<p>I don’t think he’s asserting that female arts and humanities grad students have no ultimate career goals in mind. It sounds like he’s saying that people, facing stiff competition following their graduate degree, are less likely to pursue arts and humanities unless they have the safety net of a permanent relationship.</p>
<p>It seems like people are making too big of a deal out of this. Through my interviews and what not I’ve met several professors that met their spouses through courses they TA’d. They told me they simply waited until after the course was over to start anything and everything was fine.</p>
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<p>I still think it’s a rather sweeping generalization. I’ll bet that most of the people who pursued arts and humanities careers had decided to do so long before they knew they could fall back on being a trophy wife or husband, as the case may be, and I think it’s an underestimation of these people to assume that this is the case.</p>
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<p>There’s a reason technical schools are generally known for having the ugliest student populations.</p>
<p>When I was at CMU you could tell when you cross from CMU territory into U. Pitt territory just by how attractive people looked. Not talking about just girls, guys stop looking like it’s the first time they’ve been outside in months as well.</p>
<p>Some wonderful posts on here. But sheesh, one too many posters makes me shake my head in wonderment as to how they got into graduate school in the first place (based on their immaturity, lack of basic judgment, or poor logic). </p>
<p>I’m gonna assume those posters were really grad school wannabes. Or kids who got into grad school only by paying massive amounts of tuition to schools that gleefully take them in for cheap labor. I just hope the schools they are at have good lawyers! :)</p>
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<p>hey… I’m pretty professional in the real world with my research. But who said grad students have good judgement, are mature, and possess good logic? (!) What a terrible assumption.</p>
<p>I can’t help but notice that the female posters in this thread have a certain defensive tone. There is no need to be offended, believe me, there is no need. If anything, graduate male students want to be friends with likeable female grad counterparts. A simple, very simple fact is: female supply in the graduate population is LOW. LOW as in little, like less. That’s it.</p>
<p>In addition, I don’t think courtship should be bound by race, income, level, profession, or any social bars. Although obviously, there are ways to do things with minimal risk of professional damage. As long as you remain true to your professional responsibilities, I don’t see any harm done.</p>
<p>I’d say if you like a girl, regardless of any of that, you ask her for dinner (well maybe after the quarter is over like others have suggested). And if you think that simple act will risk your reputation or will embarass you in front of your colleagues then don’t do it. But as adults you should stand by who you would like to pursue a relationship with. It might be stupidity at times, but I think it is also courage.</p>
<p>^ It’s not that complicated. </p>
<p>Relationships and sexual attraction are fantastic. I completely understand the motive here. However, acting on those feelings when you are bestowed professional responsibilities and when you have a power imbalance with the target of your affections is not. Why? Because it opens your employer up to legal liability. This isn’t an opinion but fact. </p>
<p>We would not knowingly admit someone lacking (or at least unable to grasp) this basic understanding into our graduate program.</p>
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<p>The whole concept of being a female grad student, particularly one in engineering, particularly one who’s not entirely unattractive, exhausts me. I spent 7/8 of my concentration on my studies and 1/8 of it deflecting guys who were halfway interested in me (despite my making a conscious effort to talk about how much I adored and missed my then-boyfriend, so I can’t even imagine what it would’ve been like if I’d been single), blocking out the subtle conversations of maybe-some-of-the-girls-in-this-program-don’t-belong-here (unfounded, annoying), working with my advisor who was so awkward around women that he wouldn’t look me in the eye, and ignoring the I-wish-all-the-women-around-here-weren’t-so-ugly-and-undateable conversations that my <em>male</em> friends would have in my presence. They’d get flustered when they remembered I was, incidentally, a woman, and would ungracefully stutter their way through some sort of excuse that I was unavailable, but honestly, I kind of got fed up with it all. </p>
<p>You think we don’t realize that the female grad student population is low? We’re acutely aware of it, particularly in male-dominated fields. Kind of bothered me that some people had the idea that my place of employment was some sort of meat market. If you happen to meet someone, then that’s great… But you’re not gonna be the first to approach that girl. So… okay, yes, if she’s available and you’re interested, go strike up a conversation and ask her out, but don’t go about it like it’s open season, right? It was always kind of a relief to talk with my TAs because I could always rely on that relationship to be professional, to be about my work and my studies. If profs and TAs started hitting on me, too, I think I might’ve flipped out.</p>
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<p>Yes. This. Lawsuit. Beware.</p>
<p>Wow, interesting post. Thank you for the perspective.</p>
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<p>Generally accepted by whom? I don’t recall any objective studies done on this topic. And I reject the crazy idea that this is a “basic social development process.” Essentially what you’re saying is that beautiful people aren’t smart, and/or are less driven, and/or are less responsible. That’s utterly ridiculous, and trying to couch it in terms of pseudo-science facts doesn’t make it any less so.</p>
<p>jmilton - There’s not a defensive tone here, it’s just amazement that one would actually jeopardize one’s career for a date. And you say it’s a defensive tone from the “female posters,” yet most of the posters saying this is a silly thing to do have not identified as such. Perhaps your own assumptions are getting in the way of good judgment.</p>
<p>Quite honestly, this thread has too many sexist undertones to it, and I’m not one to jump on that kind of thing (or even really notice). So if I’m seeing it, it’s pretty obvious.</p>
<p>But hey, y’all go right ahead and date whomever you like. Maybe you’ll open up some grad school and prof spots for the rest of us.</p>
<p>There are college chick hotness rankings just about everywhere (Princeton Review, Insider’s Guide, Playboy magazine, etc), and I don’t think an Ivy League school ever showed up on any of these rankings.</p>
<p>There is actually a research conducted that suggest beautiful people are supposed to be genetically smarter. Yet there is a third variable, “socialization”. Beautiful people socialize a lot more than homely people, they are invited to parties and dates far more often. The reason why they also generally have poorer grades is because they are more “distracted” by their social life. For example, a girl who spends her Saturday night studying should reasonably receive better grades than a girl who spends her Saturday night partying, even though the partying girl has stronger genetically determined “potential”.</p>
<p>You can name all the exceptions that you want, but the generally consensus is that hot/slutty/drunk (these are related) chicks don’t make it to grad school, it’s just common sense.</p>
<p>You can’t tell the difference between an objective study (on the one hand) and “ratings” in the Princeton Review or Playboy?!? And then have the nerve to say it’s genetic and common sense? You need help, man. Really.</p>
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<p>There is also actually research conducted that suggests that you can make chickens bark like dogs, omg.</p>
<p>On the less-actual-research side of things, I just read the paper, and it’s a <em>theory</em> that says that beautiful <em>women</em> are more intelligent than ugly ones because smart/rich men tend to be attracted to beautiful women and that the great balancing act of nature will therefore cause more beautiful women to be intelligent, eventually. There are no graphs, no tables, just a lot of academic hand-waving. In short, it’s bunk. Don’t believe everything you read in the Washington Post.</p>
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<p>And I work on construction sites all day, in a <em>highly</em> male-dominated field, so I typically ignore/don’t notice when gender comes into play. This, I’m noticing, and more importantly, this actually ended up bothering me.</p>
<p>(That being said, construction sites are actually less hostile to me than grad school ever was. There’s a blatent hoot, a very obvious catcall, maybe the construction superintendent asks me out to dinner and I have to wave my wedding ring at him, but then it’s all out of the way and I’m respected again.)</p>
<p>For what it is worth, I am male and even I have been fairly offended by a lot of what has been said here. I hope that I was not offensive to anyone, myself.</p>
<p>Besides, I am currently in a master’s program at a school with a plethora of attractive graduate students (IMO) and from the interview weekends I have been going on there are plenty of attractive graduate students out there. In fact, some of the departments are hoping that more men accept to help balance things out.</p>
<p>Of course, I am in biology and not mechanical engineering, but still.</p>
<p>aibarr: THANK YOU!! (both for your comments in general on this thread and for posts #60 and #68).</p>
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<p>That wasn’t actually my point. And note that I never specified which gender was MechE and which was art history in my example. :)</p>
<p>I’m a parent and an attorney. I’m not giving legal advice and employment law isn’t my specialty. However, Nash lived in a different age. The seminal case recognizing sexual harrassment in a work context as an actionable tort was decided in 1974. (It was a state case, BTW.) </p>
<p>The Prof is right; most colleges and universities have codes of conduct which prohibit grad students from dating anyone whose work product they may judge. At my kid’s alma mater, the policy prohibits dating anyone in a course you TA, anyone who might take a course you TA in the future, and anyone involved in any EC where the grad student has any authority. So, if you are a music grad student and you help choose first chair for the orchestra, everyone in the orchestra is off-limits. </p>
<p>I just don’t “get” some of the male posters here.How can you fail to understand that this is an abuse of power? Lets say you ask out that attractive undergrad in a course you TA. She turns you down. You are the one who gives her her grade. Her work is on the border between a B+ and an A-. You give her a B+. Do you have any doubt that she will think she got the lower grade because she turned you down? She may even go to the prof and make the claim. You do NOT want to find yourself in this position. </p>
<p>Lets say you wait to ask her out until the grades are in. However, you know that the difference between the B+ and A- may really matter to her, e.g., she wants to go to med school. You want her to like you. Do you think your plan to ask her out after the grades are in might influence whether you give her the A- or the B+? </p>
<p>What if you are convinced it didn’t, but give her the A-. The class is graded on a curve and you can only give out so many As and A minuses. A couple of weeks later, you ask her out. You become an item. Another student who got a B+ sees you with her, knows that she got one of the A-s. How likely do you think that student is going to think his/her grade was affected because you gave her an A- because you wanted to ask her out?–or may think you were dating then and just kept it quiet until the course was over. </p>
<p>Even if your new girlfriend doesn’t feel the least bit sexually harrassed, the other students in that section may feel that she got a higher grade than she deserved because you were attracted to her. If the course is graded on a curve, odds are high that one or more of them may mention this to another TA in your department or the prof teaching the course. Again, you do not want to be in this position.</p>
<p>DeepSeekPhd:
Thanks for completely missing the point. My point is that there has been studies conducted to judge the generally attractiveness of student populations. Regardless of what these studies’ results and values may be, there is no study conducted that suggests the contrary. That doesn’t make these studies true of course, but in the mean time, they are all we have.</p>
<p>aibarr:
There’s vast scientific literature on the relationship between intelligence and physical appearance. It is assumed that both physical and brain development are influenced by pathogen resistence, but I don’t feel like siting the entire literature here.</p>
<p>It also bothers me how people are taking personal anecdotes as evidence over scientific research. Anyways, I think I am going on a tangent here.<br>
So the consensus is: don’t date undergrads you are TAing, got it.</p>
<p>"So do you think that it is okay and ethical to hit on undergrads who are in a class you are TAing for? "</p>
<p>Don’t be an idiot.That is predatory behaviour and will get you sacked at most places. If the undergrad complains, there goes your TAship and potentially your grad school place.</p>
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<p>I can only find one paper. I just went through ten pages each of two Google Scholar searches and came up with the same paper by Satoshi Kanazawa and Jody Kovar at the London School of Economics and Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and here’s the abstract.</p>
<p>“Empirical studies demonstrate that individuals perceive physically attractive others to be more intelligent than physically unattractive others. While most researchers dismiss this perception as a “bias” or “stereotype,” we contend that individuals have this perception because beautiful people indeed are more intelligent. The conclusion that beautiful people are more intelligent follows from four assumptions. (1) Men who are more intelligent are more likely to attain higher status than men who are less intelligent. (2) Higher-status men are more likely to mate with more beautiful women than lower-status men. (3) Intelligence is heritable. (4) Beauty is heritable. If all four assumptions are empirically true, then the conclusion that beautiful people are more intelligent is logically true, making it a proven theorem. We present empirical evidence for each of the four assumptions. While we concentrate on the relationship between beauty and intelligence in this paper, our evolutionary psychological explanation can account for a correlation between physical attractiveness and any other heritable trait that helps men attain higher status (such as aggression and social skills).”</p>
<p>[ScienceDirect</a> - Intelligence : Why beautiful people are more intelligent](<a href=“http://■■■■■■■.com/2u2psg]ScienceDirect”>http://■■■■■■■.com/2u2psg)</p>
<p>It is based upon assumptions from evolutionary principles.
The part that says “The conclusion that beautiful people are more intelligent follows from four assumptions” is the part that made me decide that these guys weren’t particularly devoted to scientific examination…</p>
<p>I can’t find a picture of Kovar, but Kanazawa certainly looks like the kind of person who would write a paper about how beautiful people are the smartest people…
[Dr</a> Satoshi Kanazawa](<a href=“http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/MES/people/kanazawa.htm]Dr”>http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/MES/people/kanazawa.htm)</p>
<p>Anyhow. If you’ve got any other articles from this vast body of research, I’d really like to see them, because multiple search sessions turned up jack for me.</p>
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Glad to see I’m not alone…! =)</p>
<p>[Looking</a> Smart and Looking Good: Facial Cues to Intelligence and Their Origins](<a href=“http://66.102.1.104/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:nTI1Evy3MF4J:www.brandeis.edu/departments/psych/Leslies%2520pdf/Zebrowitz,%2520Hall..2002.pdf+]Looking”>http://66.102.1.104/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:nTI1Evy3MF4J:www.brandeis.edu/departments/psych/Leslies%2520pdf/Zebrowitz,%2520Hall..2002.pdf+)</p>
<p>just one of MANY articles that you missed. Implications of attractiveness have been studied in-depth, but I ain’t gonna to do your search for you.</p>