historicallinguist

Check UCSD for cognitive linguistics. Also, I do not think too many schools offer cognitive linguistics as a field of specialization.
For L1 acquisition, many schools have this specialization. In fact, you should also check the psychology departments, and schools of education of the school you want to apply, and should not limit your options to only linguistics departments in the schools you are interested in, when you are trying to find a place to do L1 acquisition research.
For ASL, the first school that comes to mind is Gallaudet University. You should check its website for further details.
Finally, I feel the three things you mentioned are very different stuffs, and should not be packed into a single personal statement. Be a bit more specific in a single subfield you mentioned when you are writing your personal statement. For example, if you are doing  L1 acquisition, tell the reader more specifically the L1 acquisition of what (e.g. syntax?phonology?) you are interested in, what experimental approaches you are interested in using and why, what theoretical frameworks you would like to work within and why, etc, etc.
 
Hope this helps!

Hi, linguists.
I am considering transferring to a better phd program, and wonder whether anyone has done this sort of thing before and succeeded. 
I want to do this because the advising available in our department is quite awful. Though I am doing probably the best among the phd cohort(winning university-wide award, best gpa possible, very good reports from instructors, etc), I am pretty much learning everything my own, and advising is  like a 9minutes conversation per semester. Emails rarely got responded, or got responded after two weeks (which is useless after all). Then, for external fellowship and grant application, folks who barely spent time with students told me that they did not know well about my research and cannot write LORs that focus on research(of course they did not know because they did not bother to spend time in knowing mine or those of other students well after all). What has happned is that this department has not had anyone getting external funding for many years in a row. Surely a bleak future!
what’s worse is the situation that it has so few profs that it is literally impossible to have a dissertation committee. Current 4th year or 5th students get bare minimal advising from the one or two folks in the diss committee, and sending emails back and forth with the external members who are the majority of the committee and the couple email communication is what it means to be advising. This is not anything new, I guess. Then, what ended up for MANY recent phds who completes their diss here is 
1. Cannot find a decent job anywhere else and be an adjunct in this department for more than 4 years in a row, teaching 3-5courses per semester 
2.cannot find an adjunct prof job even here, and stay here for another couple years as a TA
3. Ended up working in some wage-based job that has nothing to do with the phd whatsoever, and pay does not match the expected pay of the degree at all
Finance and job matters aside, how about research? The output of the research is far below standard as well! Rarely, if ever, a phd dissertation completed here is of publishable quality. Not a single dissertation (correct me if I am wrong) completed here makes it to be published as a LI monograph. Citation of each of them barely gets more than 2 digits over many years(which is in a sad contrast with good departments such as umass where many outstanding diss. got cited hundreds of times or thousands of times). Of course, understandably, they could not, with such minimal advising and poor connection with the field and other well known folks in the field.
Okay, research aside, how about course offering? Probably the biggest class size you could find in a phd program, with a single course crosslisted and taken by BA, MA, and Ph.D students. What this means is little to none personal attention from instructors. Plus, the quality of instructors is so low to the point that many courses are taught by nontenured people with little to none publication whatsoever, and they cannot address many questions about the materials they are teaching. Better to ask google than asking them! I am not saying adjuncts are necessarily bad, but adjuncts who are not interested in research and not doing research at all are bad fits to teach such research oriented courses.
another problem is that course offering neither fits students research interests nor is marketable. Because the course intends for large enrollment from BA, MA, and PhD at the same time, it is impossible to make it specialized. Then, a so-called graduate level seminar here ends up being a general survey course that would otherwise be a lower division undergrad course in other better universities. These kind of course are majority of offering here and seem to me useless for research, and training in these courses are not the training marketable for academic job search in the future.
These are some of the reasons that I want to get the hell out of here. Any Input welcomed !
 
 
 
 
 
 

Adding to what Fuzzy just said, I would say that the faculty of linguistics in Oxford is pretty young. It was formed in 2008.
I am not sure about which type of master offer you received from Oxford. Oxford has two types of masters for linguistics: Master of Studies, and Master of Philosophy.
The official length of a Mst a nine month, but you will actually get only 24 weeks of teaching (there are a quite a vacation between every 8 weeks of term time. Oxford runs on a trimester system). After these 24 weeks of teaching, then you will have to do several Papers and write a dissertation. I am not quite sure whether this would be a good way to go, if you will have to fund yourself.
M.Phil's official length is 21 month, and you will get 48 weeks of teaching during these 21 months. Usually, Mphil students do much better in their dissertation than Mst because M.Phil students have the luxury of more time and teaching.
By the way, syntax in Oxford has strong orientation and emphasis on Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). If you are a big fan of LFG, this might be a good place for you. But if you want to do Minimalist Syntax or OT syntax, maybe Leiden is a better place.(disclaimer: I do not know much about Leiden's syntax offerings, but at least I could tell Minimalist Syntax and OT syntax are not very supported by faculty members in Oxford.)
I also heard from students in the phonology side and syntax side respectively about their supervisors. It seems, according to their description, that supervisors in phonology (and phonetics) side are more supportive than supervisors in the syntax side (with one exception). If you really decide to come to Oxford, I would recommend you to choose your supervisor VERY CAREFULLY. A good and caring supervisor may meet with you one-on-one for 5-6 hours Per Week, whereas an awful and negligent supervisor may meet with you for 2 hours PER TERM.
Once you choose your supervisor it is really hard to change.(or in case if you are assigned a supervisor, you must change it early, maybe at the very beginning of the academic year, or otherwise this person will stick with you forever.) So, choose with caution when you have the opportunity to choose. 
 
 
 
 
 

Hi. I went to the same institution, and was in the pretty similar situation as yours. Here is my 0.02$. Unfortunately, many tutors in Oxford care more about their faces than the welfare of their former students. So, what is happening is that, after they wrote your letters for the first time, and you did not do well when their colleague serves as your tutor (for no fault on your part, as I know some of the Oxford courses really suck, especially some the 12 months or 9 months master courses), they feel that they lose faces in front of their colleagues, and there is 0 chance to get letters from these people, even if you have legitimate reasons for dropping out or for not doing well. 
One way you can get out of the dilemma is to apply to some place where references are not needed and try to get good references from this place and and then transfer to a better place that requires 3 references. One place that does not need reference is Australia universities, among which Monash University is notable. Hope this helps.

This is a good point. The student obviously was sending unsolicited suggestion/criticism to the OP. In higher education settings, unsolicited criticisms are generally not welcomed by the department, and in some cases may result in adverse consequences against those who dare to raise those issues and ask for improvement. The student may send the email under his/her .edu email account, but, in order to do so, he/she must use some sort of academese/legalese (i.e. formal polite language in a style that could best be described as probably "Oxbridge" style of communication) to express the intended suggestion, so as to overcome the first common fire-back called "rudeness". Such language use, unless the student has been communicated with such language for years, will be hard for an undergraduate to employ.
Potential retaliations commonly seen include lowering attendance grade, lowering grades for open-ended questions for which the TA has quite a lot of a discretion, etc. The student, who may have already sensed potential retaliations, when trying to send out a quick message without having the trouble of framing the message in academese/legalese, sends the message anonymously, and I think the anonymity is quite justifiable, given the culture that many departments and TAs do not appreciate "unsolicited noises" at all. 
In fact, one of the more senior TA sent out a guide to all TAs (including me) in my department, and asked us to forward that guide to all of our students so as to make sure that they write emails in an appropriate style. I knew he sent out the guide in good faith. But the style of writing really obscures the real issues raised in the email. I feel that the criticism over method of delivery or style of writing or the tone sounds more like an excuse to ignore the issues (probably legitimate, depending on the regulations of the university) raised in the email. 
 
I beg to differ on this point. If part of the duties of TAs and professors are not customer service, what exactly is the relationship between TA and professors, and students. More importantly, it sounds ridiculous to ask students to pay for their tuitions and fees, and, when they have complaints, they are told that you paid but sorry you are not customers. I went to a private school for my undergrad, and I was not graded/taught by even one TA throughout my undergrad career. In fact, mistreatment by TAs against undergraduate students is more common and widespread than you are willing to admit. First thing first, many TAs,especially in non-top tier state universities, are underpaid. So, generally, it is hard to expect the underpaid TAs to devote much of their time and attentions to their students, because they work for what they are paid for. Second, you need to understand how ridiculous class size could be in some undergraduate schools. Some, especially state/public universities, have lower division classes as large as 500 students in a single lecture. I just cannot see how the tuition they pay worth merely 1/500 attention from the Prof and TAs. Schools are oversizing a single lecture into a huge lecture hall to maximize revenue of tuition from a large pool of students. Look, essentially, the poor relationships with undergraduates derive from the mismatch between the financial input by these undergraduate and what they can get out from a huge lecture hall. Isn't this a problem? Well, as a TA, it is not a problem for me, but, as a student, and as a person, it is definitely a problem, even if this is a problem that we may not be willing to recognize at all, not to say solve it. 
As for your comments for students aren't majoring in humanities, I have some other thoughts. First, humanities, with the exception of philosophy, rarely reflect on whether the discipline is worth studying or not. I was a humanities major when I was an undergraduate. I witnessed too many professors teaching non-philosophy humanities cannot give coherent thoughts. Simply put, many humanities disciplines cannot be subject themselves to the scrutiny of rationality. Find a work of literary criticism, and I can guarantee you that you will find tautology in this book. Not sure why authors did this kind of thing, but they did it anyways. You asserted the great value of humanities major (some, such as philosophy, do have great values.), but how are you going to explain the fact that so many past graduates in subjects such as comparative literature, English, history, etc, can not get a job, after paying so much tuitions (probably by taking tons of loans) and spending so much time working through 4 years in the subject? 
They just cannot stay hungry with no food whatsoever, and continue enjoy the works of Dickens throughout the week. STEMs and business schools deserve more support, because they generate better results for the students at least in terms of their career. In fact, humanities subjects such as history are like a blackhole that sucks funding into the discipline, and barely, if ever, produces some tangible improvements of the material lives of those who work in the discipline and those who provided funding to support the discipline. STEMs are much better at making their case to their sponsors to persuade sponsors' to support them.(bottom line, STEMs proposals seem to have better agenda as to what to do, why do what is planned to do, etc). After all, you cannot just ask support and then tell those who support you that they should not expect something (probably more than what you get from them in terms of value) back from you. This is also true for student tuition. You cannot ask students to pay their tuitions and fees, and then tell them that they are not customers. If you are working in a non-profit organization that is not a university , you are not going to treat those who sponsor your organization (i.e. the patrons) in the way TAs treat students, aren't you? Then, why do you assert that students are not customers? Can a university continue to run, professors and TAs continue to get paid, if all students in a university refuse to pay their tuitions? 
 
 
 

First thing first, I was saying some humanities (e.g. philosophy) are useful, but some (e.g. comparative literature) are not. The prescriptive grammar I studied in comp 101 from what Steven Pinker called "language mavens" only turned out to be the target of criticism in my linguistics class. The problem here is that people in humanities (again, with the exception of philosophy) won't even entertain the possibility that the subject they study may not worth studying after all. I know it may be disturbing, or possibly making you feel sad to reason and then realize that XXX subject is not worth studying after all.  But the mere fact that you want some subject to be useful does not mean it is actually useful. If some subjects (e.g. say, Tibetan studies) were so useful, why are so many people in administrative posts (for example, the dean of my college who is working on downsizing some of the programs by not refilling the tenured posts after the incumbent are retired) reluctant to allocate funding to support these subjects and their programs? The deans are not freshmen who just got into college. They know what they are doing. If it were only the students who choose not to major in and therefore support humanities subjects, then maybe it is because of ignorance. But when both the administrators (i.e. dean, provost, etc) and the students frown upon the value of certain fields of studies, I guess it is the problem of the field and people working in the field should reflect on the problems of the field and try to find solutions to solve the problems, not blaming those outside the field who point out the problems. 

You do not need to worry too much about GRE in that linguistics PhD programs generally do not care too much about it. In fact, there is a trend in the recent years, probably starting from schools like mit and Ucla, to abolish the GRE requirement for admission.
I think UCSB has a decent amount of corpus linguists, and I suggest you look into their website more carefully. Stanford and UPenn do as well.  
 
Iowa state is fairly easy to get in. I guess the real question for this school is whether you can get funding from them. 
 
For umichigan, robin queen is probably the one that fits your interests. But do not count too much on this one because admission to this school is very competitive. If you have luck, then you get it, but do put all your bet on this one. 
You could also look into umass Boston. This one is in a very good location.
By the way, usually only candidates interested in experimental tracks are admittted by the prospective PI. For theoretical track, admission is made by the adcom (basically you need to get the majority vote in the adcom so as to get in). So, you probably want to approach your schools differently, depending which track you are applying to.

UW at Seattle also has a very good MS program for computational linguistics. You can definitely take a look at this one. I was from a non-CS, non-linguistics background, and applied to/will be studying in a theoretical linguistics program this fall. I applied for two application seasons two years ago and last year. One very important experience I have to say is that do not emphasize your skills in pedagogical grammar of specific languages/however many languages you know/studied, because it looks like emphasizing these will do you little service, if not disservice at all, to get admission and funding. I did my first round of application by emphasizing my knowledge in multiple foreign languages, and I was literally get rejected by EVERY linguistics department that year. Then, I reapplied, and switched to focusing my SOP on my academic interest in specific sub-field of linguistics, rather than saying something general about my knowledge as a polyglot/about knowing however many languages. This time worked, and I got accepted with funding.. 
I think GPA and GRE are NOT the most important elements that will determine whether you can get admission and/or funding. They are like threshold. GRE and GPA will matter, not so much for the department (and the ADCOM), but more for university-wide competition that is beyond the purview of what the department can decide. According to your description of your GPA and GRE, they are already above the threshold. So, not so much to worry about these two. I think your focus now should be on SOP and writing sample, as these two things are going to substantially determine whether you get a deal from the admission committee or not.
Finally, instead of saying HOW you get your linguistics knowledge outside your undergraduate curriculum, a more fruitful approach to improving chances of getting offers would be concentrating on formulating some kind of specific questions in your SOP that interest you, and tell the admission committee why these questions are both interesting and important, how you would like to answer these questions in the future, what theoretical frameworks you would like to work in/on, what are some of the potential deficiencies of the theoretical frameworks you propose to work in/on, how to ameliorate the deficiencies, if any, of the current frameworks. Last but not least, do tell how the admission committee how their curriculum, and faculty members can contribute to your research agenda. After all, you want to find a place that not only offers you admission and funding, but also a place that is the most nurturing for your academic development. 

This is incredibly bad advice.
-  Why would you want to be mentored by someone who has no experience in that role, and has no track record of successfully mentoring students? High risk, low information.
-  New assistant professors are more likely to be especially concerned with getting tenure, not advising students to the best of their abilities
-  New assistant professors are more likely to move to another institution
-  New assistant professors have smaller professional networks
-  New assistant professors are more likely to have less of a (comprehensive) grasp of the broader field
-  New assistant professors are unlikely to have extensively published in your field
Are there some advantages? Sure...assistant profs have been on the job market more recently and can offer more current professionalization advice. They are also more likely to coauthor with grad students and be publishing at a faster rate. But neither of these benefits are required for a good dissertation chair, you can receive these benefits by building relationships with them outside of them being your adviser. That's also not to say that you can't have a good chair be an assistant professor. But to make the statement in bold is completely false and the behavior (sans the foolish addressing part) is completely rational from these applicants. 

First thing first, I was saying some humanities (e.g. philosophy) are useful, but some (e.g. comparative literature) are not. The prescriptive grammar I studied in comp 101 from what Steven Pinker called "language mavens" only turned out to be the target of criticism in my linguistics class. The problem here is that people in humanities (again, with the exception of philosophy) won't even entertain the possibility that the subject they study may not worth studying after all. I know it may be disturbing, or possibly making you feel sad to reason and then realize that XXX subject is not worth studying after all.  But the mere fact that you want some subject to be useful does not mean it is actually useful. If some subjects (e.g. say, Tibetan studies) were so useful, why are so many people in administrative posts (for example, the dean of my college who is working on downsizing some of the programs by not refilling the tenured posts after the incumbent are retired) reluctant to allocate funding to support these subjects and their programs? The deans are not freshmen who just got into college. They know what they are doing. If it were only the students who choose not to major in and therefore support humanities subjects, then maybe it is because of ignorance. But when both the administrators (i.e. dean, provost, etc) and the students frown upon the value of certain fields of studies, I guess it is the problem of the field and people working in the field should reflect on the problems of the field and try to find solutions to solve the problems, not blaming those outside the field who point out the problems. 

First thing first, I was saying some humanities (e.g. philosophy) are useful, but some (e.g. comparative literature) are not. The prescriptive grammar I studied in comp 101 from what Steven Pinker called "language mavens" only turned out to be the target of criticism in my linguistics class. The problem here is that people in humanities (again, with the exception of philosophy) won't even entertain the possibility that the subject they study may not worth studying after all. I know it may be disturbing, or possibly making you feel sad to reason and then realize that XXX subject is not worth studying after all.  But the mere fact that you want some subject to be useful does not mean it is actually useful. If some subjects (e.g. say, Tibetan studies) were so useful, why are so many people in administrative posts (for example, the dean of my college who is working on downsizing some of the programs by not refilling the tenured posts after the incumbent are retired) reluctant to allocate funding to support these subjects and their programs? The deans are not freshmen who just got into college. They know what they are doing. If it were only the students who choose not to major in and therefore support humanities subjects, then maybe it is because of ignorance. But when both the administrators (i.e. dean, provost, etc) and the students frown upon the value of certain fields of studies, I guess it is the problem of the field and people working in the field should reflect on the problems of the field and try to find solutions to solve the problems, not blaming those outside the field who point out the problems. 

So, now I am starting my new term in a graduate program in University X. But I recently received a letter saying that I got to take ESL tests as a duty for the TA job (the term has not yet started). I am singled out because they said they found me having experiences living in multiple countries. But actually I knew that they singled me out because of my name that suggests that I am of a certain national origin. I told them I am a native speaker of English and another language (let's name it language X). The chair then sent me to the director of the ESL program, and the chair said the director would decide. When I was meeting with the ESL director, as soon as I sat down and just started chatting with her, she then said I had some accent of language X, and therefore  she insisted that I take the test. But the thing is she fully understood what I was saying without any problem. Then, I raised this point to her. Then, she said, oh, maybe you can do well in one-on-one situation but you can not do presentation in front of a group of students.(Are you kidding me?) The tricky part of this test is that there is no grading rubric whatsoever. And unless you get a perfect score (I do not think many of our fellow native speakers of English can get that perfect score, and that really depends on the mood of the graders), you got to pay extra fees and take their ESL classes. I checked their enrollment now, and there are so few people enrolled that the classes are going to be cancelled. I know this is why this person is pressing me to take the test and the she will have a good reason to make me pay and take the ESL class which is a waste of time. 
The university rule says nothing about requiring to take this test based on accent. So, in this situation, what should I do? Should I reach out to Labor Union, Ombudsman, departmental chair, or dean of the college, or a combination of these people?  I feel that I am discriminated based on national origin. 

First thing first, I was saying some humanities (e.g. philosophy) are useful, but some (e.g. comparative literature) are not. The prescriptive grammar I studied in comp 101 from what Steven Pinker called "language mavens" only turned out to be the target of criticism in my linguistics class. The problem here is that people in humanities (again, with the exception of philosophy) won't even entertain the possibility that the subject they study may not worth studying after all. I know it may be disturbing, or possibly making you feel sad to reason and then realize that XXX subject is not worth studying after all.  But the mere fact that you want some subject to be useful does not mean it is actually useful. If some subjects (e.g. say, Tibetan studies) were so useful, why are so many people in administrative posts (for example, the dean of my college who is working on downsizing some of the programs by not refilling the tenured posts after the incumbent are retired) reluctant to allocate funding to support these subjects and their programs? The deans are not freshmen who just got into college. They know what they are doing. If it were only the students who choose not to major in and therefore support humanities subjects, then maybe it is because of ignorance. But when both the administrators (i.e. dean, provost, etc) and the students frown upon the value of certain fields of studies, I guess it is the problem of the field and people working in the field should reflect on the problems of the field and try to find solutions to solve the problems, not blaming those outside the field who point out the problems. 

This is a good point. The student obviously was sending unsolicited suggestion/criticism to the OP. In higher education settings, unsolicited criticisms are generally not welcomed by the department, and in some cases may result in adverse consequences against those who dare to raise those issues and ask for improvement. The student may send the email under his/her .edu email account, but, in order to do so, he/she must use some sort of academese/legalese (i.e. formal polite language in a style that could best be described as probably "Oxbridge" style of communication) to express the intended suggestion, so as to overcome the first common fire-back called "rudeness". Such language use, unless the student has been communicated with such language for years, will be hard for an undergraduate to employ.
Potential retaliations commonly seen include lowering attendance grade, lowering grades for open-ended questions for which the TA has quite a lot of a discretion, etc. The student, who may have already sensed potential retaliations, when trying to send out a quick message without having the trouble of framing the message in academese/legalese, sends the message anonymously, and I think the anonymity is quite justifiable, given the culture that many departments and TAs do not appreciate "unsolicited noises" at all. 
In fact, one of the more senior TA sent out a guide to all TAs (including me) in my department, and asked us to forward that guide to all of our students so as to make sure that they write emails in an appropriate style. I knew he sent out the guide in good faith. But the style of writing really obscures the real issues raised in the email. I feel that the criticism over method of delivery or style of writing or the tone sounds more like an excuse to ignore the issues (probably legitimate, depending on the regulations of the university) raised in the email. 
 
I beg to differ on this point. If part of the duties of TAs and professors are not customer service, what exactly is the relationship between TA and professors, and students. More importantly, it sounds ridiculous to ask students to pay for their tuitions and fees, and, when they have complaints, they are told that you paid but sorry you are not customers. I went to a private school for my undergrad, and I was not graded/taught by even one TA throughout my undergrad career. In fact, mistreatment by TAs against undergraduate students is more common and widespread than you are willing to admit. First thing first, many TAs,especially in non-top tier state universities, are underpaid. So, generally, it is hard to expect the underpaid TAs to devote much of their time and attentions to their students, because they work for what they are paid for. Second, you need to understand how ridiculous class size could be in some undergraduate schools. Some, especially state/public universities, have lower division classes as large as 500 students in a single lecture. I just cannot see how the tuition they pay worth merely 1/500 attention from the Prof and TAs. Schools are oversizing a single lecture into a huge lecture hall to maximize revenue of tuition from a large pool of students. Look, essentially, the poor relationships with undergraduates derive from the mismatch between the financial input by these undergraduate and what they can get out from a huge lecture hall. Isn't this a problem? Well, as a TA, it is not a problem for me, but, as a student, and as a person, it is definitely a problem, even if this is a problem that we may not be willing to recognize at all, not to say solve it. 
As for your comments for students aren't majoring in humanities, I have some other thoughts. First, humanities, with the exception of philosophy, rarely reflect on whether the discipline is worth studying or not. I was a humanities major when I was an undergraduate. I witnessed too many professors teaching non-philosophy humanities cannot give coherent thoughts. Simply put, many humanities disciplines cannot be subject themselves to the scrutiny of rationality. Find a work of literary criticism, and I can guarantee you that you will find tautology in this book. Not sure why authors did this kind of thing, but they did it anyways. You asserted the great value of humanities major (some, such as philosophy, do have great values.), but how are you going to explain the fact that so many past graduates in subjects such as comparative literature, English, history, etc, can not get a job, after paying so much tuitions (probably by taking tons of loans) and spending so much time working through 4 years in the subject? 
They just cannot stay hungry with no food whatsoever, and continue enjoy the works of Dickens throughout the week. STEMs and business schools deserve more support, because they generate better results for the students at least in terms of their career. In fact, humanities subjects such as history are like a blackhole that sucks funding into the discipline, and barely, if ever, produces some tangible improvements of the material lives of those who work in the discipline and those who provided funding to support the discipline. STEMs are much better at making their case to their sponsors to persuade sponsors' to support them.(bottom line, STEMs proposals seem to have better agenda as to what to do, why do what is planned to do, etc). After all, you cannot just ask support and then tell those who support you that they should not expect something (probably more than what you get from them in terms of value) back from you. This is also true for student tuition. You cannot ask students to pay their tuitions and fees, and then tell them that they are not customers. If you are working in a non-profit organization that is not a university , you are not going to treat those who sponsor your organization (i.e. the patrons) in the way TAs treat students, aren't you? Then, why do you assert that students are not customers? Can a university continue to run, professors and TAs continue to get paid, if all students in a university refuse to pay their tuitions? 
 
 
 

I don't think the rates are nearly as high in linguistics. This is something that you should figure out specifically for the programs that you're applying to. At least for the programs I have any knowledge of, the vast majority fund all their PhD students for the duration of the program, and people who drop out do so for reasons of incompatibility. Some might be asked to leave, some just decide it's not for them, and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. If you decide something isn't for you or you are told by your supervisors that you aren't doing work that would allow you to find employment, there is no reason to stay an extra few years and complete the degree, you're better off finding something else to do. These situations aren't many, though they exist, but it's not close to half the students anywhere I have know of, and again, I don't know that it's necessarily all bad. A much more pressing question is: at the schools you are considering, are people graduating at a decent rate and are they finding jobs? and while they are at the program, are they happy? 

I am in a similar boat. But I did something different from what you did. I just honestly tell them where I am from, and more importantly let them know I am proletarian. I guess when you are more openly talk about your problems in a sincere way, there are generally two types of people: 1. those who are quickly tired of your stories and problems 2. those who are interested in listening and/or willing to help if possible. You can quickly identify who may be more suitable for you to continue to hang out more often and know more about each other in this way. 
You willed to loan the money to your family rather than spending that money in buying things for yourself. This means that you exercised your free will to take this action to help your sister, giving priority to help others in stead of yourself. This is a case of altruism. I guess your essential problem is not that you do not have the money to buy the things you window shopped. You did have the money. If you had not had loaned the money to your family, you could have used that money to buy the things you window shopped. The essential issue here is that you gave priority to the happiness of your family rather than to your own pleasure. That was your choice. But now you somehow regret your choice because as a result of your altruism to your family you cannot enjoy the shopping that you could have enjoyed. How to solve this problem? Well, switch your priority if you can will to do so. 
You may say you have the moral obligation to help your sister out. But honestly speaking, not matter from Aristotelian ethics (reason over emotion) , deontological ethics (rationality as basis of morality), utilitarianism (maximization of utility), contractualism/contractarianism (mutual agreement), it is hard to justify that it is morally required to give priority to your family over yourself, unless you are simply altruistic, and choose to exercise your free will to help at the cost of your own happiness. For example, you said that you parents did not support you for your college career in a substantial sense. Then, ask yourself why you should support them for the EFC that they are supposed to contribute, and why you should take the responsibility of theirs. Is there any social contract going on here? If so, what kind of social contract? If no social contract at all, isn't it unfair to even ask you to contribute, regardless of whether you are opulent or are eking out a living? 
Based on your description, I also feel that your family members are trying to take advantage of (i.e. exploit) you. They did not financially support you for many years yet ask you for financial support for their own problems. Isn't this a text-book definition of exploitation (i.e. giving out little and then demanding a lot back)? Given that you are now self-supported and can make a living with your stipend, AND given that your family can barely support you for anything, it may be better for you to distance yourself from your family, or simply quit from it and cut whatever ties you may have with them. After all, a family is not unlike other social institutions such as a school, a company, etc, and you should have the right to quit if you are treated unfairly in such a social institution. A detailed discussion of family as a social institution can be found in this book: The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (published in 1884). So, if you have time, take a look at this book, and you will have a better idea what family is all about. 
 
 
 
 
 
 

This is a good point. The student obviously was sending unsolicited suggestion/criticism to the OP. In higher education settings, unsolicited criticisms are generally not welcomed by the department, and in some cases may result in adverse consequences against those who dare to raise those issues and ask for improvement. The student may send the email under his/her .edu email account, but, in order to do so, he/she must use some sort of academese/legalese (i.e. formal polite language in a style that could best be described as probably "Oxbridge" style of communication) to express the intended suggestion, so as to overcome the first common fire-back called "rudeness". Such language use, unless the student has been communicated with such language for years, will be hard for an undergraduate to employ.
Potential retaliations commonly seen include lowering attendance grade, lowering grades for open-ended questions for which the TA has quite a lot of a discretion, etc. The student, who may have already sensed potential retaliations, when trying to send out a quick message without having the trouble of framing the message in academese/legalese, sends the message anonymously, and I think the anonymity is quite justifiable, given the culture that many departments and TAs do not appreciate "unsolicited noises" at all. 
In fact, one of the more senior TA sent out a guide to all TAs (including me) in my department, and asked us to forward that guide to all of our students so as to make sure that they write emails in an appropriate style. I knew he sent out the guide in good faith. But the style of writing really obscures the real issues raised in the email. I feel that the criticism over method of delivery or style of writing or the tone sounds more like an excuse to ignore the issues (probably legitimate, depending on the regulations of the university) raised in the email. 
 
I beg to differ on this point. If part of the duties of TAs and professors are not customer service, what exactly is the relationship between TA and professors, and students. More importantly, it sounds ridiculous to ask students to pay for their tuitions and fees, and, when they have complaints, they are told that you paid but sorry you are not customers. I went to a private school for my undergrad, and I was not graded/taught by even one TA throughout my undergrad career. In fact, mistreatment by TAs against undergraduate students is more common and widespread than you are willing to admit. First thing first, many TAs,especially in non-top tier state universities, are underpaid. So, generally, it is hard to expect the underpaid TAs to devote much of their time and attentions to their students, because they work for what they are paid for. Second, you need to understand how ridiculous class size could be in some undergraduate schools. Some, especially state/public universities, have lower division classes as large as 500 students in a single lecture. I just cannot see how the tuition they pay worth merely 1/500 attention from the Prof and TAs. Schools are oversizing a single lecture into a huge lecture hall to maximize revenue of tuition from a large pool of students. Look, essentially, the poor relationships with undergraduates derive from the mismatch between the financial input by these undergraduate and what they can get out from a huge lecture hall. Isn't this a problem? Well, as a TA, it is not a problem for me, but, as a student, and as a person, it is definitely a problem, even if this is a problem that we may not be willing to recognize at all, not to say solve it. 
As for your comments for students aren't majoring in humanities, I have some other thoughts. First, humanities, with the exception of philosophy, rarely reflect on whether the discipline is worth studying or not. I was a humanities major when I was an undergraduate. I witnessed too many professors teaching non-philosophy humanities cannot give coherent thoughts. Simply put, many humanities disciplines cannot be subject themselves to the scrutiny of rationality. Find a work of literary criticism, and I can guarantee you that you will find tautology in this book. Not sure why authors did this kind of thing, but they did it anyways. You asserted the great value of humanities major (some, such as philosophy, do have great values.), but how are you going to explain the fact that so many past graduates in subjects such as comparative literature, English, history, etc, can not get a job, after paying so much tuitions (probably by taking tons of loans) and spending so much time working through 4 years in the subject? 
They just cannot stay hungry with no food whatsoever, and continue enjoy the works of Dickens throughout the week. STEMs and business schools deserve more support, because they generate better results for the students at least in terms of their career. In fact, humanities subjects such as history are like a blackhole that sucks funding into the discipline, and barely, if ever, produces some tangible improvements of the material lives of those who work in the discipline and those who provided funding to support the discipline. STEMs are much better at making their case to their sponsors to persuade sponsors' to support them.(bottom line, STEMs proposals seem to have better agenda as to what to do, why do what is planned to do, etc). After all, you cannot just ask support and then tell those who support you that they should not expect something (probably more than what you get from them in terms of value) back from you. This is also true for student tuition. You cannot ask students to pay their tuitions and fees, and then tell them that they are not customers. If you are working in a non-profit organization that is not a university , you are not going to treat those who sponsor your organization (i.e. the patrons) in the way TAs treat students, aren't you? Then, why do you assert that students are not customers? Can a university continue to run, professors and TAs continue to get paid, if all students in a university refuse to pay their tuitions? 
 
 
 

First thing first, I was saying some humanities (e.g. philosophy) are useful, but some (e.g. comparative literature) are not. The prescriptive grammar I studied in comp 101 from what Steven Pinker called "language mavens" only turned out to be the target of criticism in my linguistics class. The problem here is that people in humanities (again, with the exception of philosophy) won't even entertain the possibility that the subject they study may not worth studying after all. I know it may be disturbing, or possibly making you feel sad to reason and then realize that XXX subject is not worth studying after all.  But the mere fact that you want some subject to be useful does not mean it is actually useful. If some subjects (e.g. say, Tibetan studies) were so useful, why are so many people in administrative posts (for example, the dean of my college who is working on downsizing some of the programs by not refilling the tenured posts after the incumbent are retired) reluctant to allocate funding to support these subjects and their programs? The deans are not freshmen who just got into college. They know what they are doing. If it were only the students who choose not to major in and therefore support humanities subjects, then maybe it is because of ignorance. But when both the administrators (i.e. dean, provost, etc) and the students frown upon the value of certain fields of studies, I guess it is the problem of the field and people working in the field should reflect on the problems of the field and try to find solutions to solve the problems, not blaming those outside the field who point out the problems. 

This is a good point. The student obviously was sending unsolicited suggestion/criticism to the OP. In higher education settings, unsolicited criticisms are generally not welcomed by the department, and in some cases may result in adverse consequences against those who dare to raise those issues and ask for improvement. The student may send the email under his/her .edu email account, but, in order to do so, he/she must use some sort of academese/legalese (i.e. formal polite language in a style that could best be described as probably "Oxbridge" style of communication) to express the intended suggestion, so as to overcome the first common fire-back called "rudeness". Such language use, unless the student has been communicated with such language for years, will be hard for an undergraduate to employ.
Potential retaliations commonly seen include lowering attendance grade, lowering grades for open-ended questions for which the TA has quite a lot of a discretion, etc. The student, who may have already sensed potential retaliations, when trying to send out a quick message without having the trouble of framing the message in academese/legalese, sends the message anonymously, and I think the anonymity is quite justifiable, given the culture that many departments and TAs do not appreciate "unsolicited noises" at all. 
In fact, one of the more senior TA sent out a guide to all TAs (including me) in my department, and asked us to forward that guide to all of our students so as to make sure that they write emails in an appropriate style. I knew he sent out the guide in good faith. But the style of writing really obscures the real issues raised in the email. I feel that the criticism over method of delivery or style of writing or the tone sounds more like an excuse to ignore the issues (probably legitimate, depending on the regulations of the university) raised in the email. 
 
I beg to differ on this point. If part of the duties of TAs and professors are not customer service, what exactly is the relationship between TA and professors, and students. More importantly, it sounds ridiculous to ask students to pay for their tuitions and fees, and, when they have complaints, they are told that you paid but sorry you are not customers. I went to a private school for my undergrad, and I was not graded/taught by even one TA throughout my undergrad career. In fact, mistreatment by TAs against undergraduate students is more common and widespread than you are willing to admit. First thing first, many TAs,especially in non-top tier state universities, are underpaid. So, generally, it is hard to expect the underpaid TAs to devote much of their time and attentions to their students, because they work for what they are paid for. Second, you need to understand how ridiculous class size could be in some undergraduate schools. Some, especially state/public universities, have lower division classes as large as 500 students in a single lecture. I just cannot see how the tuition they pay worth merely 1/500 attention from the Prof and TAs. Schools are oversizing a single lecture into a huge lecture hall to maximize revenue of tuition from a large pool of students. Look, essentially, the poor relationships with undergraduates derive from the mismatch between the financial input by these undergraduate and what they can get out from a huge lecture hall. Isn't this a problem? Well, as a TA, it is not a problem for me, but, as a student, and as a person, it is definitely a problem, even if this is a problem that we may not be willing to recognize at all, not to say solve it. 
As for your comments for students aren't majoring in humanities, I have some other thoughts. First, humanities, with the exception of philosophy, rarely reflect on whether the discipline is worth studying or not. I was a humanities major when I was an undergraduate. I witnessed too many professors teaching non-philosophy humanities cannot give coherent thoughts. Simply put, many humanities disciplines cannot be subject themselves to the scrutiny of rationality. Find a work of literary criticism, and I can guarantee you that you will find tautology in this book. Not sure why authors did this kind of thing, but they did it anyways. You asserted the great value of humanities major (some, such as philosophy, do have great values.), but how are you going to explain the fact that so many past graduates in subjects such as comparative literature, English, history, etc, can not get a job, after paying so much tuitions (probably by taking tons of loans) and spending so much time working through 4 years in the subject? 
They just cannot stay hungry with no food whatsoever, and continue enjoy the works of Dickens throughout the week. STEMs and business schools deserve more support, because they generate better results for the students at least in terms of their career. In fact, humanities subjects such as history are like a blackhole that sucks funding into the discipline, and barely, if ever, produces some tangible improvements of the material lives of those who work in the discipline and those who provided funding to support the discipline. STEMs are much better at making their case to their sponsors to persuade sponsors' to support them.(bottom line, STEMs proposals seem to have better agenda as to what to do, why do what is planned to do, etc). After all, you cannot just ask support and then tell those who support you that they should not expect something (probably more than what you get from them in terms of value) back from you. This is also true for student tuition. You cannot ask students to pay their tuitions and fees, and then tell them that they are not customers. If you are working in a non-profit organization that is not a university , you are not going to treat those who sponsor your organization (i.e. the patrons) in the way TAs treat students, aren't you? Then, why do you assert that students are not customers? Can a university continue to run, professors and TAs continue to get paid, if all students in a university refuse to pay their tuitions? 
 
 
 

First thing first, I was saying some humanities (e.g. philosophy) are useful, but some (e.g. comparative literature) are not. The prescriptive grammar I studied in comp 101 from what Steven Pinker called "language mavens" only turned out to be the target of criticism in my linguistics class. The problem here is that people in humanities (again, with the exception of philosophy) won't even entertain the possibility that the subject they study may not worth studying after all. I know it may be disturbing, or possibly making you feel sad to reason and then realize that XXX subject is not worth studying after all.  But the mere fact that you want some subject to be useful does not mean it is actually useful. If some subjects (e.g. say, Tibetan studies) were so useful, why are so many people in administrative posts (for example, the dean of my college who is working on downsizing some of the programs by not refilling the tenured posts after the incumbent are retired) reluctant to allocate funding to support these subjects and their programs? The deans are not freshmen who just got into college. They know what they are doing. If it were only the students who choose not to major in and therefore support humanities subjects, then maybe it is because of ignorance. But when both the administrators (i.e. dean, provost, etc) and the students frown upon the value of certain fields of studies, I guess it is the problem of the field and people working in the field should reflect on the problems of the field and try to find solutions to solve the problems, not blaming those outside the field who point out the problems. 

This is a good point. The student obviously was sending unsolicited suggestion/criticism to the OP. In higher education settings, unsolicited criticisms are generally not welcomed by the department, and in some cases may result in adverse consequences against those who dare to raise those issues and ask for improvement. The student may send the email under his/her .edu email account, but, in order to do so, he/she must use some sort of academese/legalese (i.e. formal polite language in a style that could best be described as probably "Oxbridge" style of communication) to express the intended suggestion, so as to overcome the first common fire-back called "rudeness". Such language use, unless the student has been communicated with such language for years, will be hard for an undergraduate to employ.
Potential retaliations commonly seen include lowering attendance grade, lowering grades for open-ended questions for which the TA has quite a lot of a discretion, etc. The student, who may have already sensed potential retaliations, when trying to send out a quick message without having the trouble of framing the message in academese/legalese, sends the message anonymously, and I think the anonymity is quite justifiable, given the culture that many departments and TAs do not appreciate "unsolicited noises" at all. 
In fact, one of the more senior TA sent out a guide to all TAs (including me) in my department, and asked us to forward that guide to all of our students so as to make sure that they write emails in an appropriate style. I knew he sent out the guide in good faith. But the style of writing really obscures the real issues raised in the email. I feel that the criticism over method of delivery or style of writing or the tone sounds more like an excuse to ignore the issues (probably legitimate, depending on the regulations of the university) raised in the email. 
 
I beg to differ on this point. If part of the duties of TAs and professors are not customer service, what exactly is the relationship between TA and professors, and students. More importantly, it sounds ridiculous to ask students to pay for their tuitions and fees, and, when they have complaints, they are told that you paid but sorry you are not customers. I went to a private school for my undergrad, and I was not graded/taught by even one TA throughout my undergrad career. In fact, mistreatment by TAs against undergraduate students is more common and widespread than you are willing to admit. First thing first, many TAs,especially in non-top tier state universities, are underpaid. So, generally, it is hard to expect the underpaid TAs to devote much of their time and attentions to their students, because they work for what they are paid for. Second, you need to understand how ridiculous class size could be in some undergraduate schools. Some, especially state/public universities, have lower division classes as large as 500 students in a single lecture. I just cannot see how the tuition they pay worth merely 1/500 attention from the Prof and TAs. Schools are oversizing a single lecture into a huge lecture hall to maximize revenue of tuition from a large pool of students. Look, essentially, the poor relationships with undergraduates derive from the mismatch between the financial input by these undergraduate and what they can get out from a huge lecture hall. Isn't this a problem? Well, as a TA, it is not a problem for me, but, as a student, and as a person, it is definitely a problem, even if this is a problem that we may not be willing to recognize at all, not to say solve it. 
As for your comments for students aren't majoring in humanities, I have some other thoughts. First, humanities, with the exception of philosophy, rarely reflect on whether the discipline is worth studying or not. I was a humanities major when I was an undergraduate. I witnessed too many professors teaching non-philosophy humanities cannot give coherent thoughts. Simply put, many humanities disciplines cannot be subject themselves to the scrutiny of rationality. Find a work of literary criticism, and I can guarantee you that you will find tautology in this book. Not sure why authors did this kind of thing, but they did it anyways. You asserted the great value of humanities major (some, such as philosophy, do have great values.), but how are you going to explain the fact that so many past graduates in subjects such as comparative literature, English, history, etc, can not get a job, after paying so much tuitions (probably by taking tons of loans) and spending so much time working through 4 years in the subject? 
They just cannot stay hungry with no food whatsoever, and continue enjoy the works of Dickens throughout the week. STEMs and business schools deserve more support, because they generate better results for the students at least in terms of their career. In fact, humanities subjects such as history are like a blackhole that sucks funding into the discipline, and barely, if ever, produces some tangible improvements of the material lives of those who work in the discipline and those who provided funding to support the discipline. STEMs are much better at making their case to their sponsors to persuade sponsors' to support them.(bottom line, STEMs proposals seem to have better agenda as to what to do, why do what is planned to do, etc). After all, you cannot just ask support and then tell those who support you that they should not expect something (probably more than what you get from them in terms of value) back from you. This is also true for student tuition. You cannot ask students to pay their tuitions and fees, and then tell them that they are not customers. If you are working in a non-profit organization that is not a university , you are not going to treat those who sponsor your organization (i.e. the patrons) in the way TAs treat students, aren't you? Then, why do you assert that students are not customers? Can a university continue to run, professors and TAs continue to get paid, if all students in a university refuse to pay their tuitions? 
 
 
 

This is a good point. The student obviously was sending unsolicited suggestion/criticism to the OP. In higher education settings, unsolicited criticisms are generally not welcomed by the department, and in some cases may result in adverse consequences against those who dare to raise those issues and ask for improvement. The student may send the email under his/her .edu email account, but, in order to do so, he/she must use some sort of academese/legalese (i.e. formal polite language in a style that could best be described as probably "Oxbridge" style of communication) to express the intended suggestion, so as to overcome the first common fire-back called "rudeness". Such language use, unless the student has been communicated with such language for years, will be hard for an undergraduate to employ.
Potential retaliations commonly seen include lowering attendance grade, lowering grades for open-ended questions for which the TA has quite a lot of a discretion, etc. The student, who may have already sensed potential retaliations, when trying to send out a quick message without having the trouble of framing the message in academese/legalese, sends the message anonymously, and I think the anonymity is quite justifiable, given the culture that many departments and TAs do not appreciate "unsolicited noises" at all. 
In fact, one of the more senior TA sent out a guide to all TAs (including me) in my department, and asked us to forward that guide to all of our students so as to make sure that they write emails in an appropriate style. I knew he sent out the guide in good faith. But the style of writing really obscures the real issues raised in the email. I feel that the criticism over method of delivery or style of writing or the tone sounds more like an excuse to ignore the issues (probably legitimate, depending on the regulations of the university) raised in the email. 
 
I beg to differ on this point. If part of the duties of TAs and professors are not customer service, what exactly is the relationship between TA and professors, and students. More importantly, it sounds ridiculous to ask students to pay for their tuitions and fees, and, when they have complaints, they are told that you paid but sorry you are not customers. I went to a private school for my undergrad, and I was not graded/taught by even one TA throughout my undergrad career. In fact, mistreatment by TAs against undergraduate students is more common and widespread than you are willing to admit. First thing first, many TAs,especially in non-top tier state universities, are underpaid. So, generally, it is hard to expect the underpaid TAs to devote much of their time and attentions to their students, because they work for what they are paid for. Second, you need to understand how ridiculous class size could be in some undergraduate schools. Some, especially state/public universities, have lower division classes as large as 500 students in a single lecture. I just cannot see how the tuition they pay worth merely 1/500 attention from the Prof and TAs. Schools are oversizing a single lecture into a huge lecture hall to maximize revenue of tuition from a large pool of students. Look, essentially, the poor relationships with undergraduates derive from the mismatch between the financial input by these undergraduate and what they can get out from a huge lecture hall. Isn't this a problem? Well, as a TA, it is not a problem for me, but, as a student, and as a person, it is definitely a problem, even if this is a problem that we may not be willing to recognize at all, not to say solve it. 
As for your comments for students aren't majoring in humanities, I have some other thoughts. First, humanities, with the exception of philosophy, rarely reflect on whether the discipline is worth studying or not. I was a humanities major when I was an undergraduate. I witnessed too many professors teaching non-philosophy humanities cannot give coherent thoughts. Simply put, many humanities disciplines cannot be subject themselves to the scrutiny of rationality. Find a work of literary criticism, and I can guarantee you that you will find tautology in this book. Not sure why authors did this kind of thing, but they did it anyways. You asserted the great value of humanities major (some, such as philosophy, do have great values.), but how are you going to explain the fact that so many past graduates in subjects such as comparative literature, English, history, etc, can not get a job, after paying so much tuitions (probably by taking tons of loans) and spending so much time working through 4 years in the subject? 
They just cannot stay hungry with no food whatsoever, and continue enjoy the works of Dickens throughout the week. STEMs and business schools deserve more support, because they generate better results for the students at least in terms of their career. In fact, humanities subjects such as history are like a blackhole that sucks funding into the discipline, and barely, if ever, produces some tangible improvements of the material lives of those who work in the discipline and those who provided funding to support the discipline. STEMs are much better at making their case to their sponsors to persuade sponsors' to support them.(bottom line, STEMs proposals seem to have better agenda as to what to do, why do what is planned to do, etc). After all, you cannot just ask support and then tell those who support you that they should not expect something (probably more than what you get from them in terms of value) back from you. This is also true for student tuition. You cannot ask students to pay their tuitions and fees, and then tell them that they are not customers. If you are working in a non-profit organization that is not a university , you are not going to treat those who sponsor your organization (i.e. the patrons) in the way TAs treat students, aren't you? Then, why do you assert that students are not customers? Can a university continue to run, professors and TAs continue to get paid, if all students in a university refuse to pay their tuitions? 
 
 
 

This is a good point. The student obviously was sending unsolicited suggestion/criticism to the OP. In higher education settings, unsolicited criticisms are generally not welcomed by the department, and in some cases may result in adverse consequences against those who dare to raise those issues and ask for improvement. The student may send the email under his/her .edu email account, but, in order to do so, he/she must use some sort of academese/legalese (i.e. formal polite language in a style that could best be described as probably "Oxbridge" style of communication) to express the intended suggestion, so as to overcome the first common fire-back called "rudeness". Such language use, unless the student has been communicated with such language for years, will be hard for an undergraduate to employ.
Potential retaliations commonly seen include lowering attendance grade, lowering grades for open-ended questions for which the TA has quite a lot of a discretion, etc. The student, who may have already sensed potential retaliations, when trying to send out a quick message without having the trouble of framing the message in academese/legalese, sends the message anonymously, and I think the anonymity is quite justifiable, given the culture that many departments and TAs do not appreciate "unsolicited noises" at all. 
In fact, one of the more senior TA sent out a guide to all TAs (including me) in my department, and asked us to forward that guide to all of our students so as to make sure that they write emails in an appropriate style. I knew he sent out the guide in good faith. But the style of writing really obscures the real issues raised in the email. I feel that the criticism over method of delivery or style of writing or the tone sounds more like an excuse to ignore the issues (probably legitimate, depending on the regulations of the university) raised in the email. 
 
I beg to differ on this point. If part of the duties of TAs and professors are not customer service, what exactly is the relationship between TA and professors, and students. More importantly, it sounds ridiculous to ask students to pay for their tuitions and fees, and, when they have complaints, they are told that you paid but sorry you are not customers. I went to a private school for my undergrad, and I was not graded/taught by even one TA throughout my undergrad career. In fact, mistreatment by TAs against undergraduate students is more common and widespread than you are willing to admit. First thing first, many TAs,especially in non-top tier state universities, are underpaid. So, generally, it is hard to expect the underpaid TAs to devote much of their time and attentions to their students, because they work for what they are paid for. Second, you need to understand how ridiculous class size could be in some undergraduate schools. Some, especially state/public universities, have lower division classes as large as 500 students in a single lecture. I just cannot see how the tuition they pay worth merely 1/500 attention from the Prof and TAs. Schools are oversizing a single lecture into a huge lecture hall to maximize revenue of tuition from a large pool of students. Look, essentially, the poor relationships with undergraduates derive from the mismatch between the financial input by these undergraduate and what they can get out from a huge lecture hall. Isn't this a problem? Well, as a TA, it is not a problem for me, but, as a student, and as a person, it is definitely a problem, even if this is a problem that we may not be willing to recognize at all, not to say solve it. 
As for your comments for students aren't majoring in humanities, I have some other thoughts. First, humanities, with the exception of philosophy, rarely reflect on whether the discipline is worth studying or not. I was a humanities major when I was an undergraduate. I witnessed too many professors teaching non-philosophy humanities cannot give coherent thoughts. Simply put, many humanities disciplines cannot be subject themselves to the scrutiny of rationality. Find a work of literary criticism, and I can guarantee you that you will find tautology in this book. Not sure why authors did this kind of thing, but they did it anyways. You asserted the great value of humanities major (some, such as philosophy, do have great values.), but how are you going to explain the fact that so many past graduates in subjects such as comparative literature, English, history, etc, can not get a job, after paying so much tuitions (probably by taking tons of loans) and spending so much time working through 4 years in the subject? 
They just cannot stay hungry with no food whatsoever, and continue enjoy the works of Dickens throughout the week. STEMs and business schools deserve more support, because they generate better results for the students at least in terms of their career. In fact, humanities subjects such as history are like a blackhole that sucks funding into the discipline, and barely, if ever, produces some tangible improvements of the material lives of those who work in the discipline and those who provided funding to support the discipline. STEMs are much better at making their case to their sponsors to persuade sponsors' to support them.(bottom line, STEMs proposals seem to have better agenda as to what to do, why do what is planned to do, etc). After all, you cannot just ask support and then tell those who support you that they should not expect something (probably more than what you get from them in terms of value) back from you. This is also true for student tuition. You cannot ask students to pay their tuitions and fees, and then tell them that they are not customers. If you are working in a non-profit organization that is not a university , you are not going to treat those who sponsor your organization (i.e. the patrons) in the way TAs treat students, aren't you? Then, why do you assert that students are not customers? Can a university continue to run, professors and TAs continue to get paid, if all students in a university refuse to pay their tuitions? 
 
 
 

If I got an email like this from one of my students, I would probably not respond (I'm not sure how that would really improve things), but I would definitely think about what the student is trying to communicate. I think the request to not surf the web in class is legit, no matter if the tone of the email isn't as polite as possible. I don't think the student wrote you that email just to troll you. You can deal with the tone by not responding, but seriously, do think about whether other students could feel this way as well. As a grad student TA, you are supposed to be a role model for students. If students can look over your shoulder and see you not attending to class-related material, that says to them that you're 'checked out' and don't care. It doesn't matter that it was grant-related or work-related. It's not a part of your job in that space; it's an active detriment to it. 
IMO, they are probably using a fake account because they're afraid of retaliation, which doesn't delegitimize their message. There are a lot of TAs that might judge the student or treat them differently after offering this kind of feedback. 
So I guess I'm saying you should not talk to this student, or try to find them (they clearly don't want to be found), but do think about why they sent the message, and maybe talk to other TAs? Do they also sit in the front of the class and surf the web? What does the professor think about non-class-related laptop use?

Honestly, as a TA, I agree with you that the email sounds rude, but, as a student, I do not think it is problematic with regard to the content. I remember that many years ago when I was an undergraduate I wrote some similar stuff to one of my profs, and obviously this prof was upset by the uncourteous style of my email. He then taught me to write in the appropriate form (with salutation, closing, better tone, etc). Well, obviously I got better respondences from profs since then, because the style is more courteous and formal. But now I am in graduate school, and I actually witness some profs do not follow these conventionality of email courtesy. They write something like "hi.XXXXX" or simply "XXXXXX PERIOD" with no salutation, closing, etc. While I feel profs writing stuffs like these are rude, it is hard for me to justify to say the content they say via such a format is problematic.(Of course, I do have bad perception over profs writing stuffs in such a way, and feel like to steering clear of in the future when possible ). So, maybe the OP could respond, by simply citing that XXX behavior is not prohibited by the regulations of xxx university.