Dave Minchang

There’s a time for every PhD student to find an advisor. The department chair loves helping us in that endeavor. He has a presentation on how to choose an advisor, and the main idea is that you should look for three things: The person The topic The money In the best-case scenario, you can get two out of three. You must prioritize and choose what matters most to you. For example, you might get a topic you like with a funded project, but your advisor is going to be a bad human being. Alternatively, you could have a great advisor working on an exciting topic, but there is going to be no funding for your research. I was lucky. I found the perfect advisor for me. I like him; he is a true gentleman who works in a groundbreaking field and has made seminal contributions to it. Additionally, he is the professor who brings the largest amounts of money to the department. Naturally, everyone wants to work with him, but he only takes the best of the best into his lab. He told me, given my proven track record of publications and scholarships and my related work experience: “I want you.” I was honored. How lucky am I? I got a 20 hours contract, the maximum I’m legally allowed to work as an international student, but everyone knows you can’t complete a PhD if you only work 20 hours per week. For the past three years, I have been navigating courses, teaching duties, and research. I found myself withdrawing from human interactions because I’m constantly thinking about my research from the moment I wake up until I go to bed. The pay is below the cost of living for a mid-sized city, and I still must pay part of my tuition. I managed to get by. Thankfully, the university is great at financial advising, and they helped me realize that I can only afford to eat twice a day or live in a different state. You know what I chose. In the end, it was an easy decision because most of the time I don’t have the time or energy to make food or eat. But that doesn’t matter. I love the topic, I love the person, and I’m getting paid to do it. The last time I met with my advisor, he said, with the calmest voice he could find: “I can barely justify paying your salary. You are getting paid to complete your PhD, and you have shown minimal progress. Most people in the world pay to go to school, but you are getting paid to get educated. Did you realize how lucky you are?” And yes, I’m still thinking to myself: How lucky I am to be getting paid for doing a job.

I'm sick of being told to keep politics away. At the moment we have to go to an embassy to ask for a visa everything are politics. The last movement of SEVIS is hostile. It creates much more uncertainty on international students. We have no certainty that even if we made it to study in the US rules won't change in a detrimental way. I think we are smart people; choosing a place for going to grad school is not only about academics, and looking on local policies for international students should be one important aspect to take into account.

In fact those are bad news. The tweet is a campaign movement in Trump's intention on denial covid and shift agenda to immigration. Now there is a change in the F1 regulation for virtual schools. Even though I'm not in the US at this moment, and my school has announced next semester will be in person, and I'm waiting for a visa interview, I take this new movement personal. My school has told me many times: you are welcome here, but the department of state makes me feel just the opposite. The whole process of getting a visa is just about being treated as a criminal for wanting to go to grad school and prove that you are not going to steal the job of American born. I have burned a lot of money in doing so. With new restrictions in the coming days, like puting an end date for F1 status and more restrictions on OPT program, and the real possibility of Trump's relection, the US seems a bad place for being a student. Now I'm facing with the reality: there are better places in the world for being an international student, where you can feel respected and treated like a human being.