[HN Gopher] Stanford student collects her Master's degree at the...
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Stanford student collects her Master's degree at the age of 105
Author : onnnon
Score : 65 points
Date : 2024-06-21 20:30 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ed.stanford.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (ed.stanford.edu)
| shae wrote:
| That beats the 24 years it took me to finish my undergrad
| voisin wrote:
| Sounds like there's an interesting story buried in there!
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I think the joke is that they finished their undergrad at age
| 24.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| Brian May of Queen finished his PhD on asteroid dust after a 33
| year hiatus.
| carrolldunham wrote:
| This culture of degrees as attainments is not good. It's supposed
| to be training for a productive research career but when some
| unlikely person collects the degree it's treated like a medal.
| The professor's time was wasted.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Why not just think of a degree as a certification of completion
| of a sequence of courses and tasks, which teach skills, and
| whose completion can be verified?
| clpmsf wrote:
| That seems like a very strange opinion... "the professor's time
| was wasted"?? The pursuit of education (and often degrees) is
| meaningful on a personal level. A productive research career is
| simply one of infinitely many paths that a person could choose
| to take.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| Most of the time the professors spend 0 time specifically on a
| student (PhDs excluded) as postdocs/PhD students mark
| coursework and even (in some institutions) exams
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| > PhDs excluded
|
| lol you think professors spend time on their phd students?
| they have postdocs for that...
|
| edit: a typical research lab functions exactly like any other
| organization in the world: hierarchically. a chief
| executive/leadership role/head (the prof), his/her direct
| reports (post docs), their direct reports (phd students), and
| their direct reports (undergrads). if a phd student is being
| directly advised by the prof that's simply because the prof
| currently has no postdocs _not because they don 't desire
| some_.
| anticensor wrote:
| For legal reasons, the thesis supervisor has to be a
| professor in most unis (a non supervising advisor can be
| anyone with a doctorate, though), not just a random postdoc
| fellow.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| In the US.
| jjk166 wrote:
| It is very much not meant to be training for a career. The
| culture of "time spent on anything that does not lead
| specifically to financial gain is wasted" is sad.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Maybe it isn't meant to be, and maybe it's not very good at
| it, but a bachelor's degree is a de facto prerequisite to
| almost any office job.
|
| Schools know this, which is why they can continue to charge
| more and more every year. But when anyone brings up the fact
| that maybe university is suboptimal vocational training, they
| retreat back into claiming they're not. You can't have it
| both ways.
| jjk166 wrote:
| That bachelors degrees should not be a prerequisite for
| office jobs only reinforces the argument that education is
| not meant to be vocational training.
|
| And bachelors degrees are not the only form of education,
| nor the one being discussed here.
| something98 wrote:
| Research careers. Lol. Since this is HN I'll hit a nerve, but I
| bet much less than 0.1% of CS MS degree holders do research as
| a career.
| Clamchop wrote:
| I can both see the sense in what you wrote and am icked out by
| it. And yet I'm not conflicted; ruthless objectivity in pursuit
| of productive output isn't always the best thing, and sometimes
| it's unethical outright.
|
| So I believe anyone should be able to get an education if and
| when they want to.
| soperj wrote:
| Completely disagree, and feel like this is exactly where
| universities have gone wrong.
| starttoaster wrote:
| I would argue that Fine Arts, and many other liberal arts
| degrees are the perfect examples of you being wrong that
| degrees are solely for career development. Degrees are
| documents given from accredited institutions that you learned
| something. Nothing more. The professor's time was not wasted,
| their job is simply to teach, not to teach workers.
| dctoedt wrote:
| It's a bit reminiscent of college dropout Steven Spielberg's
| returning to Cal State Long Beach in 2002 to finish his B.A. in
| Film and Electronic Arts: One of the degree requirements was to
| complete and submit a film project -- so he submitted _Schindler
| 's List_, which had won the Academy Award for Best Picture (and
| Spielberg the Oscar for Best Director).
| something98 wrote:
| I'd love to read the critiques (if any) the professor dared to
| give when grading that.
| starttoaster wrote:
| I'm sure they came up with something, it's quite literally
| the teacher's job, and I'm hesitant to believe any movie is
| perfect. What I want to see is if Steven tried to rebuttal
| the feedback at all. I'm imagining the Ron Swanson scene at
| Home Depot where he says, "I know more than you."
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _it 's quite literally the teacher's job, and I'm
| hesitant to believe any movie is perfect._
|
| If I were the teacher, I'd simply say, "Congratulations,
| great job," and leave it at that. Otherwise, the teacher
| would risk being ridiculed for nitpicking one of the
| greatest films ever.
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