How do parents get their children into grad school?

sakky
Sat, 21 Feb 2009 01:00:14 +0000

Don’t parents have their own lives? Any parent that “gets” their kid into grad school is a bad parent and any program that can’t see through parental interference is a bad program. What ever happened to “standing on your own two feet?” What’s next - parents writing their kid’s thesis or maybe teaching classes for them?



I don’t know that it’s necessarily bad for a parent to help their kid get into grad school. It may actually be good.

Let me give you an example. I know one husband and wife who were highly successful professors and researchers who were instrumental in establishing a new graduate institution. One of the first admittees was Irene,their own daughter, who earned her Doctor of Science there.

Oh, by the way, the husband and wife in question were none other than Nobel Prize winners Pierre and Marie Curie. The daughter? Irene Joliot-Curie, who later won the Nobel Prize herself. The institution in question used to be known as the Radium Institute and is now known as the Curie Institute (L’Institut Curie), and is a highly respected science graduate education and research center. In fact, it was at the Curie Institute that Irene met her future husband, Frederic, who would win the Nobel with her.

So the question is: would the world really have been better off if Irene had never been admitted to the Curie Institute? Was Irene really not worthy of being there, such that somebody else should have been given her seat? That’s a difficult case to make considering Irene’s own Nobel victory, earned only 9 years after she finished her doctorate.