April 23, 2003

grad school

Grrr. The other teacher is not here in class again. She's not slacking,
mind you, she's just off teaching something else. But still, it would be nice if
she'd told me in advance. Now I don't know if she'll be gone all day or just part
of the day. I'm hoping for part, as I have a meeting this afternoon to dash off
to.

On the other hand, reading about href="http://www.yarinareth.net/Dorothea/gradsch/straighttalk.html">Dorothea's
grad school experiences
, not to mention some of SWooPP's occasional makes me
grateful for my own situation. This 40-hour week of classes is the equivalent,
time-wise, of a one-semester class. I'm here teaching 10 students (there were
more, but it's a lab day and several people are "auditing" and don't have to take
lab). I have a laptop to work on while they do their labs, they all have computers
at their tables, there are enough books to go around, and I don't have to come up
with tests. More importantly, my boss appreciates what I'm doing and I get paid
somewhat more than the average full professor.

I should note, though,
that my own grad-school experience wasn't particularly unpleasant. I did it part
time, with my company paying for classes, so I never had the full experience of
looking for funding, serving as a TA, and so on. Grad school was just a secondary
part of my life. Furthermore, I suspect that even for those going fulltime the
experience is different for those working on science, engineering or business
degrees. (Disclosure: My MS is in Physical Sciences with a concentration in Space
Science. Don't laugh -- I was working for a NASA contractor at the time. But yes,
I really did take up Time and Space in grad school. And yes, I really AM a Rocket
Scientist.) Those students know they are employable, and many will have worked
before or during the degree or will have a corporation footing the bills, so
there's not that fear factor. And if the department heads know they don't have
total power over their students, they're less likely to become petty tyrants. My
own advisor was not terribly interested in what I was doing, I don't think, but he
never made my life more difficult.

That's not true. He did pose one
challenge: staying awake during classes he taught. He was awful. I think he was
about the only full-time professor in the department, and if he'd been good he
probably would have been at a better school. I attended a satellite campus of the
University of Houston, because it was close to home and work. And because it was
also close to the Johnson Space Center, it had lots of space-related classes as
well as business classes aimed at engineers going on for MBAs. For some reason it
also had a big education program, but I was never given any reason to be impressed
with either that program or many of its students. But because it was close to the
JSC and the Lunar and Planetary Institute, quite a lot of the lecturers were NASA
or NASA-contractor or LPI research scientists moonlighting by teaching a class or
two, and those people were uniformly excellent. They were PhDs teaching on the
subjects that most interested them, on which they were doing front-line research,
which is why I enjoyed most of my classes greatly.

I don't really use
much of what I learned about Lunar Geology or Human and Robotic Exploration of
Space, or even Astrophysics, but the program was open enough to let me take a
couple of other courses I felt lacking in. I took Electromagnetism (actually they
required that one because as a Mechanical Engineer, I'd only taken the intro
course to Electrical Engineering as an undergrad) and Statistics, and the latter
is the foundation of what I'm teaching now. Plus of course, I get to put the MS on
my resume. And mostly, I got to go learn some really cool stuff.

Posted by dichroic at April 23, 2003 04:59 PM
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