Grad School Life

[eigen]

For general discussions about graduate school life- advisor issues, peer issues, frustrations, etc.

[mamselle]

My former spouse was a grad student TA in computer science when we married.

In those days, the big mainframes were only allocated to student use for creating files, tables, etc. for their theses after hours.

There was a definite pecking order: you didn't start your run if your prof/advisor had things going through, because you could slow down or (the horror!) STOP your prof/adviser's run, which would be a BAD THING...

So people had beanbag chairs in their offices to sleep on, because your run might not finish until 2 AM, and you might not get to go home at all if there were errors and you had to fix them and re-run the whole thing.

Or at least that was how it was explained to me...

Anyway, we decided that in the normal taxonomy of things, grad students might be considered worms. But undergrads, who were paying customers, were seen as a net gain, so they were really better off, except they had to do all those homework packets.

So, we decided ther real order was,

Profs-upper animal kingdom
U/Grads- worms
Grad students-Sub-worms.

It did seem to explain a lot...

M.