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Comment by sldivzklhc | Hacker News Reader

>Undergraduates don't have the specialized knowledge required to teach or to contribute substantially to research. Graduate students, however, do both of these jobs.

I don't think grad/undergrad is the right distinction here. I was employed by my undergrad-only liberal arts alma-mater as a teaching assistant and research assistant. And the college employed many of my classmates in other positions. We weren't exploited like many graduated students are, but another institution could have treated us worse.

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To this point and the point below about undergrads and specialized knowledge: yes, you're absolutely right. I should not have said that undergrads don't have the specialized knowledge to teach. Plenty of undergrads make great TAs, and teaching assistants are a critical part of the learning process at most universities. What I should have said is that courses are not taught by (the role of the teacher is held by) undergraduates but by professors and graduate students, who are responsible for the planning, content, and instruction, and for the TAs that assist them. The only point I'm trying to make is that graduate students are given substantial full-time-equivalent jobs and that there place and role in the university ought to reflect this.

> college employed many of my classmates in other positions

And how many classmates were not employed? Far more. So yes, the grad/undergrad distinction is valid. Undergrads are often assigned boring research jobs and are paid less.

> Undergrads are often assigned boring research jobs and are paid less.

I agree paid less, but disagree about "boring" research jobs. It probably depends on your school and your major. Nuclear Engineering at NC State got me to research molecular dynamics GPU techniques (this was around 2010) to simulate rare events (such as radiation-resistant material interactions) in order to get real-world simulation times to the order of milliseconds, which is a whopping 1000x speedup from the usual microseconds. I got access to the school's supercomputers just like any other physics grad.

My work later moved to the CASL (Consortium for Advanced Simulation of LWRs[0]) umbrella, and I was not the only one. None of the topics were boring, and the general impression I got from the department head was that undergrads were as capable but just requiring slightly more guidance.

It was a great funnel for getting undergrads to continue their research to grad school and ultimately to a PhD. I did not continue, but still have several friends that are pursuing their PhDs.

[0] http://www.casl.gov/

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