Kimberly Snowden <ksnowden at ag.arizona.edu> wrote:
> Unfortunately, given how difficult the funding climate is,
> many labs are reliant on the labour of graduate students. So how can we
> continue to get our science done, in order to compete for the next grant,
> without contributing to the problem of producing more warm bodies who
> don't have a very good chance of getting a "real job"?
I would agree that we have too many grad students, but cutting the
numbers down will mean not only reorganizing research, but also
reorganizing undergraduate studies. This is especially true in fields
like chemistry where so many labs are taught by grad students. At UGA,
we had a couple of thousand students take intro chem courses, and there
was no way that the professors could supervise labs for all of them. In
fact, they had to turn a number of them away because the labs were full.
I was a TA the whole time I was a grad student, and even though it took
time away from research, I often heard students say, "you are the only
one who will answer questions" or "this is the only class of less than
150 students that I have." Maybe if we allowed some grad students who
were primarily interested in teaching concentrate on that, it would free
up some of the research space.
Karen
--
____________________________________________
Karen Wheless
kwheless at rockland.net
"Keep a green tree in your heart, and perhaps the
singing bird will come"
