{"id":2589,"date":"2022-01-11T16:05:05","date_gmt":"2022-01-11T16:05:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/96.66.168.57\/wordpress\/?page_id=2589"},"modified":"2026-08-24T02:53:59","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T02:53:59","slug":"intermission-xx-graduate-students","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/?page_id=2589","title":{"rendered":"Intermission XX:  Graduate Students"},"content":{"rendered":"<audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-2589-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Intermission-2589-P01.mp3?_=1\" \/><a href=\"https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Intermission-2589-P01.mp3\">https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Intermission-2589-P01.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n<p>As a student and as a professor, I met many graduate students. Some were classmates, some were students in my classes, and I advised the thesis research of some. I met people from all over the world and discovered many cultural similarities and differences. Experiences with people from outside the United States established that people from other countries are much like those from the U.S.; some are awesome, some are jerks, and most are somewhere in between. I think the percentage in each category is relatively consistent around the world.<\/p>\n<p>There were undoubtedly cultural differences, but I believe that has more to do with the environment and society where each person spent their formative years. Besides the European and Australian students, the most culturally similar to the U.S. students were those from Korea and Taiwan. The Indian and Middle Eastern&#8211;mostly Iranian&#8211;students were also quite similar, but the Indian students, in many cases, overestimated how similar the cultures were. This overestimation often exposed itself with phrases and terms they assumed Americans would know. For example, Indians called the top student &#8220;the topper,&#8221; and I often heard this. I&#8217;m not sure if it&#8217;s slang, but they assumed Americans would know what it meant. Likewise, Indians call erasers &#8220;rubbers,&#8221; which they would quickly learn did not mean the same thing to an American.<\/p>\n<p>Something I found fascinating and unexpected was the Chinese students&#8217; general selfishness. I&#8217;m not saying that all the Chinese students I met were selfish or more selfish than most Americans. However, coming from a communist society, I assumed they would have a more socialist attitude with everyone helping and contributing to the whole. As a graduate student, these attitudes caused some tension in the lab. The Chinese students would never take the initiative to do things for the good of the lab, like purchase toner for the printer or other supplies we all used. We didn&#8217;t pay for this, but writing and submitting purchase orders took time.\u00a0\u00a0 The Chinese students argued that it was more difficult for them because they were not native English speakers, and this was true. It didn&#8217;t seem like they were interested in contributing to the group&#8217;s needs.<\/p>\n<p>One Chinese student that was particularly unhelpful when it came to this type of thing got particularly upset when he was desperately trying to print his thesis to give to his thesis committee before a deadline. The printer in the lab was out of toner, and he was mad that no one had noticed and bought some before he needed it. The rest of the lab told him that if he knew he needed to print a lot, he should have checked and done the work to order some. Instead of ordering some after using the last of it, he printed everything in another lab. We were glad to see him graduate.<\/p>\n<p>Next page&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--nextpage--><\/p>\n<audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-2589-2\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Intermission-2589-P02.mp3?_=2\" \/><a href=\"https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Intermission-2589-P02.mp3\">https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Intermission-2589-P02.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n<p>The first graduate student I hired as a professor was a young lady named Tara. She was very bright, and I wish I would&#8217;ve done a better job advising her. She came to Penn State from Bradley University, a small private university in Peoria, Illinois. While I&#8217;m sure she got a sound undergraduate education, I should have suggested taking upper-level undergraduate classes when she got to Penn State instead of graduate classes. The graduate classes seemed to overwhelm her as a new graduate student.<\/p>\n<p>I understood part of the issue almost two years after first meeting her. Another professor asked me how old Tara was, and I remember looking at him and saying, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know. Graduate student age? 24 or so.&#8221;\u00a0 He said that his students had told him she was young. I then pulled her application from the department files and realized that she was 18 when she started working with me. She had spent four years in high school and four years in college, as usual, but started high school very young.<\/p>\n<p>I wish I had known this when I hired her. Knowing how young she was would not have changed my decision, but I would have handled things somewhat differently. It&#8217;s not like Tara was immature; for an 18-year-old, she was probably too mature. She always seemed extremely serious and didn&#8217;t seem to be enjoying her time as a student. Tara also didn&#8217;t seem interested in the research project I&#8217;d given her. It seemed like an exciting topic, but Tara never seemed motivated to work on it; thus, she made plodding progress. I asked Tara many times if she&#8217;d like to work on something else or even find a different adviser. She always said everything was fine, but I knew if Tara weren&#8217;t excited about the research at the start, she would hate it after a few years.<\/p>\n<p>After three years of making very little progress, I wasn&#8217;t sure what to do. I supported Tara with research money, and as a new professor, I needed her to be productive. At some point at one of our weekly meetings, she broke down and started to cry. Once she collected herself, she told me that she didn&#8217;t have much interest in doing any research and had been miserable trying to force herself to make progress. I think she understood my situation&#8211;needing her to be productive&#8211;and wasn&#8217;t sure how to say she wanted to quit school after I&#8217;d supported her for a year.<\/p>\n<p>She also made it very clear that getting a Ph.D. was not <em>her<\/em> interest or goal; it was her parent&#8217;s. Thus, I&#8217;m sure she also didn&#8217;t know how to tell her parents she wanted to give up on the dream they had for her. I&#8217;m not sure if her parents had advanced degrees or if they thought that as a &#8220;gifted&#8221; child getting a Ph.D. was the best thing for her. I let her know that I was okay with her decision and would help her transform her work into a thesis for her Master&#8217;s degree.<\/p>\n<p>After this meeting, her demeanor completely changed. She cut off what had been extremely long hair and just seemed to be happy for the first time. I think she finally admitted that not getting a doctorate did not mean she hadn&#8217;t fulfilled her potential. She also clearly had decided that she needed to do what was best for her and not what her parents felt was best.<\/p>\n<p>She spent about a year finishing her thesis and got a job at an excellent company that makes software ubiquitous to all of science and engineering. I have not kept in touch with her, but I hope she&#8217;s happy. Every once in a while, I&#8217;ll check her LinkedIn page. She&#8217;s now a &#8220;Senior Quality Engineering Manager,&#8221; so she must be doing well. I certainly hope so.<\/p>\n<p>Through this and other experiences as an adviser, I quickly learned that it&#8217;s not something at which I&#8217;m particularly good. I knew managing people was never something I wanted to do, which was a significant reason I went to graduate school. However, I learned as a professor that I&#8217;m not good at motivating people. Motivating people usually means creating some stress for them to get something done, and I so hate being under pressure that I avoid putting other people under it.<\/p>\n<p>Next page&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--nextpage--><\/p>\n<audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-2589-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Intermission-2589-P03.mp3?_=3\" \/><a href=\"https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Intermission-2589-P03.mp3\">https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Intermission-2589-P03.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n<p>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&#8217;t that he was a poor student or couldn&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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 &#8220;got&#8221; so dirty.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;d used it as a napkin for the last week. He would also frequently miss meetings, and when I&#8217;d see him next and ask where he was, he&#8217;d say something odd but act like it was normal. Once, he said, &#8220;I was in court.&#8221;\u00a0 I asked, &#8220;Why?&#8221; and he responded, &#8220;I haven&#8217;t paid my rent.&#8221;\u00a0 When I asked how many months he&#8217;d not paid, he said, &#8220;Six.&#8221;\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;d already invested a couple of years of research money in him and didn&#8217;t want to start over with a new student who I would only be able to support for two years.<\/p>\n<p>Next page&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--nextpage--><\/p>\n<audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-2589-4\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Intermission-2589-P04.mp3?_=4\" \/><a href=\"https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Intermission-2589-P04.mp3\">https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Intermission-2589-P04.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n<p>The beginning of the end started when I got an email while I was in Florida with my family visiting my dad over Spring Break. The email was from someone in Penn State&#8217;s graduate school office and said they wanted me to look at some documents Balaji had submitted containing what appeared to be a forgery of my signature. When they sent me the papers, it was clear that I had not signed them, and as time had passed, the imitation had gotten worse and worse. The issue was that these were I-20 forms that allowed international students to renew their visas to remain in the country. They essentially attest that the student has financial support and is progressing toward a degree. For a graduate student who a professor is supporting as a research assistant, these forms are just a formality, and I would have indeed signed them had Balaji asked. The forms contained no misleading information, but they are federal documents, and forging a signature on them is a felony offense.<\/p>\n<p>When I returned to State College, I learned of the strange circumstances that had led to the discovery of these forgeries. The Penn State library had a program where students could sign out laptops for a certain period. I&#8217;m not sure of the details, but Balaji had gotten one of these laptops and then reported it stolen. When the campus police interviewed him, he said the laptop had been stolen from my lab when he&#8217;d left the door unlocked to go somewhere. He then called the investigating officer back and changed his story, saying that he&#8217;d locked the door. The officer then started to wonder if Balaji was being honest. Talking with Balaji more made him even more suspicious, so he called the graduate school to learn more about him. The graduate school office staff then noticed the signature on his I-20&#8217;s allegedly being from the same person but changing dramatically from semester to semester.<\/p>\n<p>I have no idea what was happening with the laptop, but a &#8220;good samaritan&#8221; returned it the following week. I suspect that either Balaji had broken it or planned to sell it. My initial assumption was that he&#8217;d likely left it somewhere, and someone had taken it. The laptop, however, was the least of Balaji&#8217;s problems at this point.<\/p>\n<p>Because the I-20 is a federal form, and being 2009, the FBI got involved. An agent came to my office and interviewed me about Balaji. They were worried about him planning some terrorist attack, but I highly doubted that was the case and suggested they interview him and let him talk. Balaji&#8217;s problem was the same one that is often the cause of getting caught; he thought he was far more intelligent than he was. Over the few years of interacting with him, I discovered that he would eventually contradict himself if you kept asking him simple questions. In my experience with him, these were never huge lies or anything that mattered much, but I learned not to believe anything he said.<\/p>\n<p>Not long after the FBI contacted me about Balaji, a reporter from the Daily Collegian, Penn State&#8217;s student newspaper, contacted me for an interview. Unbeknownst to me, Balaji had been the university&#8217;s graduate student association (GSA) president, and the newspaper had learned law enforcement was charging him with forgery. The article they wrote about the situation is still <a href=\"https:\/\/www.collegian.psu.edu\/archives\/former-student-leader-faces-forgery-charge\/article_12ce3d48-b57b-579c-a0bc-b4f24cf650c3.html\">online<\/a>, and another article with a picture&#8211;I&#8217;d bet he got that t-shirt free&#8211;can be found <a href=\"https:\/\/onwardstate.com\/2009\/05\/01\/former-gsa-president-busted-for-alleged-forgery\/\">here<\/a>. I was utterly dumbfounded when I learned he&#8217;d been the GSA president. I later asked another student how he won the election. Balaji was a regular at the meetings because there was always free food. When the president&#8217;s office was open, Balaji was the only person who wanted the job. I wonder how much money he oversaw and if there were good checks and balances with the GSA budget. While I have no idea if he embezzled anything&#8211;although it wouldn&#8217;t surprise me&#8211;I&#8217;m sure the amount of free food at the meeting increased under his watch.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not sure what happened when the FBI finally contacted him, but my understanding was that he spent time in a federal prison before being deported. Penn State, at some point, expelled him.<\/p>\n<p>Next page&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--nextpage--><\/p>\n<audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-2589-5\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Intermission-2589-P05.mp3?_=5\" \/><a href=\"https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Intermission-2589-P05.mp3\">https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Intermission-2589-P05.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n<p>Later, I accessed the files on his lab computer, spoke to some of my other students about him, and discovered some rather interesting things. First, the other students were sure that Balaji was living in the lab because either his landlord had evicted him, or Balaji thought there was no reason to pay for an apartment when he could live in the lab. Living in the lab would explain him sleeping in the student lounge and walking around the building in his underwear. He seemed to be using a file cabinet as a dresser.<\/p>\n<p>I also discovered a Penn State letterhead template on his computer that listed the lab&#8217;s telephone number as my office number and had a contact email ermock@psu.edu. This email address turned out to be an alias to Balaji&#8217;s Penn State email. When I informed Penn State&#8217;s computer services that they needed to add some checks to prevent people from creating aliases to impersonate other people, they acted like it would be too much trouble to fix. I wonder if it&#8217;s still possible. The letterhead explained how Balaji had been hired as an intern at Ford for a summer. When I initially learned about this, I didn&#8217;t understand how they would hire him without contacting me. Now I wonder what kind of glowing recommendation letter they got and what they might think of &#8220;my&#8221; recommendation after working with Balaji for a summer.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-2612 alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/96.66.168.57\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/BalajiEmail.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"240\" height=\"274\" \/>I also discovered electronic discount brokerage statements that made me suspect Balaji had tried his hand at day trading. His day trading wouldn&#8217;t surprise me, considering his attitude that he was smarter than everyone. I wonder if day-trading losses were part of why he didn&#8217;t seem to have any money. I could certainly see his arrogance leading him to keep thinking he would eventually outsmart the market.<\/p>\n<p>A few years later, I got an email from someone in India asking if Balaji had earned his Ph.D. as he claimed and if the Balaji Raghavan in the Daily Collegian article was the person I&#8217;d advised. After telling him that Balaji had not completed his Ph.D. and confirming he was the person that had forged my signature, I learned that Balaji was to wed this man&#8217;s sister in an arranged marriage. I&#8217;m not sure what ultimately happened, but I suspect the brother ended the arrangement after I told him of Balaji&#8217;s generally strange behavior beyond the signature forgeries and the lies about his degree.<\/p>\n<p>A couple of years after that, I got an email from a professor in France wondering about Balaji and his history with me and Penn State. He had applied for a research position at a university there, and I told the professor the story. I&#8217;m not sure what became of that; however, his <a href=\"https:\/\/scholar.google.com\/citations?user=JBLKlhkAAAAJ&amp;hl=en&amp;oi=ao\">Google Scholar page<\/a> claims he has a Ph.D. and is an associate professor at INSA de Rennes in France. A seminar announcement confirms that he eventually got a Ph.D. from a university in France and is a &#8220;tenured Associate Professor of Civil and Mechanical Engineering at the (French) National Insititute of Applied Science.&#8221;\u00a0 Although it claims he&#8217;s held this position since 2013, which cannot be correct.<\/p>\n<p>To give you one last anecdote into Balaji&#8217;s distorted thinking, the very last thing he asked me was to write him a recommendation letter.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As a student and as a professor, I met many graduate students. Some were classmates, some were students in my classes, and I advised the thesis research of some. I met people from all over the world and discovered many cultural similarities and differences. Experiences with people from outside the United States established that people [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2589","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2589"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3062,"href":"https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2589\/revisions\/3062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unstablefocus.mynetgear.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}