There are some crazy stories about who had to be the worst graduate student I ever knew, Balaji Raghavan. Unfortunately, he was one of my Ph.D. students when I was a professor. It wasn’t that he was a poor student or couldn’t do the research for his thesis; he had a very odd personality. It was this bizarre personality that eventually got him expelled and deported.
He came to Penn State as a top student from an excellent university in India. I had just received a substantial grant from the National Science Foundation, and I was initially delighted to be able to support him and two other students with the grant money. From the start, he had quite a quirky personality. For one, he was simply a slob, extraordinarily cheap and miserly. While engineering graduate research assistants like Balaji don’t make much money, they had their tuition paid and made roughly $35,000 per year as a stipend. This income was certainly enough money to buy food, clothes, etc. However, Balaji appeared to buy his clothes from the Goodwill store or found events giving away t-shirts and wore them until they fell apart. I recall another graduate student trying to get him to buy new boots because duct tape was the only thing holding them together.
He kept complaining that he needed a better keyboard because the keyboard that came with his lab computer had become unusable. He also wanted one with black keys. I didn’t understand what was happening, so I went down to my lab and looked closely at his desk. It and the keyboard were utterly disgusting. The other students laughed when I told them Balaji said he needed a new keyboard. They said he was constantly complaining about the white keyboard because it “got” so dirty.
Whenever I would give him a copy of a paper to read, or any other paper document, he would always bring it back looking like he’d used it as a napkin for the last week. He would also frequently miss meetings, and when I’d see him next and ask where he was, he’d say something odd but act like it was normal. Once, he said, “I was in court.” I asked, “Why?” and he responded, “I haven’t paid my rent.” When I asked how many months he’d not paid, he said, “Six.” There was another time with parking tickets; I never did see his car, but that was probably good. He acted like this was just a normal part of being a graduate student, although he was around plenty of other students to know it was not.
I could deal with these oddities, but his behavior seemed to deteriorate, and after a couple of years, it got even more bizarre. I would more frequently hear from other students and professors about odd things he’d done. The custodial staff had encountered him more than once sleeping in a student lounge and walking around the building at night in his underwear. He insisted that boxer shorts were shorts and not underwear. I probably would have fired him, but I’d already invested a couple of years of research money in him and didn’t want to start over with a new student who I would only be able to support for two years.
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