possessed as fiction, but everyone told me that no one would read a novel about graduate students. It seems almost uncivilized to tell someone writing a novel, "No, you have to call this a memoir."

I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.

Every year, I have my graduate students read the great works of history, from classical times to the present. They gamely tackle Tacitus, ponder Plutarch, plow through Gibbon. Then they get to Thomas Carlyle and feel like Dorothy when she touched down in Technicolor Oz.

I think there are ways that graduate students can fact-check their work. I think there are ways that we can do this that don't require massive amounts of resources.

I had wanted to write 'The Possessed' as fiction, but everyone told me that no one would read a novel about graduate students. It seems almost uncivilized to tell someone writing a novel, 'No, you have to call this a memoir.'

those with the least training (graduate students) were just as accurate as the fully trained ones (paid pros)

I used to ask my graduate students to submit a semester-long goal the second week of school. After doing this for years, I knew I could expect 90 percent of the goals to be unrealistic. Setting realistic goals is a skill and a prerequisite for hope.

I advise my graduate students to pick a research problem that is important (so that it will matter if it is solved), but one for which they have a secret weapon that gives some prospect of success. Why a secret weapon? Because if the problem is important, other researchers as intelligent as my students will be trying to solve it; my students are likely to come in first only by having access to some knowledge or research methods the others do not have.

An intense temperament has convinced me to teach not only from books but from what I have learned from experience. So I try to impress upon young doctors and graduate students that tumultuousness, if coupled to discipline and a cool mind, is not such a bad sort of thing.

I have graduate students who have developed this ability to love and want to perfect it. Those are the students I spend a lot of time with because at this time they need that.