The graduate program has been on my mind a lot recently. The graduate student population has changed greatly in the last 5-10 years. With the large increase in international students cultural differences are evident. When our graduate students were mainly US citizens students would more readily complain when things were not to their liking. One result of this change is that I feel less connected with the students. With little or no input from the students I have very little idea what is going on. Another result is that it becomes harder to work for changes to help students. At one point I was worried about the problems that students were having graduating. In particular I was worried about the problems graduate students were having finding advisors for a thesis (or plan A as it is labeled in the university catalog). Given that no student had complained to the chair of the department about this I had an uphill battle just to convince him that is a problem.

 

The thesis option is a problem for our department. Given all the other duties one has I consider 1-3 thesis students a reasonable load. 5 thesis students is my upper limit. This number is manageable if all the students are not active at the same time. 10 thesis students at a time is very excessive. I had that number thesis students once and life was hell. To put these numbers in perspective I believe that in the math department the faculty out number the graduate students. This means that on average an instructor has less than one thesis student.

 

Looking at the most recent graduate catalog I see 10 faculty that are actually accepting thesis students. So if all faculty have a reasonable number of thesis students our capacity for thesis students is about 20. If we push faculty hard and many of the students are not active at the same time we can stretch this to 50, but is this is really stretching things. At this number other things start to suffer like creating new courses, updating course material, grading papers and supervising students. We have about 300 graduate students and our graduate enrollments have been steady for sometime.

 

We do farm out about 15 students to other departments. We also have a person that is willing to work himself to death so it might be possible that at any given time we can have up to 20-30% of our graduate students taking the thesis option. Some students think that they can just wait a few years for their turn a being in the luck 20-30%. After all as students finish thesis other students can start a thesis, so if you wait around long enough it will be your turn. There are a number of things wrong with this thinking. First, there are constantly more students entering the program. This means that the number of students competing for thesis slots is basically constant, so you may never rise the top of the list. Secondly, after you finish taking classes you will drop out of circulation and faculty will not see you. Given a constant line of students requesting the thesis option faculty are likely to select the bright student in their class over someone they have not seen for three years.

 

Student may consider this situation unfair and maybe it is unfair. However it is our reality. Also part of our reality is that students don't need to select the thesis option, they can select plan B, the exam option. The current catalog even states that we can handle a limited number of thesis students. When students ask me about the thesis option I tell them that the hardest part is finding an advisor. Students need to take this into account when deciding whether to take the thesis option (plan A) or the exam option (plan B). If you decide on plan A beware that you may not be able to find an advisor to take you on and not be able to graduate.