TechTakes

One of the things that happened during the Great Low Interest Rates Decades is that it seems like anyone who fit a certain profile (millennial white guy with american citizenship, a computer, and at least a modicum of what passes for charm among the nerd elite) could convince both VCs and the US government that there was tons of money in disrupting the delivery of some legacy sector of society. Sometimes they were correct (eg. buying stuff without going to a retail establishment), sometimes it seems like they should have been correct and yet somehow have failed to make money anyway (Uber), mostly they were comical (Juicero). But the ones that are the most excruciating are all the places where you really, really can't frictionlessly deliver at scale, because large-scale human intervention is necessary: education, health care, customer service.

The promise of the American tech boom is massive online delivery without people. Employers hate their employees, and government is always willing to be told that doing without employees is industrial progress.

What do those people think education even looks like?

The same think all coding bootcamps think education looks like: try to ~~take over the world!~~ poorly teach fullstack web development with none of the fundamentals!

So it seems like you're my former neighbour, then. Depending on how you count, UW might look like it's both overstaffed and underfunded. This is because i'm mildly certain that most of these TAs aren't hired as TAs, because nobody really pays them. All PhD students, definitely all at Kampus Ochota, have a requirement to take a certain number of teaching internship hours, which is about 40-60 per year depending on field. (this is, btw, anomaly on national scale and from next year or so new admissions will be paid for these TA hours).

At my faculty (Chemistry; about 220 admitted for BSc, about 80 for MSc annually) that's enough to man almost all the more entry-level labs (that require more supervision), along with a proper salaried PhD or sometimes two. (We mostly make sure that students don't do any stupid/dangerous shit, most labs are 12-15 students, first year labs are 30-40 and are limited by size of labs. We're talking about 1 staff, incl TAs, per 4 to 6 students) I'm not sure how MIM makes use of that human resource, but wouldn't surprise me if some classes are just led by some PhD students. This is definitely not a resource that Lambda has, so actual costs if anything should be even higher

ERC grants, haven't seen many of them. European Regional Development Fund, a few grants sourced from Norway and Switzerland, NCBiR, NCN, FNP, some funding straight from ministry, there's more of this. MIM is a notch or two higher than most of faculties so i don't doubt it, but these grants are supposed to go for research, not for teaching. There are other sources of funding for that, and especially after new minister of science was installed, that money became available (it's a special hell to navigate all of this)

That said, our faculty hasn't been saved from bullshit hype. There's nanostructure engineering course now, launched some three years ago or so, which is not engineering degree and mostly deals with bulk nanoparticles and such, and this is something that simply does not have much use (some sensors, limited use in catalysis but it has problems with reproducibility and dies quickly). Nano- hype happened mostly in early 00s and started dying around 2015 or so, so it's not even right on timing. This deters few however and you can find loads of bs papers with shit like catalyst based on chitin nanoparticles made from recycled sustainably sourced beetles or whatever with non-reproductible results published in MDPI or Frontiers. There is, or was, "blockchain and AI lab", tucked somewhere at CeNT (i take that yall's have thrown them away from MIM and they inhabited first hospitable room since)