Reconnecting with grad alums

Pizza parties and Facebook pages are all well and good, but the graduate experience at Princeton will not be changed by such lip service. Graduate students are future professors in training, of whom the University should be proud, not treating as if they were ­invisible. I am still stinging from a student tour guide’s remark, which I overheard my first year as a graduate student, that “all classes are taught by professors.” What about the hundreds of graduate teaching assistants? No ­professor ever set foot in the French 101 class I taught or the German 101 class I took. The only change I have noticed is that I am asked more frequently to donate. When someone from the administration contacts me to ask why I, and many like me, did not complete the Ph.D. program and chose to stop at a terminal master’s, then I will know that attitudes are really changing.