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Comment by Bahamut | Hacker News Reader

It should be noted that this is a fairly common pattern in graduate mathematics departments at public schools - IMO, it is to give students a chance when given outstanding resources.

I experienced something similar while at UIUC for math, but I passed the comprehensive exams solidly (my first attempt at two of them were thwarted by abnormally difficult exams where almost no one passed).

I ultimately left, but largely due to non-academic reasons combined with the state of Illinois stealing the university's budget allocation. Teaching wasn't too bad, but life in the tech industry sure beats academia.

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This sounds like a very strange system to me. Where I graduated (and I believe in most of Europe) the university has to have allocated the full funding for the entire PhD for a student before that student is admitted. So the university cannot afford to run a scheme like you describe, which is good since that sounds to me like a borderline predatory system.

Teaching positions for grad students aren't predatory. They are really a form of financial assistance. In return for teaching 3 hours a week 2 hours sitting in your office with the occasional student visitor (with say 5 hours of prep work that could be done during office hours and 3 12 hour days grading exams). That's 8 hours of work a week which works out to a pretty decent hourly salary.

It's hardly luxury and when the state/university system yanks funding out during your tenure THAT is somewhat predatory but usually most departments find a way to tighten belts and make sure current students have sufficent funding.

I've got six hours of teaching a week plus 2 hours of office hours plus meetings related to teaching plus prep plus grading.

Plus classes, homework, exams, plus research meetings, plus doing research, plus seminars, plus commute.

My university's administration has a rule that our department can't pay us more than a fixed amount, and that amount happens to be lower than the living wage in the city I live in. In other words, by the university's own admission they don't pay us enough to live off of.

For what it's worth, when I was still in college trying to decide between pursuing a math Ph.D. or going into the tech industry as a programmer, I remember being advised to think very hard about Berkeley as a graduate school due to the reasons cited above.

So, while this is just anecdata and I ultimately chose the second option, my experience researching graduate math departments is that Berkeley is specifically known for this practice and very few other departments are.

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