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I relocated last Summer to Redlands California in part to attend UC Riverside and work on a PhD in Computer Science. I was offered a fellowship, tuition + $30K a year. My experiences at UCR were less than satisfactory, with the exception of Amy Ricks in the CS department office, they generally sucked.

The majority of Grad students in my department were foreign nationals, primarily Chinese. It was annoying and depressing to attend a course and to here nothing but Chinese spoken with the sole exception of the lectures. There was no mentoring or advising offered to me during my stay at UCR. My official adviser was too busy and kept fobbing me off on Amy. I constantly made to feel like I was too old to be there and the wrong nationality to guarantee success.

The Graduate Division at UCR tried to get rid of me from almost the day I arrived. They were only interested in their statistics and had no interest in student success. I believe that Grad Division was more interested in catering to foreign students who paid the fat fees than American students. I believe that this attitude was fostered even more in the CS department due to the vast majority of tenured professors being foreign nationals. This begs the question of why an American Institution of Higher Learning’s academic department has so few American instructors? And so few American graduate students? I feel that I was the victim of discrimination based on my nationality in my own country and at a educational institution financed by my state and country.

We started a home farming project in our front yard using above ground planter boxes.

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