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by Throwawayaerlei
1553 days ago
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> 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. |
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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.