Hey there. It’s your old Chem TA. Remember me?
You know, we’re not so different, you and I. It was only some three or four years ago; I was on the other side of the room, squirming in my chair-desk, fiddling with my phone, not paying attention to the guy droning on at the dry-erase board.
I’ve thought the things you’ve thought: “I wonder if any of this material will be on the test.” “I should have used one of my attendance drops today…” “If my TA had been good-looking, at the very least I could stay to watch what’s going on.”
I’ve also done the things you’ve done. Yes, I notice you trying to hide your Candy Crush-emblazoned phone under your notebook. Yes, I can see you alt-tabbing out of Facebook chat into your Word document as I walk down the aisle. How can I tell you started your lab report two hours ago? Because I’ve done that, too.
I could go on, but I’ll cut to the chase: I truly believe that in our hearts, we graduate student TAs aren’t creaky curmudgeons. We, too, are swanky millennials who, until just recently, lived the lives you undergrads currently lead.
So if we’re not so different, how can we so easily appear to be stoic robots sitting at the front of the room? Why do we reply to your burning questions with two-word emails? Don’t we care about our students?
For us science PhD students, I personally attribute this indifference to the multitude of challenges that graduate students face that leave little time and energy for, really, anything else.
Academically, there is still the challenge of taking courses, which at the graduate level have greater expectations and higher levels of rigor. Most science graduate programs also have a preliminary exam and/or qualifying exam that covers students’ knowledge of the field and research progress, which must be passed in the second or third year. Although these challenges are not exactly unique to graduate students, the stakes are significantly higher. At Duke and many other schools, failure of a course or two failures of the preliminary exam will typically result in expulsion from the program. Granted, these consequences are administered very rarely, but the possibility is always hovering in the minds of first-year students.
Beyond program requirements, for PhD students, the core of the work is in the form of research. Unlike most of the questions we faced as undergraduate students, the questions that PhD students have to solve have never been solved before, and sometimes are actually unsolvable. Doing good research takes long nights and weekends, leaving meager time to think about real-life problems. Combining the long hours with consistent failure and bad results breeds anguish and discouragement that takes a hefty amount of mental energy and resolve to overcome.
In addition, there’s considerable pressure to obtain good experimental results and publish in prominent journals. So much so that fabricating or smearing results is commonplace in academia. Duke is rife with its own academic controversies, from the case of Dr. Anil Potti and its mishandling by Duke administrators, to the retractions of papers from two pulmonary researchers just last year.
Furthermore, good results help toward publish in a big-name journal, but another somewhat obscure factor is having the right connections. It’s very difficult for first-time research professors to break into the “old-boys club” mentality possessed by editors of many of the more prominent scientific journals. Politics is rampant in the scientific community, especially affecting pre-tenured faculty. In addition to publishing and getting grants, assistant professors must also be able to play politics and appease their superiors in their first several years in order to collect their precious tenure. Unfortunately, their graduate students will often be the ones who will incur their wrath, and the pressure of the clunky tenure process trickles down to the ground floor.
In addition to academic and political problems, PhD students must continue to acquire funding for their research. In the humanities and social sciences, this can be a substantial problem, as evidenced by an article published last fall, which generated heated discussion on continuation fees. For those of us in natural sciences, this is typically not a major issue because most graduate students are beginning to wrap things up by their fifth year, which is the last year the Graduate School provides financial support. But unless the student’s lab has acquired grants to support their research, the financial support package from the Graduate School often comes in the form of teaching (and grading).
So, the next time you wonder why your graduate student TA seems to be in a bad mood, just consider the possibility that he or she just got a bad experimental result and needs to go back several steps, is reaching the deadline for yet another funding application (which, if history shows, probably won’t be successful), and is definitely not going anywhere this spring break (what “break?”). Really, most of us are cool people! But, just like you all, we’ve just got a lot on our plate.
Junu Bae is a graduate student in the chemistry department.
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