[Throwawayaerlei]

> I've never really heard of undergraduates "forging relationships" with faculty, at least not beyond a particular semester course.

Which means you never did any research for a professor, or know anyone who did. At MIT there's no less than official two programs for that, the main one with very substantial financial incentives.

There's an old saying about MIT that's relevant, "Undergraduates are treated like graduate students, graduate students like junior faculty, and tenured professors like gods." It exaggerates some but it most certainly gets the first bit right, undergraduates are assumed to be capable of graduate level research. "seniors planning on graduate education becoming more active in a department, maybe getting an internship to make photo copies and coffee" is just not how it works at MIT, that's work for MIT's generally very capable office staff.

And thus if you use the research method in "'forging relationships' with faculty" perhaps after acing a course they taught, and you do well, you'll get the inherently political but not in a really bad way "in" to graduate programs when your professor tells a professor who knows your professor that you can do research, as discussed elsewhere.

[Maursault]

What you're claiming makes it sound like seeking graduate acceptance requires manipulation and only nepotism guarantees acceptance. Other people are not a means to an end but instead the ends themselves. I don't see anything wrong with a friendship with a faculty member, but you make it sound as though the right way to do things is to have an agenda for getting a faculty member's attention so that they might "put in a good word" with their faculty friend at some graduate department to grease the tracks of acceptance.

Certainly, relationships are important, but they're only valuable if they're genuine, a two-way street, and not one-sided. What possible incentive would a faculty member have to invalidly get an undergrad accepted to some grad program? Just because they like them? What do they get out of it? This all brushes very close to psychological egoism and narcissism.

Of the 20M or so undergrads at any one time, what percentage of them are doing graduate level work? Some... I took graduate seminars as an undergrad. It's not all that unusual, but whatever an undergrad does, even at MIT, is for the exercise, the experience of doing it, and not for pushing the state of the art and publishing articles. Even if an undergrad does publish in a journal, it is going to be clear the purpose of the exercise was the experience of doing that work, and not advancing the field. Undergrads think they know everything. Grad students know they know nothing. PhD's know everyone else knows nothing.

[Throwawayaerlei]

> but whatever an undergrad does, even at MIT, is for the exercise, the experience of doing it, and not for pushing the state of the art and publishing articles.

I'm sorry, but we're running into a brick wall of your viewpoint of the capabilities of all undergraduates which does not match what happens at MIT or any other research university which also formally or informally has undergraduates or even high school students perform grad student level research.

I was in a NSF Summer Science Training Program in the 1970s and real research was an integral part of it, I did grunt labor a lab tech or beginning grad student would do, but learned a great deal about the general field from the Principle Investigator (PI, the professor who ran the lab) and the senior grad student who I directly worked under. In return they got free labor and payed their debts forward to the people who originally mentored them.

Move from eight man weeks in that program to what can be done at MIT in up to four months a year full time for pay, plus whatever can be squeezed in when classes are in session and you get paid in credit, and the system can easily turn out a mid-level or higher grad student equivalent with enough work under his belt to be in real papers published by legitimate journals that wouldn't be what you describe above. And be the basis of a very legitimate recommendation, grad students who turn out not to be able to do research are a messy loss to a department and the professor who finds this out the hard way.

We have no basis for discussion so this will be the end of my replies, but there's at least one other discussion on this system in this topic, and it's common enough knowledge in academia.

[Maursault]

> In return they got free labor

For one, it sounds like you might be placing undo value on your grunt labor. But more importantly, it sounds like you don't see that you made out on the deal, and they got the short stick of your grunt labor.

> We have no basis for discussion so this will be the end of my replies,

It would have been more honest of you to admit you're annoyed at dissent, and don't wish to discuss further, but instead, passive-aggressiveness.

Be well.

[Throwawayaerlei]

Please don't selectively quote, the full sentence is "In return they got free labor and payed their debts forward to the people who originally mentored them."