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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]When I was a graduate student then a postdoc years ago, every time I would be really annoyed when the advisor assigned an undergraduate to me.  It's a liability.  Was at Cal.[/quote]

Or you could see it as a failed opportunity for developing your mentorship and people management skills. I bet you’re not good at those even now.

I actually had positive experiences with assigned undergrads during my doctorate. You get what you put in.[/quote]

You must be joking.  The advisor is just shifting their own work onto you, because they don't want to do it.  As a grad student or postdoc, you have limited time and more important things to do than to deal with undergrads.[/quote]

I’m not joking. That’s how you develop soft people skills, project management etc. In your career you’ll have to deal with people less knowledgeable than you are that need to be motivated and trained. You definitely missed that opportunity. Berkeley students are some of the most hard working and smart there are.[/quote]

Wow you are dumb.  Managing undergrads is not a skill to develop and this is not the point of grad school or a postdoc.

If you want to babysit with your free time you can find some toddlers.[/quote]

You have such an overinflated sense of yourself and a demeanor that sucks. A grad student just starting is not that much better than an undergraduate. Being a mentor at all stages of one’s career is not only rewarding but also helps you grow professionally.

Wondering what kid of relation you had with your adviser, maybe you’re just modeling behavior you were exposed to. I guarantee you’re more useless to a professor when you start than those annoying undergrads were to you. Also your adviser may be looking to screen future candidates for his lab, he asks you to mentor a few students, then that’s your duty as a member of his research team to do it, not sure why you think that’s even controversial.[/quote]

Mentoring undergrads is not the duty of a grad student or postdoc.  Wowsers.  They are funded to conduct research, submit grants, and publish papers.

For faculty, this falls more in line with their job expectations, depending on the circumstances.  [b]However, a good faculty member isn't going to weigh down their grad students and postdocs with undergrad mentoring.[/b][/quote]

Are you for real? Now graduate students expect that faculty don’t bother them with distractions? Wondering if you ever had a real job besides academia.

You got your facts wrong, the university is funded to conduct the research, the professor leads the research team and the graduate students execute the tasks. Most grants have an [b]educational[/b], dissemination and outreach component that your adviser committed his team to carry on. Note that he didn’t say he’ll do it himself, but his research team as a whole. The granting agency doesn’t care only about the papers, future workforce development is part of their mission, which is why congress allocates money to those agencies. But no, you can’t be bothered with that crap, cause you know better and undergrads annoy you. Seriously, just grow up.

In real life you do what the person paying your salary asks you to do. [/quote]

You have no idea how the real world works.  Which is why faculty have been taking advantage of you and dumping their useless work in your lap.  And you take it with a smile because of how naive you are.[/quote]

Good friend is a full professor at Stanford. He is quite open that he hasn't taught an undergrad class in many years and that he has zero time for them. His view is that he is paid to run his lab, train his grad students and make money for Stanford. In his mind spending time with undergrads is a misuse money as they still have too much to learn.[/quote]

That’s exactly why you assign a grad student to mentor an undergrad and a postdoc to mentor a grad student. If the group is large you don’t have the time and frankly the skill and knowledge if we’re talking about experimental work. But you still want your group to learn from each other and disseminate best practices and retain the know how once somebody is leaving. You don’t want students to figure out how to run an assay from the kit instructions when there’s a group member that did it hundreds of times. It’s like you know nothing about managing a group of people.

[/quote]

No faculty with a serious research program is going to do this.  The loweset level trainee in the lab is a grad student.  Going below that is a sign of problems.  Furthermore, your faculty member was clearly dumping undesirable work on you, in addition to dipping below the bottom for trainees.[/quote]

You speak like you run countless “serious” research programs. Won’t go into many details but I’ve funded university research with the big shot professor doing the sales pitch, the junior faculty running the research along with postdoc/staff member, and tasks run by graduate students and gasp! undergrads. I think they even had a summer high school student if I remember correctly.

You have a very narrow view on how research is done from a management perspective.[/quote]

I know from experience what it takes to run a top research program, while you seem lost.  Yes, some faculty work with undergrads but usually either as a personal favor or out of desperation.  The smart ones would assign the mentoring to a lab tech or other employee who isn't under the time deadlines that grad students and postdocs have.  A lack of funding can also lead to working with undergrads.[/quote]

Respectfully, being a postdoc with a famous professor is not the same as “knowing from experience what it takes to run a top research program”. Your ego is bigger than it should be. I like how you judge what “smart” faculty should do.

Duh, of course lack of funding means you’ll need to work with undergrads especially when you’re starting up since they are paid by the university. But if you’re trying to recruit future graduate students, that’s a perfectly fine route. You advocate for their admission to the program, and get a graduate student that hits the ground running because they already spent a good amount of time in your lab. So an associate professor can get down and dirty mentoring undergrads, but no, that’s beneath the lofty graduate student![/quote]

Respectfully, I am faculty at a top 3 medical school where I also trained.  Currently I feel like I am speaking to a lower primate.[/quote]

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