以下是引用天香国猪在2006-8-29 7:58:00的发言:To wind,
As an Engineer, I dont agree with your comparison between Chinese and American students.
We all know how much Chinese students care about scores and publications. I was also a so-called straight A student, nineteen graduate-level courses taken, and top in class. I would never say I was better than an American student with an averaged B student. Our research group used to have an EE Chinese Ph.D. student, who always attended to conference and published paper, and she had very hard time to produce a working control board for us. For myself, even I am ME in computational world; it is still shame to say that I have never laid my hand on a working compressor; however we invented a world-leading one. Most of Chinese students are lack of hands-on experience.
We should not evaluate a US student based only on classroom performance.
Comparing to top Chinese student, most of top undergraduate students have spent a year or two at big name companies, such as Siemens, NASCAR, Boeing, and so on, as an intern or co-op. They work on real projects. And most of the time, they even rotate among different group with different majors, sometimes management. Most of them know what is REALLY going on. These student will unlikely go back to school for Ph.D., since they receive offer during the Co-op. Some of them will finish their Master degree while they are working. If you were a Ph.D. advisor in a Chinese University, would you take an A student in your school, if he/she is available to you, or some good students from Palestinian University which you have never been?
Once, I also teased about American quantitative capability, and I said without calculator they could not live. While, if we brought up with a calculator, we would also depend on it. My hubby gave me a lesson. He used to work at Chicago future and commodity trading board (?), where he met the fastest human calculator, who happened to be an American. Why do we need to know square root of 2 is 1.414 if we have a calculator?
I also disagree with you about pay. Chinese students get less pay most of the time. My hubby, who has been the US for more than thirteen years, told me before I graduated, which I didnt believe. Now, I find that most of the companies are taking advantage of it. I had an American classmate, who was a so-so student. She got an offer of 65K right after a Master degree from Motorola few years ago. Considering low living cost in this region, it was not low salary. Last year, most of my Chinese Ph.D. classmate got offers of 62K from Siemens. There was one, who was from top school, got a 65K. One of my colleagues even told me that he knows some black undergraduate student can easily get offer of 60K.
As a Chinese, I agree with you that I dont like people ONLY see advantage of a foreign country. Although we are all happy to see that China is improving very fast, we still need to be honest to compare a developing country to a developed one. However, I would not say WE Chinese students are better than American students. This really depends on how you define better. Knowledge, experience, contribution and happiness may be all included. I will never degrade my degree and good performance, and will not underestimate other peoples experience and intelligence.
BE ALERT and BE SMART.
Agree.