dunroving

As a prof, I have to comment on some of the points made about grad students at uni. These are general responses, not just to excpomea.

There are definitely some places where grad students are slaves (and maybe even sex-slaves), but you have to remember that such stories sell newspapers/magazines/TV time, so you have to take the media generalization that this is an epidemic with a pinch of salt. I'd be mortally offended if someone tried to imply that goes on where I work, for example. I have never, ever, known of these extreme things going on anywhere that I have worked or been a student at.

And a different perspective on the "grad students doing the prof's research" take. If you were a manager and hired a secretary to type all of your letters, would you say the secretary is "doing your job for you"? (I doubt it). Some profs put in countless hours to get grants that allow grad students to work their way through school. The grant pays tuition, fees, and an hourly salary that beats any other kind of employment they could get (except maybe stripping; I just read about some of the students here doing that to put themselves through school).

"My" GA for example does all of the day-to-day supervision of the project that I designed, wrote up, got funding for, obtained all the laborious permissions for, blah, blah. We meet for 2 hours each week to go over progress, and she is under strict instructions to let me know if her workload goes over 20 hours a week. She's learning far more, professionally, from this (paid) experience than she would working at a bar or restaurant, and I can almost guarantee you that her CV and my reference will get her a very good job when she graduates (plus the fact that she is an excellent example of a true professional).

While some unprofessional exlpoitation does undoubtedly occur, let's not get confused between higher education and daytime soaps...