Lobo Mind Loan

This semester the number of graduate students who decided to come here was considerably higher than the expected number. The Department is short on the funds to support them all like it promised to. All that leads me to think again about something that I was strongly considering initiating last February. Here it is:

Last August Mark, an excellent student, graduated from my group. He was offered a few different and interesting jobs. One of them was a short term job with high pay. I think it was something like 8 months and 80 k. It wasn't his first choice because it didn't provide a lot of security.

But I couldn't help but guess at the reasons for the odd job offer. Why the high pay and short duration? Here is my first guess: they wanted a job done but they didn't want an employee. Mark had a very specific expertise that could help this company improve their products. If he had accepted they could have extracted the valuable knowledge without acquiring a long term liability. My second guess is that they actually do want more quality employees, but that they don't know a good way to find out if you will be one without having you work for them for a little while.

Now I want to ask a question: was Mark very much more valuable the semester after he graduated than he was the semester before? I think that the answer is no. Only somewhat more valuable. But before he graduated he was probably earning about $1,200 per month rather than $10,000 per month.

Mark isn't alone in having a very specialized and possibly quite valuable expertise. Ideally a PhD student comes to know one specific topic better than anyone else in the world. Not every student achieves that ideal but I believe that a fair portion of them do.

Right now PhD students at UNM are supported on either TA-ships or RA-ships. Both become great opportunities to learn to do research and to learn to teach. It's a great system, especially for training up future teachers and researchers for the academic world. There is one weakness: you can get a little cloistered. You don't get to learn how the world works. Especially how the other large research sectors, government and industry work. And it is hard to know if at the end you will be prepared to work in either. Or even if you would like to work in either. The pay is also pretty low if you want to raise a family and live a normal life.

Anyway, here is what one might do:

• Gather a list of companies and the technical problems they would like solved and the kind of people they would like to recruit

• Gather a list of upper-level graduate students and their greatest strengths and strongest interests

• Try to pair up the two. The companies would put in 30 k for 6 months. No taxes or paperwork beyond the 30k. The company doing the work takes a commission of 10%. The rest of the money goes to paying a stipend, paying tuition, paying taxes, and so on.

Companies benefit from the chance to take advantage of specific expertise, and from the chance to try out perspective employees in an inexpensive way.

Students benefit by having the chance to learn a little about the real world and by having a temporary increase in funds. They can also form job leads for the future.

Professors benefit because they can fund more students in a more exciting fashion.

Professors and industry benefit by forming stronger ties with industry and having any cross pollination that can come from such ties.

UNM benefits because it will become known as the place to go to graduate school if you want to come out with an understanding of the technical work place.

Albuquerque benefits because it can have the chance to keep a larger portion of it's quality graduate students in the area.

The University benefits as it becomes known as the best place to come to graduate school if you would like to go into industry down the road and as it becomes able to fund more graduate students than it would be able to take on otherwise.

What do you think?