These continuous enrollment policies remind you that schools are in the business of making money

This memo below was sent out to all department chairs, graduate studies chairs, and graduate program administrative support staff at OSU. I don't think it was intended to be read by students or anyone else, but it got forwarded to the student list, and they haven't taken me off of that list yet. For brevity, I'm omitting the PDF that was attached to the memo.

I have always thought these continuous enrollment policies (and limits on funding based on a credit hour ceiling) were slimy. It's even slimier when you read this memo which initially says it is in the benefit of the student to finish their doctorate quickly but then at the end says that it ensures the college is making money.

Patrick S. Osmer, Vice Provost and Dean
February 28, 2011

TO:
Department Chairs
Graduate Studies Committee Chairs
Graduate Program Administrative Support Staff


Colleagues:

I am writing to remind you of the Continuous Enrollment Policy that is in effect for all students who were admitted to the Graduate School autumn quarter 2008 and after. We are receiving petitions for exemption from the policy, which we need to have approved by the college before we can consider them, as I ex­plain below.

Simply put, this policy requires all post-candidacy students to be enrolled for a minimum of three credit hours every quarter (excluding summer quarter) until graduation. I am including a copy of the policy for your convenience. Recall that the policy is an outcome of the process that led to the reduction of full-time enrollment for post-candidacy students to three credit hours. One specific goal of continuous enrollment is to reduce time to degree for doctoral students by having them formally engaged with their program and the university. Going away to teach somewhere else with the intent to finish the dissertation off campus, for example, is not in the student’s best interests or the university’s.

A student may apply for a leave of absence due to extenuating circumstances such as the birth or adoption of a child or a serious medical condition, but a leave will not be granted with the sole reason of financial hardship.

If a student is requesting an exemption from continuous enrollment due to circumstances not covered by the leave of absence as stated in the Graduate School Handbook, I am asking that he or she direct that petition to the dean’s office for your review. The college may choose to cover the cost of the post-candidacy enrollment for an individual student and we will work with the college to manage that process. I remind you that according to the current budget model, the net marginal revenue to the college will be positive for a student who enrolls for three hours and for whom the college covers the (standard) fee au­thorization.

We continue to communicate this policy to students and to graduate programs and appreciate your assis­tance with that process. Please let me know if you have further questions.

Sincerely,

Pat

250 University Hall
230 N. Oval Mall
Columbus, OH 43210-1366
PH:(614) 247-7413
FAX:(614) 292-3656

Currently, students get into their post-candidacy period as soon as possible and must keep 3-hour enrollment per quarter. Before that, students were urged to do their candidacy a year before defending their dissertation (so the candidacy started the "writing year"). In general, students were asked to maintain 15-hour enrollment (because it was good for individual department budgets). But then the state got involved and started to crank down on the maximum number of hours a doctoral student could accumulate... and things went down hill from there. So now we have early candidacies and lots of mandatory 3-hour enrollment. By the way, if you didn't get the hint, students don't actually take any classes during these 3- or 15-hour enrollment periods; they take (and someone pays for) "research hours". "Research hours" are usually not given letter grades (although some universities give them letter grades, which helps graduate students to buffer their GPA's against some classes that they actually do have to take), and they rarely require any deliverables to pass them. They are throw away classes invented by bean counters.

Updated LaTeX document class for Ohio State University (OSU) graduate school dissertation and thesis documents

Back in 1996, The Ohio State University Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department made available LaTeX2e support files including a document class that complied with the graduate school's format for dissertations (see samples pages, guidelines, templates, and other resources from the graduate school). The resulting osudissert96.cls and osudissert96-mods.sty from the ECE department was kept up to date through 1998, but it was left to lapse out of compliance after several format updates from the graduate school (including a recent one in 2009). Additionally, the graduate school only officially supports helping students with documents "typeset" in Microsoft Word (and even their Word templates may require a more recent version than they claim on the website).

So back when I put together my dissertation (which has source code available to review) in 2010, I updated those old ECE templates for the 2010 format. I tried to make them backward compatible with the old osudissert96 to make them nice drop-in replacements for anyone using the outdated versions. You can find them at:

• http://links.tedpavlic.com/zip/osudissert10.zip
• http://links.tedpavlic.com/zip/sample-osudissert10.zip

For the most part, the old osudissert96 documentation still applies. However, it might be better just browsing through the sample and/or using the sample as a template for your own document. To get the sample up and running,

1. Unzip sample-osudissert10.zip.
2. Unzip osudissert10.zip.
3. Put the CLS and STY files from osudissert10.zip into the same directory as the files from sample-osudissert10.zip
4. Build the sample dissertation with:
   1. pdflatex Thesis.tex
   2. bibtex Thesis.aux
   3. pdflatex Thesis.tex
   4. pdflatex Thesis.tex
5. Review the resulting Thesis.pdf file, which also includes documentation on how to get your own dissertation up and running.

There is also a README file in sample-osudissert10.zip that basically says the same as above. Experts may just need the files in osudissert10.zip, but it will still be useful to see the quick reference in Appendix B of the sample dissertation. Note that the documentclass is still called osudissert96.cls even though the zip file is called osudissert10.zip; this choice was made for compatibility with old dissertations using the old files.

I hope that helps someone out there. I probably won't be monitoring the graduate school format policies now that I am not in graduate school anymore, but I am usually happy to help with "how-to-modify" questions over e-mail (if I have time). Good luck!

Graduate School Reflection

When looking for a good graduate program, most people focus on the adviser. After all, with as individual-driven as graduate school is, having an adviser who checks in every once in a while and cares is a nice thing to have. However, I don't think most people think about the department. That's probably because there's no help there. It's probably the case that wherever you go, the department doesn't care about you or its classes. The department will do its best to screw you over. The department will put you through hell... but maybe that's their job. Maybe everyone gets a good hazing as a rite of passage on the way to joining academia.

I suppose it could be worse. One thing I didn't realize as an undergrad is how much the department really really doesn't care about them. Undergrads are a little bit like the coppertops of The Matrix; they plug in and go about their lives not ever realizing that they're just there to generate revenue. There's no social good. There's no professional obligation to educate young professionals. It's all about the money.

One day I sat in on a meeting of large donors to The College. A marketing person from The College or The University gave a PowerPoint presentation on improving the ranking of The College. One major topic of discussion was about which pictures to put on the front of brochures that are mailed out to other Colleges who contribute to the rankings ("Ah, yes, but what type of people both become engineers AND become deans of engineering colleges? Maybe engineers prefer charts, but deans prefer pictures of people walking on grass!" (no joke)). Another topic was how many graduate students to accept in order to maximize one variable in a large formula that contributes to ranking. Too few graduate students and you have too few research dollars being spent, but too many and the professor-to-student ratio is all upset. No talk of "excellence" or anything like that. All about marketing and presentation. Oh... why was I there? I had to sit and be pretty so the old donors had some young people to talk to during the dinner.

Welcome to a research I university.

Letter to Prospective Graduate Student

Now that all of my adviser's older graduate students have graduated, I have somehow become an international ambassador (completely against my will) for the university. I've been getting e-mails from students interested in getting their PhD in the area of control here at OSU. Here's a sample response, which may or may not be helpful to some random Googler out there.

> I am interested in Fuzzy controllers in Control Systems
> and have done some paper presentation on that in under
> Grad school. I plan to take the same for my PhD studies.

    It's good to hear that you're considering advanced
studies in control systems.  Keep in mind that state of the
art control research is not in fuzzy control. Modern control
uses a more rigorous mathematical approach. Recent interest
in nonlinear systems has made the mathematics of real
analysis an important tool for the control researcher. 

    That being said, Professors Passino and Yurkovich are
experts in fuzzy control (you can see their book on the
subject). Professor Passino's current research investigates
biological and psychological systems (in particular, how to
integrate engineering ideas into those fields and use
insights from those fields to inspire engineering
solutions). Professor Yurkovich is highly active in
automobile control system research (spanning everything from
the automobile itself to the manufacturing systems that make
it). Because Professor Yurkovich's research is a little more
conventional, it tends to be more easily funded. 

    Additionally, there are several other strong control
faculty members here at OSU.  Professor Ozguner, for
example, is a leader in coordinated control (e.g.,
integration of multiple vehicles or systems with independent
controllers). Professor Serrani is an expert in nonlinear
dynamics (e.g., control of fluid flow through an
airbreathing supersonic jet). Check out OSU's ECE webpage
for more information on the other control faculty.
 
> 1. How do you find the course you are pursuing. That is
> about the quality of teaching, course material and other
> facilities at the university?

    I think that the courses at OSU are very strong,
especially in control and *mathematics*. Keep in mind that
OSU's math department has a strong theoretical bias, which
actually makes it ideal for engineering disciplines
surrounding communication systems, signal processing, and
control systems (a focus on algebra for the first two and
real analysis for the latter). All of these courses are
taught by experienced faculty, and I have been very happy
with the level of instruction here at OSU.

    That being said, some of our facilities are older.
Additionally, primarily due to lower undergraduate
enrollment in the ECE department, *internal* funding
opportunities for graduate students have been on the
decline. 

> 2. Do I need to get in touch with any Professors before
> applying for admission?

    *YES*, it would be a good idea to see
what space will be available. However, many will probably
tell you to get back in touch with them after you have been
admitted to the program. Still, you should contact them to
see if they'll be available to take on new students. It is 
usually best to make first contact by e-mail (though, 
depending on the professor, your mileage may vary). Make your 
intentions clear in your e-mail's subject (e.g., "Considering 
PhD Study in Control Systems Area at OSU").

    Keep in mind that many professors will favor PhD
students over MS students (which shouldn't be an issue in
your case). Additionally, the OSU ECE department has
recently "modernized" its advanced degree program. Now there
is a 4 year (nominally) "direct to PhD" program that may (or
may not) be attractive to you. You might want to consult the
"ECE Graduate Handbook" (available on the ECE webpage in the
section for graduate students) to get more details about
those programs.

    In the meantime, you should definitely be pursuing
outside funding options. Having outside funding will make
you more attractive to any university and will give you more
flexibility when doing your own research.

    I hope that helps. Best wishes --
    Ted

I'm leaving out many details that I bitch about frequently among friends. Maybe that's because I'm optimistic that the university (and the ECE department) will "change" for the "better," or maybe that's because I don't want to be the lone miserable schmuck.

Like reading my horoscope...

In a comment on a previous post, I got a complaint that all of my new posts are about computer stuff only. Evidently, I'm much more entertaining when I talk about life.

A little after I left my job in Austin to start grad school, my boss left his job to go to grad school. His most recent post really resonates with me. As a bonus, Clay was always more entertaining than me, so I figured forwarding "you all" to his post would be even better than me taking the time to report on life in general.

From Clay's post:
Sundays are tough at the Menlo Park outpost of the Daigle/Box family. The psychology of it all is as follows: LL takes Sundays pretty badly because it means the weekend is almost over. So she regrets how, yet again, we failed to do anything fun or get any skinnier. For example, last night (which was a Saturday), she wanted to go see a movie, but instead we stayed home and ordered Chinese food, which accomplished neither the fun nor skinny parts of her goals. It is also on Sundays that LL notices the apartment isn't tidy and sometimes that can compound the feelings of not getting stuff done.

I on the other hand, don't mind Sundays that much. My low point actually comes on Friday when, yet again, I feel like I didn't make very much progress that week on school or research or whatever else.
(...continues...)

So, go read about Clay and LL's "Furniture repair!".