tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8964719845369935777.post3055975436646265365..comments2024-03-27T21:23:40.339-04:00Comments on Chemjobber: The Way Things Could BeChemjobberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15932113680515602275noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8964719845369935777.post-62033883114003104892012-09-08T23:27:51.561-04:002012-09-08T23:27:51.561-04:00This sounds disturbingly rational.
It would proba...This sounds disturbingly rational.<br /><br />It would probably help if everyone involved looked at each other as people (and not as whiny grad students, foreign visa holders, BNU/LNU grads, professors/slavedrivers, greedy capitalists/brave businesspeople). Of course, wrt jobs, HR seems to need to depersonalize people who apply for jobs or who have them and won't anymore, and schools seem to view students either as expendable quantities with infinite capacity for work and a small and finite capacity for sleep. Much of the ability to disregard people is built into systems to make them runs and to make it possible for people to collect their benefits without having to be aware of from where they come. We haven't done this anywhere (particularly in politics, where we need it badly).<br /><br />It would also help if we recognized that we were helping to create knowledge. I didn't do enough research in undergrad, and so the jump to trying to actually make knowledge that is reliable and useful was rather large. Unless we get caught lying, the role of students in knowledge is generally not regarded much, if at all (other than, perhaps, the telomere Nobel). It would help some wrt both the expendability/irrelevance of grad students and the feeling that the Ph.D. is a ticket to punch (that it's an end and not a means). It also might actually imply that later on, all those outsourcing folks and BS/MS people who work on your project are not entirely expendable, that we are all in this together. Probably if that had been the case, events like Sangji's death (let alone the man who was killed at Sepracor Canada) would be less common.Hapnoreply@blogger.com