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#21
08-01-2007, 04:10 PM
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Re: Get to teach university class! Life BBV
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ] [ QUOTE ] [ QUOTE ] oh mr apeattack, i'll do anything to get an A in your class.  [/ QUOTE ] This doesn't happen as much in engineering classes because 95% of the students are male [/ QUOTE ] [/ QUOTE ] I would say ~75% of the students in the engineering dept. are male. Male students can be desperate for grades too. [/ QUOTE ] Well, if you're into guys, that's cool. Talk to Dan Bright. 
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#22
08-01-2007, 04:14 PM
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Re: Get to teach university class! Life BBV
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ] [ QUOTE ] oh mr apeattack, i'll do anything to get an A in your class. [/ QUOTE ] This doesn't happen as much as poorly written TV shows and porn sites would have you believe. In my two years of being a teaching assistant this has never even come close to happening. [/ QUOTE ] Especially not on a Fortran course [/ QUOTE ] If this class were upper division (for 3rd and 4th year students), I would say you are right on. :P But this is a mandatory, introductory course and consists mostly of naive 1st year students. It is not listed as a 'Fortran course.' Many students will end up changing majors by the end of the first year because they can't hack/don't like engineering. So this course would be the most likely engineering course to have students try to 'earn' their grade. But I'm soooooo full of ethics that I would report this student.
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#23
08-01-2007, 04:17 PM
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Re: Get to teach university class! Life BBV
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ] [ QUOTE ] [ QUOTE ] oh mr apeattack, i'll do anything to get an A in your class. [/ QUOTE ] This doesn't happen as much as poorly written TV shows and porn sites would have you believe. In my two years of being a teaching assistant this has never even come close to happening. [/ QUOTE ] Especially not on a Fortran course [/ QUOTE ] If this class were upper division (for 3rd and 4th year students), I would say you are right on. :P But this is a mandatory, introductory course and consists mostly of naive 1st year students. It is not listed as a 'Fortran course.' Many students will end up changing majors by the end of the first year because they can't hack/don't like engineering. So this course would be the most likely engineering course to have students try to 'earn' their grade. But I'm soooooo full of ethics that I would report this student. [/ QUOTE ] nit. what uni is this?
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#24
08-01-2007, 04:21 PM
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Re: Get to teach university class! Life BBV
Fortran is terribly outdated. Had to learn fortran95 for a physics program a few years back. There are much better languages out there built for strict math calculations. Problem is porting existing software over to it.
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#26
08-01-2007, 05:22 PM
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Re: Get to teach university class! Life BBV
They pay 3200 (or less) while expecting the grad student to work as instructor, grader, and lab tech, citing that this will look good on their record when they are applying for a teaching position. But a teaching position is really worthless. The profession has been going straight downhill for over three decades now. Weak pay and long hours. Summers off are a mirage. Sure, it's easy to schedule your doctor's appointments, but you can't choose what time of year to take any vacation. Unless your father-in-law dies or your sister marries at the right time, you can't go to the funeral/wedding.
The standard management style is for the administration to harrass and have no appreciation for nearly every single professor, even the few who excel in all categories. They think they are MLB negotiators, and talk like what is really important is how often you hit the winning run in the first game of a double header on a Tuesday - that's what the team needs! No matter what you accomplish, they will always want more. Tuition and research dollars from engineering and other lucrative areas (often business schools) get bled from to subsidize the rest of the university. Faculty from non-engineering departments will always assume that engineering faculty can't teach or don't care about teaching. Promotion and tenure bear almost no relation to accomplishment. The only significant correlation I could ever find was between P&T and belonging to the prevailing religious sect (at various schools, Baptist, Hindu, Catholic, etc.). Many schools now cut faculty midway to tenure; it's not just MIT anymore. Your record is not as important as the university's perception of your area. That means your area must be hot in order to get hired; hot when you come up for tenure; and now hot at the midway mark too. The school's finances have to be okay throughout the whole period as well. Professors who don't get tenure are often tainted goods, and don't get decent industry careers; taking a teaching position is very high risk, for no reward. I've seen departments have over a dozen consecutive years of budget cuts - if the department credit hours are down one year, then cut; if the college's credit hours are down the next year, then cut; if the university's credit hours are down the next year, then cut. All this cutting is to make way for expansion/creation of empires above the department level. Administrative bloat is totally out of control. At one school I was at, only 20% of the tuition made its way to the departments, where the actual teaching gets done - that had to be stretched for instruction, staff, phones, photocopying, etc. I've seen lots of embezzlement, immigration fraud, and other corruption too. You think it's all being flattered because hot chicks desperately wanting an A come on to you? That stuff never happens. Ape, I'm telling you this, because I wish someone had told me. Thank God, I'm out of that scene now. Poker is such an easy and stress-free job.
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#27
08-01-2007, 05:53 PM
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Re: Get to teach university class! Life BBV
[ QUOTE ]
Fortran is terribly outdated. Had to learn fortran95 for a physics program a few years back. There are much better languages out there built for strict math calculations. Problem is porting existing software over to it. [/ QUOTE ] If you want to design a game, Fortran is crap. But Fortran compilers have great optimization options. I can tell you that Fortran is standard for many engineering applications, especially for solving Ax=b problems (which is what many supercomputers spend their time doing). Here is the first result from a google search 'Fortran speed' [ QUOTE ] Fortran is one of the oldest programming languages around. It has survived and thrived through the years, despite its disadvantages due to: * its large user base among scientists and engineers. * the vast number of (high quality & fully debugged) existing library code (eg. most of the codes in Netlib are written in Fortran). * the existing engineering & scientific codes already written in it. * its relative ease of use & simple learning curve. * the fact that its simplicity, along with some of its conventions (eg. non-equivalence of subroutine arguments) and the work put by compiler people over these decades have made Fortran compilers produce extremely fast code, making it usually the best language to write a code is speed is the only consideration. Still, Fortran in its most popular language level, Fortran 77, suffers from several disadvantages, the most important of which for numerical programming are: * Memory can not be dynamically allocated and to run a larger problem one needs to recompile. * There are no structures or linked lists (no pointers). One can implement them only in obscure ways. * There is no low level access to I/O primitives * String manipulation is not straightforward. [/ QUOTE ] fortran info (note: I don't go to this university)
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#29
08-01-2007, 06:15 PM
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Re: Get to teach university class! Life BBV
[ QUOTE ]
They pay 3200 (or less) while expecting the grad student to work as instructor, grader, and lab tech, citing that this will look good on their record when they are applying for a teaching position. But a teaching position is really worthless. The profession has been going straight downhill for over three decades now. Weak pay and long hours. Summers off are a mirage. Sure, it's easy to schedule your doctor's appointments, but you can't choose what time of year to take any vacation. Unless your father-in-law dies or your sister marries at the right time, you can't go to the funeral/wedding. [/ QUOTE ] ~1500-1600/month is standard for grad students (who only do research) at my university. I would be getting this much if I was only doing research instead of teaching. From what others have told me, grad school has always been about long hours and weak pay. As T.A.'s we are only supposed to work 10-20 hours a week, but that is often unrealistic. But I will be leaving grad school with zero debt and a degree that opens a lot of doors. I feel that it is a fair trade-off. The amount of time off depends on your adviser. My adviser is very flexible and allows me to work from home (computational work is fun). All he cares is that you are making progress in your research projects. [ QUOTE ] The standard management style is for the administration to harrass and have no appreciation for nearly every single professor, even the few who excel in all categories. ... No matter what you accomplish, they will always want more. [/ QUOTE ] Publish or perish is the norm, of course. I don't see this huge management vs professor fight that you are describing though. But this might just be my department or maybe I am not involved enough. [ QUOTE ] Promotion and tenure bear almost no relation to accomplishment. [/ QUOTE ] It seems that if professors are doing a decent job (publishing often enough, getting grants to pay for research and graduate students, etc.) they will eventually be tenured. It is rare that a professor doesn't publish often once they are tenured. But maybe this is just my department and/or my university. [ QUOTE ] Ape, I'm telling you this, because I wish someone had told me. Thank God, I'm out of that scene now. Poker is such an easy and stress-free job. [/ QUOTE ] It could have be that my work environment is very different or it could be that I'm not being exposed enough to all the crap you were exposed to. I have already made up my mind not to become a professor at a major university because I am getting sick of doing research constantly (I much prefer teaching). I will ask my adviser what he feels the management vs professor environment is like.
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#30
08-01-2007, 06:28 PM
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Re: Get to teach university class! Life BBV
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3200 ?? thats it .. your getting ripped off! [/ QUOTE ] It comes out to be ~$25-30 per hour if you include lecture, discussion, grading and office hours. There is a large uncertainty range in how long it will take me to grade hw. However, I am expected to do research during this time too (hooooray 4 grad school), for which I will not be compensated for the month of August. But I see it as a great opportunity to get practice running an entire class.
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