<p>I just went to DS’ schools website to catch the video of the graduation only to learn there were two student deaths in the past month. A google search found an article in the L.A. times, [Caltech</a> grads recall suicide victims - Los Angeles Times](<a href=“http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-caltech-suicides13-2009jun13,0,1030349.story]Caltech”>Caltech grads recall suicide victims)
both students committed suicide. One was a junior, the other a graduating senior. My heart goes out to the families. </p>
<p>DS is at school until Tuesday, then he leaves for an internship. I want to give him a hug right now.</p>
<p>Condolences to your son and his friends…this is so tragic and unnecessary. </p>
<p>When are colleges going to take steps in the academic side of campus life to alleviate the stress and frustration which builds to such devastating levels?</p>
<p>Whenever I hear college profs snicker about ‘weeding out the dumb ones’, and making problem sets so challenging as to break the students’ spirits, I wonder if they realize their part in these suicides. It’s easy to blame it all on previous mental conditions, but the system as it now exists creates many of these problems. Sleep deprivation mixed with perceived failure (Bs,Cs,Ds for those 4.0 admittees) and family pressure are becoming a lethal combination.</p>
<p>At some top tier schools suicides are not even acknowledged or admitted under the cover of student privacy. Colleges should be forced to list suicide statistics in addition to campus crime.</p>
<p>Really? It’s the professor’s fault for giving them hard problem sets? Whoever it is that put the notion in their head that a B/C/D makes you a failure isn’t the major problem, it is the professor that doesn’t make it easy to ace his class. Alright.</p>
<p>Oh, goodness, as I think about this today, I’m realizing part of my panic is DS is leaving the country on Tuesday and I still don’t know how we’ll be communicating over the summer - his cell phone won’t work where he’ll be (he’d need to buy a phone in that country). I hate to see him going so far away carrying this grief into a country where he doesn’t know anyone and another language is spoken. </p>
<p>I don’t want to get into a debate about the stress level at his school - its enormous. But even though DS’ gpa is not stellar, since freshman year, he’s had the attitude that grades don’t matter. Maybe its a good thing, but he probably won’t be looking at grad schools next year and who knows what employers will think of his gpa. So it may lead to a different kind of stress.</p>
<p>Employers tend not to care about GPA, Oaklandmom. They want to know what experience you’ve had in your field, references about your honesty and personality, and whether you are going to stick around for more than six months past your training period. Once a kid has a degree in their hot little fist, the whole grade/GPA thing is over. If you’ve got a 4.0+, by all means trumpet that to the world on your resume but if you don’t, it really doesn’t matter any more. Time for new mindset. </p>
<p>I’m sorry about the suicides…There needs to be more support at schools for the stressed-out kids but we can’t know if they killed themselves because of stress or for some other reason.</p>
<p>Side note, oaklandmom–we set up Skype and I got a webcam at Best Buy. I’m assuming your son is taking his laptop with a built-in camera and will have access to wi-fi.
Our daughter is in Shanghai this summer and doesn’t remember any Mandarin.</p>
<p>chuy- I never said it was the prof’s “fault”. However, the profs freely admit that when they were in school, there was not the same competition nor intensity. No one is saying “hard” problem sets are wrong, only that schools that pride themselves on a harsh learning environment need take some responsibility for their suicides.</p>
<p>I still stand by the theory that the three (3) factors combine dangerously: Lack of sleep, Intense workload, Family pressure.</p>
<p>If the same suicides happened in a prison, all sorts of state agencies would descend. Why isn’t attention being paid to college suicides?</p>
<p>Perhaps if the tenure system for profs was abolished, there would be more focus on student learning as a function of faculty performance and less on maintaining the status quo.</p>
<p>Or would losing tenure be too stressful for the faculty?</p>
<p>There is the phenomenon of suicide clusters. I was just reading another thread about the student suicides at Gunn High School in Palo Alto. Very scary!</p>
<p>There is absolutely no proof that tenure makes problem sets any easier.
Some schools are pressure cookers because of the preponderance of students in certain fields. These fields tend to be in science & engineering which require weekly problem sets; If all your courses are in these fields and you’re hit with four problem sets all due within a day or two of each other, the pressure can be very high. And if you’re graded on a curve and your peer group is very high caliber, you can struggle to even be in the middle of the pack.
Finally, would I trust a physics prof to be able to diagnose depression in one of his students? Not on your life!</p>
<p>A member of the faculty cannot lose tenure unless for cause (such as moral turpitude, as happened to a prof at my college who was caught living with a freshman). A member of the faculty threatened with loss of tenure would probably be worse in the classroom rather than better! S/he probably would be constantly on the job market, honing his or her cv, and delivering job talks in far-flung locales and just generally angsting instead of thinking fresh ways of making physics more accessible.</p>
<p>“Both young men were good students and there was no known link between the two suicides, although Wang may have been aware of Go’s death. “It looks like a copy-cat thing,” Caltech spokesman Jon Weiner said.”</p>
<p>Understatement of the “may have been aware”. They were in the same house, of which Brian Go was president.</p>
<p>We need to stop this insanity. We need to take the hamster wheel out of their lives and tell them they can stop. That they can slow down. That they don’t have to be perfect. That perfection is boring. That perfection doesn’t allow for decisions that need to be made on the fly. That you don’t learn how to look someone in the eye by doing problem sets.You can’t teach having casual banter over a beer and discussing the latest sports action with someone that you want to do business with. These kids need to know that we want them to make the world a better place by having people that can connect. </p>
<p>My good friend is an executive for a top worldwide company. He won’t hire the 4.0 kid. Too risky. i’m so sorry about these kids.</p>
<p>whats the saying? Love the kid on the couch…</p>
<p>“That you don’t learn how to look someone in the eye by doing problem sets.You can’t teach having casual banter over a beer and discussing the latest sports action with someone that you want to do business with. These kids need to know that we want them to make the world a better place by having people that can connect.”</p>
<p>Don’t meant to attack, but I feel this makes unfair assumptions about the type of individual who commits suicide. Brian was a social, outgoing individual who, actually, you would want to do business with. He was president of his house. And had a girlfriend for most of the year, who herself is a very vivacious outgoing individual. </p>
<p>Depression is a crippling illness that many individuals do a good job of hiding until it’s too late. </p>
<p>I will admit that CalTech is a pressure cooker and this may have added to it. But it’s insulting to the individuals to assume that they were simply the complete all your problem sets and don’t socialize types of individuals. Brian’s suicide wasn’t one you would’ve saw coming. </p>
<p>“BGo’s summer research mentor Mani Chandy was not only impressed with his ability to solve problems—the two wrote a paper together on distributed software—but also with the balance BGo struck with work and socializing. BGo and Mason would occasionally skip group meetings to go to the beach, which Chandy thought was healthy.”—article published in student newspaper. </p>
<p>"These kids need to know that we want them to make the world a better place by having people that can connect. "
He knew this.</p>
<p>Actually, you get to know people by doing p-sets with them. As a friend of my S boasted while showing him around MIT, you just have to walk out of your room to get a group of people to do p-sets together. Unless Caltech has a very different environment than MIT, I doubt that its students hide in their rooms to do their p-sets. In one course my S took, the prof actually assigned partners for each project.
It’s students in the humanities who are more likely to work on their own.</p>
<p>It is extraordinarily difficult to intervene effectively–as in, involuntarily committing the person to safeguard them–in the case of a suicidal person over 18 if they don’t want to comply.</p>
<p>College is a difficult time to catch problems - the student is away from the family and friends that knows him well and that would more likely catch changes. The college environment has other students that probably have no training or experience with depression so students may not know what to do. Professors don’t have a history with the student and may only see them for a few minutes per semester.</p>
<p>If it is something that turns up in college, then the best people to catch it are those that around her the most which would mean some kind of training is required. This is a low-incidence issue so justification could be difficult in training an entire student body.</p>
<p>Suicide is the second-leading cause of death on college campuses, second only to accidents. Active Minds, Inc. estimates that over 1,000 students per academic year die by suicide on college campuses and they and other experts claim that more lives could be saved. The University of Maryland claims on their counseling center website that if a student is suicidal and cannot or will not go voluntarily to the hospital that a parent, law enforcement official or other person in authority must be contacted so that he or she gets the care that they require. This is in essence saying that they would rather be sued for saving someone’s life than for ignoring someone’s life. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act allows college administrators to call the family in an emergency situation. Caltech’s brochures also say that they will call in an emergency situation. They did not. Yes, all these things may be difficut, but what is the value of a human life? We have to try. Not all suicidal people can be saved, but most suicides (in the words of Kay Redfield Jamison, the Head of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins in Maryland) can be prevented.</p>
