Last night, I had the opportunity to have dinner with John Urschel and several other Millennium Scholars. Our conversation ranged from game theory and neural networks, to Colin Kaepernick as a free agent, to life and conversations during this interesting time of our lives. Big thanks to John!
I feel that I have a few take aways from yesterday that I’d like to discuss. One being the do’s and don’t’s of conversation with grading college seniors and graduating graduate students. There were 3 graduating seniors at the table. Because the students don’t live together, they don’t know everything about everyone’s lives. Thus, I thought it was a valid question for one student to ask a fellow graduating senior if they’ve made a decision about graduate school yet. The female student went on to say no. In my head, I thought it was because she was being indecisive or having trouble deciding, especially since she is one of the most successful undergraduate researchers that I’ve met at Penn State. But, instead, she goes on to say that she hasn’t been accepted anywhere. I was in shock.
But then, John went on to tell us that we should never ask our colleagues questions about their future during this difficult time, if we don’t already know the answer to the question. But, how else would we know? I guess it is their business and not ours but I found it to be an incredibly interesting idea. It is so unfortunate that she applied to Ph.D. programs in a male-dominated field and wasn’t accepted, while she knows that her equally as qualified male colleagues were.
I just feel that so often, students are left in this uncomfortable position, between faculty or institutions. They want to stand up for themselves but fear having a bad name in the field or a reputation that hurts them in the future. Maybe graduate student unionization efforts will change this? Who knows? I just pray for good karma or justice for students like her.
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