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Uhm, what exactly are you trying to get at? I said subject GRE is a very good measure of eventual success in academia, do you have a solid response to that or j

Uhm, what exactly are you trying to get at? I said subject GRE is a very good measure of eventual success in academia, do you have a solid response to that or just a rambling tirade? Paper authorship if the student is the first author shows grit and “gumption” I suppose? As if that’s what’s needed in academia at this moment (it’s important but not the main requirement). But almost no undergrad gets a first author paper. They get mentioned in the middle because they ran a bunch of sds gels. I wasn’t even interested in trying to become a professor and I got 10 papers before I finished my PhD, do you know how many I (or any of the folks I actually know who are now professors) had during our undergrad? Zero. And not for lack of trying. You know who actually got papers? The son of the department head.

muds 4y ago
The original comment, to me, reads more like "subject GRE is a definitive measure of eventual success in academia." I was arguing against the definitive part. Thanks for the clarification. Maybe it might be a good measure for your cohort, you, and people in similar situations. > Almost no undergrad gets a first author paper Maybe this is different in different fields but we have a lot of undergraduate first author papers in programming languages and machine learning. I mean -- through and through -- undergraduate students bringing up a topic, getting guidance from professors and senior PhD students, getting results by the end of the semester, and publishing results by next year. Even the people who end up "running the sds slides" either fall out by next year or end up working towards their own first author publications. I've always chalked this up to the experimental setup cost being very cheap in CS compared to in the "hard sciences" so most undergraduate students are already comfortable with all the tools they need to do research. > I wasn't interested in trying to become a professor I think this is precisely the variable that a standardized test cannot account for! I feel an "authentic" undergraduate research experience is successful if it helps students realize if research is right for them or not. > ... papers ... the son of the department head... I see where your frustration is stemming from. Sorry this was your first experience with undergraduate research.

muds 4y ago

The original comment, to me, reads more like "subject GRE is a definitive measure of eventual success in academia." I was arguing against the definitive part. Thanks for the clarification. Maybe it might be a good measure for your cohort, you, and people in similar situations. > Almost no undergrad gets a first author paper Maybe this is different in different fields but we have a lot of undergraduate first author papers in programming languages and machine learning. I mean -- through and through -- undergraduate students bringing up a topic, getting guidance from professors and senior PhD students, getting results by the end of the semester, and publishing results by next year. Even the people who end up "running the sds slides" either fall out by next year or end up working towards their own first author publications. I've always chalked this up to the experimental setup cost being very cheap in CS compared to in the "hard sciences" so most undergraduate students are already comfortable with all the tools they need to do research. > I wasn't interested in trying to become a professor I think this is precisely the variable that a standardized test cannot account for! I feel an "authentic" undergraduate research experience is successful if it helps students realize if research is right for them or not. > ... papers ... the son of the department head... I see where your frustration is stemming from. Sorry this was your first experience with undergraduate research.