Foreign Born TAs

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Gabe on Tue, Jul 29, 03:07AM

My personal experience with foreign TAs was that some were good and some were terrible. Largely due to language barriers making the bad foreign TAs terrible instead of just bad. I remember going to one TA and I couldn't understand a word he said. A half an hour later I still couldn't understand hiim. Obviously visiting him wasn't much use.

On the larger topic of recruiting foreign students I'd say that it only makes sense to bring in the best and the brightest but a lot of the foreign students I met while pursuing my bachelors and masters (across 4 universities) were no better/smarter than average native students. I don't see the point in recruiting foreign students who aren't any smarter than the natives. The only benefit from this is for corporations that use foreign engineers to supress salaries. However, there are long term consequences (engineering students and professionals returning to their home country with proprietary knowledge) that will only get more acute as the economic conditions in India and China improve. We should be recruiting more natives rather than spending time and money on recruiting the average engineer from other countries. This would cause our corps some short term pain but I think it will be healthier for the US in the long term.

Gabe My Site

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