It is a new semester. So there are few technical glitches that might happen as usual. But I find myself getting emails from students asking about things that they can find on their own by googling up information themselves. With classes, meetings, a workshop and a conference, I got easily annoyed with students who emailed me asking such mundane thingy. Just because they pay the tuition fees, does it give them the right to treat me like an information counter personnel? I wonder where these students come from. Why are they acting like a kindergartener who ask questions that they can find the answer themselves through Google?
Several postgraduate students asked me a list of reading materials. For goodness sake! Some of them are PhD candidates even – who are supposed to be trained as independent researchers. If they depend on me as their supervisor to give them a list of things to read, they should register for my undergraduate courses where I provide a course information with list of reading materials like textbooks and such.
What should I do about this? To relieve stress dealing with these students, I read PhD comics by Jorge Cham. It gives me an idea to contribute to the comic. I think I will email the cartoonist to share my predicament (tongue in cheek remark!)