Professor Accessibility, TA's, and Relationships

mathboy98
Thu, 10 Dec 2009 12:52:22 +0000

I agree, but I think the “attention” that undergraduates and graduate students receive is different enough that I just flatly don’t understand the “grad students draw attention away from undergrads” trope.



I do share your confusion to a large bit, and I’ve found the way to resolve it is to note how many different kinds of professors there tend to be. Some are supremely uninterested in teaching anything but very specialized topics of interest to them, and will spew volumes if one questions them about these, but possibly be very unhelpful upon visits to their office otherwise. Now while I don’t approve of this behavior, I do think it’s rightfully the graduate students’ right to be able to chat with professors about research topics before an undergraduate talks to them about “fluffy matters” simply because that’s presumably all the graduate students are there for.

A little example from personal experience too: a professor I particularly like has had heavy teaching duties this term, and while I know him very well, it’s hard for him to find time for me this particular term, as easy as it was the previous term, because he has graduate students to attend to on top of his teaching duties. And it so happens other professors are much less likely to have the answers to my questions, so I’d even be asking him about things he particularly enjoys thinking about, but he simply has other obligations (which of course is fair, but I wish it weren’t the case).

A point that’s a little strange to me is why Harvard undergraduates’ fluffy thoughts would take precedence over any of your own thoughts you had and emailed a professor about.

Certainly though, the many professors with any conscience at all seem to take care of their undergraduates’ questions about a course they’re teaching swiftly and well. There are also a good number (though I’d not go as far as to say an abundance) who seem to be able to inspire students with the love they had for the same subjects when they took courses on them long ago. While some of these matters are specific to my experience, I imagine I can criminally generalize a little bit of it to MIT!

EDIT: One other limiting factor is that sometimes one only learns enough to be conversant with the professors once relatively older. An MIT grad student I know mentioned how in a course he took, they had to give presentations, and it was easy to tell the undergraduates were severely limited in what they could do, and ended up presenting things he said he’d known several years ago, and weren’t realistically of much interest. He said he sympathized, but it goes to say if this was what a graduate student felt, one can only imagine what professors, whose knowledge can be ridiculously encyclopedic, may feel.