Browsing Topic Best Graduate Students Quotes

Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.

Those who matter don’t mind, and those who mind don’t matter.

There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.

Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do.

When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.

I didn’t study writing in school, I studied biology as an undergraduate and graduate student. So I think that I write fiction in the scientific way. I love invention, obviously; I love creation of character. But I do feel very rooted in the real world, even in the way that I create characters.

Jocelyn Bell joined the project as a graduate student in 1965, helping as a member of the construction team and then analysing the paper charts of the sky survey.

I trust that a graduate student some day will write a doctoral essay on the influence of the Munich analogy on the subsequent history of the twentieth century. Perhaps in the end he will conclude that the multitude of errors committed in the name of Munich may exceed the original error of 1938.

I used to tell women graduate students, half-seriously, that the role of slightly rebellious daughter was one of the better roles for women living in patriarchy.

Economic analysis is the first principle of Marxism. Professors who were genuine leftists would have challenged the entire economics-driven machinery of American academe the wasteful multidepartmental structure, the divisive pedantry of overspecialization, the cronyism and sycophancy in recruitment and promotion, the boondoggling ostentation of pointless conferences, the exploitation of graduate students and part-time teachers, the subservience of faculty to overpaid administrators, the mediocrity and folly of the ruling cliques of the Modern Language Association.

There was one thing more than any other that turned this New York, liberal, Jewish, Columbia University graduate student away from modern liberalism: its use of moral equivalence to avoid confronting evil during the Cold War.

An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he’s working on these days. ‘My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.’ ‘Oh really, that’s interesting: one didn’t think there was a class system in the United States.’ ‘Nobody does. That’s how it survives.

American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone.

It is a mistake to think of these men as visionary dreamers, playing around at Philadelphia with abstract conceptions of political theory, pulling a whole scheme of government out of the air like a rabbit out of a hat. True, many of them had read and studied enough about the science of politics to put the average statesman of today to shame. But political science was to them an extremely practical topic of discussion, dealing with the extremely practical business of running a government–not, as today, a branch of higher learning reserved for the use of graduate students.

You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.

I tell my graduate students [at Bard College], ‘There are two ways to change the world: through policy, or through sustainable business.’ With sustainable business, individuals build solutions within the current system… Sustainable business asks, ‘How would nature do this?’

We need to align the incentives so that colleges have an incentive to keep down their costs… to graduate students on time with degrees in areas where they’re going to be able to get jobs and going to be able to pay back those loans.

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

By leaning on companies, by leaning on infrastructure providers, by leaning on researchers, graduate students, post-docs, even undergrads, to look at the challenges having an untrusted internet, where we have to put our communications on wires that are owned by a phone company that we can’t trust, that’s working in collaboration with a government that we can’t trust, in areas around the world, we can restructure that communications fabric in a way that it’s encrypted.

You are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

I learned law so well, the day I graduated I sued the college, won the case, and got my tuition back.

Anybody who instantly goes from being a poet and a graduate student to being a public figure has to be in a state of shock. First people want to praise you, and then they want to attack you. No one can prepare you for it.

When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There’s something that might be called the ‘graduate student syndrome’; graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery.

I have graduate students who have developed this ability to love and want to perfect it. Those are the students I spend a lot of time with because at this time they need that.

Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.

There was a golden period that I look back upon with great regret, in which the cheapest of experimental animals were medical students. Graduate students were even better. In the old days, if you offered a graduate student a thiamine-deficient diet, he gladly went on it, for that was the only way he could eat. Science is getting to be more and more difficult.

Never follow anyone else’s path, unless you’re in the woods and you’re lost.

Commencement speeches were invented largely in the belief that outgoing college students should never be released into the world until they have been properly sedated.

To those of you who received honours, awards and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students, I say, you too can be president of the United States.

My attitude toward graduate students was different, I must say. I used graduate students as colleagues: I gave them the best problems to work on, and I encouraged them.

Science itself is badly in need of integration and unification. The tendency is more and more the other way … Only the graduate student, poor beast of burden that he is, can be expected to know a little of each. As the number of physicists increases, each specialty becomes more self-sustaining and self-contained. Such Balkanization carries physics, and indeed, every science further away, from natural philosophy, which, intellectually, is the meaning and goal of science.

Almost all of my graduate students say that they got interested in dinosaurs because of ‘Jurassic Park.’

I got involved when I was a graduate student at UCLA when UCLA was the first site on the net.

A paradigm is a powerful theoretical and methodological framework which defines the working lives of thousands of intelligent and disciplined minds. And paradigms do not attract the loyalty of such minds unless they ‘work’. One of the first things a graduate student learns is that if there is a discrepancy between the paradigm and what he or she has discovered, then the automatic assumption is that the paradigm is right and the student wrong. Just as a good workman never blames his tools, so the diligent student never blames his paradigm

Things that I can do myself, I either do by myself, or teach a willing undergraduate who doesn’t know how to do those things by doing it for me. Things that I can’t do myself, my graduate students should be doing.