NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/comp/ai/4311

Text File | 1992-11-17 | 5.5 KB | 109 lines

Newsgroups: comp.ai
Path: sparky!uunet!ukma!asuvax!ennews!news
From: [e-mail] (Subbarao Kambhampati)
Subject: Re: How to pick a grad school [excerpt from Stephen Gould]
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (USENET News System)
Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, Arizona State University, Tempe
References: <[e-mail]> <srt.721931824@sun-marino> <[e-mail]>
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 21:13:41 GMT
Lines: 97

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Matthew L. Ginsberg) writes:
>  What graduate school teaches you that you can't learn
>anywhere else is to be a scientist.  And the person you learn that
>from, more than anyone else, is your faculty advisor.

Reminds me of Harvard biologist Stephen Gould's essay about Mentors
and Students in graduate school (in his book "Wonderful Life"), which
I enclose below for general edification..

Rao
[Nov 16, 1992]

            Mentors and Students:

            From "Wonderful Life"
              Dr. Stephen Gould, Harvard



Universities operate one of the few survivors of the old
apprenticeship system in their programs for awarding doctoral degrees.
Consider the anomaly. You spend your entire educational career, from
kindergarten to college, becoming more and more independent of the
power of individual teachers; (cross your first-grade eacher and your
life can be hell for a year; displease a college professor, and the
worst you can do is fail a single course).  Then you become an adult,
and you decide to continue for a Ph.D. So what do you do? You find a
person whose research intrigues you, and sign on (if he will accept
and support you) as a part of a team.

In some fields, particularly those with large and expensive
laboratories dedicated to the solution of definite problems, you must
abandon all thought of independence, and work upon as assigned topic
for disertation (choice in research is a luxury of later postdoctoral
appointments).  In more genial and individualistic fields like
paleontology, you are usuaally given fair latitude in choosing a
topic, and may emerge with a project uniquely your own.  But in any
case you are an apprentice, and you are under your mentor's
thumb--more securely than at any time since the early years of
priomary school. If you work well together andyour mentors ties to the
profession are secure, you will get your degree and, by virtue of his
influence and your proven accomplishments, your first decent job.

It is a strange system with much to criticize, but it woks in its own
odd way. At some point, you just can't proceed any further with
courses and books; you have to hang around someone who is doing
research well. (And you need to be on hand, and ready to assimilate,
all the time, every day; you can't just show up on Thursday afternoon
at two for a lesson in separating parts from counterparts.)  The
system does produce its horrors--exploitive professors who divert the
flow of youthful brilliance and enthusiasm into their own dry wells,
and provide nothing in return.  But when it works (as it does rather
more often than a cynic might expect, given the lack of checks and
balances), I cannot imagine a better training.

Many students don't understand the system. They apply to a school
because it has a general reputation or resides in a city they like.
Wrong, dead wrong. You apply to work iwth a particular person. As in
the old apprenticeship system of the guilds, mentor and student are
bound by mutual obligations; this is no one-way street. Mentors must,
above all, find and provide financial support for students.
(Intellectual guidance is, of course, more fundamental, but this part
of the game is a pleasure. The real crunch is the search for funding.
Many leading professors spend at least half their time raising grant
support for students.)  What do mentors get in return? This
reciprocation is more subtle, and often not understood outside our
guild.  THE ANSWER, STRANGE AS THIS MAY SOUND, IS FEALTY IN THE
GENEALOGICAL SENSE.

The work of graduate students is part of a mentor's reputation
forever, because we trace intellectual lineages in this manner.  I was
Norman Newell's student, and everything that I ever do, as long as I
live, will be read as his legacy (and, if I screw up, will redound to
his detriment--thought not so seriously, for we recognize a necessary
asymmetry: errors are personal, successes part of the lineage).  I
happily accept this tradition and swear allegiance to it--and not for
motives of abstract approbation but because, again as with the old
apprenticeship system, I get my turn to profit in the next generation.
As my greatest joy in twenty years at Harvard, I have been blessed
with several truly brilliant students.  The greatest benefit is an
exciting lab atmosphere for the moment--but I am not insensible to the
custom that their future successes shall be read, in however small a
part, as mine also.

(By the way, this system is largely responsible for the the sorry
state fo undergraduate teaching at many major research universities.
A student belongs to the lineage of his graduate adviser, not not the
teaches of his undergraduate courses.  For researchers ever consicious
of their reputation, there is no edge whatever in teaching
undergraduate courses.  You can do it only for love or responsibility.
Your graduate students are your extensions; your undergraduate
students are ciphers in your fame.  I with that this could change, but
I don't even know what to suggest).