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Comment by sandoooo | Hacker News Reader

Knowing the culture and relative status dynamics would have helped. Undergrads are lower than the worms beneath your feet as faculty, and shouldn't be invited to faculty gatherings lest they drool on the carpet.

By not figuring out what the faux pas's are for the local ecosystem, he was setting himself up for failure. If it wasn't this talk it would have been something else.

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Are they? As an undergrad I thought my professors were silly folks who got suckered into making a huge effort on obscure facts when they could easily make the same salary with less energy in software/IT. When a prof I did research with behaved rudely to me I just quit his lab and got someone else to write grad school letters for me. Academically all but the best undergrads know basically nothing, but looking down on them seems like you’ll soon have lab a labor shortage to me, especially in CS.

undergrads don't bring in grant money, but do cost time (teaching). From a university 'business' point of view, they are a net loss.

Grants are a big thing in academia.

In the UK it's exactly the opposite. Here's the best case (UCL - a super research intensive university): https://www.ucl.ac.uk/students/fees-and-funding/how-ucl-uses... Most other universities rely far more on teaching. Tuition fees also have the advantage that they are constant and relatively easy to predict while grants last a few years at best (and of course you do have to >do< something with them so they are not pure profit. Broadly, grants are the delicious froth on top of the tuition fee latte.

It’s not always true. I know an undergrad who had a conference paper out in a direction a PI could use in grant writing.

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