graduate school: the horror!

recently we were asked to fill out a form concerning our experience in our graduate department. the responses were sometimes uplifting, often funny, and downright depressing at times. here's a sampling of answers. note that i've gone with more funny ones than anything else.. to be honest, there were many happy responses. but those aren't interesting!

update: my sister seema tell's me that my samples below are more depressing than anything.. i tend to think of them as quite amusing. perhaps there's some schadenfreude here

on advising and graduate advisors:

After my advisor received tenure, he stopped showing interest in most of my groups' research projects. It has been very frustrating.

The advisors should at least be living in Berkeley and not in another country! The advisors priority is his fame, industrial relationship and money more than the students research and progress.

Instead of explicitly turning me down, one professor would just schedule other people during our arranged meeting times so I would show up and he would be busy. He'd promise to email me and not follow through. It's not clear what professors are looking for in potential students. There were way too many students my year and not enough advisors to go around. [ed note: i especially liked this one because it can be read as if the advisor promised to email AND not follow through with his promises. ha!]

I had secured an advisor early on but had to change in the middle of my PhD as the previous advisor ran out of funding on the project I was working on. I was told to change topic or change advisor.

a happy one:

I feel that my working relationship with my advisor is excellent, but it would be nice to have a better working relationship with other faculty in the same area.

on improving diversity and position of women in computing:

Maybe making the environment a little more friendly toward women.

This question assumes that 'improving diversity' is a good thing. For the love of god, talk to people who've gone to programs with forced measures to 'improve diversity' (CMU's fiasco with women, first and foremost), and you'll get a good idea of how much that fucked things up.