10/14   from the princeton review:
        Is There a Conspiracy? While most first year Ph.D. students work
        extremely hard, statistics reveal that many will not meet the
        first year requirements of their graduate programs anyway. Only
        one out of every six students who starts a Ph.D. program in the
        humanities and social sciences finishes it.
        Some people believe graduate departments with large undergraduate
        programs accept more first year students than they can fund in
        successive years because they need the teaching assistants
        (T.A.s). These people maintain that professors purposefully give
        out low grades so they can "flunk out" graduate students the
        department can't afford to keep after the first year. This belief
        is so widespread that, in departments that guarantee to fund
        graduate students through teaching or research assistantships,
        there's probably at least some truth to that theory. Some
        students who don't complete the Ph.D. will leave with master's
        degrees; others will leave with no degree at all. All Ph.D.
        students should have a backup plan.
        \_ what's your point?
           \_ i'll wait until the people applying for grad school
              see this posting.  obviously, you are either done with
              your phd or in industry.
              \_ in the top schools, most first yr. grad students have finished
                 and passed the qualifying exams.  First thing you
                 want to do is to get a good advisor and becomes
                 a RA.  The road to PhD starts getting fuzzier once
                 you realize the PhD degree is not a guarantee of
                 anything, and you begins to wander about what to
                 do after graduation.  If it's industry, the PhD can be
                 an overkill.  If academic, the competition for
           \_ you couldn't pay me enough to go to UCI.
                 the few good spots are really intense, and you
              \_ again, paolo, you couldn't pay me enough to go to UCI.
                 may have to settle for lesser schools.  You need
                 to be strongly convinced that you love what you
                 do to ride through the PhD curve.
                 \_ fixed by only slightly overzealout motd formatting god
        \_ URL please. Anyone could make this up.
           \_ cos you believe everything on the internet?
              \_ as opposed to believing everything on the motd?
           \_ http://www.review.com
        \_ was accepted to uci and uc davis for fall 2001, uc davis
           guaranteed $22k+ per year via fellowship/grant/RA/TAships.
           uci guaranteed tuition for 4 years, and fellowship for first
           year. doesn't sound like it to me.
           \_ you couldn't pay me enough to go to UCI. ICS==DeVry - paolo
           \_ look at a UCI graduate: www.csua/~keithyw
        \_ who goes to grad school in CSUA? can we get feedback from them?