When I was an undergrad mechanical engineering student at Maryland, I was considering graduate school there. However, my choices there were limited because I wanted to work in automotive engineering, specifically on internal combustion engines. The one professor who had done work on this was essentially retired and only teaching one class as a professor emeritus, not taking on any grad students.
There was another professor who was new to the university and I heard was highly regarded who did specialize in combustion. I don’t recall exactly, but at one point during summer break I think, I got the opportunity to work for him, perhaps as an intern or something like that. At the time, there was one graduate student he had who was running the lab. This student complained about him constantly. He was going on about how terrible the professor was, he didn’t know what he was doing, why was he doing it this way, etc. He completely turned me off to this professor. I got out of there as soon as I could, and the next semester when the professor walked in as the teacher for one of my classes, I quickly switched to go to that class taught by a different professor (the engineering department at Maryland would list all classes as taught by “Staff” so you couldn’t pick ahead of time based on who it was. When my friend Andy Staff graduated, the dean joked, “you’re the one who was teaching all those classes!”).
Today, I received the email newsletter from the Mechanical Engineering department at Maryland, and it included this article about the professor.
Gupta Inducted into Royal Academy of Engineering
Professor Gupta was honored for his achievements in clean and efficient energy conversion technologies used in energy, power and propulsion systems. He is a leading authority on swirl flows, distributed combustion, and biofuels production and use.
What I think really happened was that his grad student was just a complainer, and I in my youth didn’t really judge the situation for what it was. I didn’t make enough effort to find out for myself what the professor was really like to work for. Maybe the grad student was right, or right about some things, but I find it hard to believe that Dr. Gupta would be that terrible of an advisor yet succeed so much and stay at Maryland this long if he were that bad. I wish I had found out for myself.
And that professor emeritus? Shortly before I graduated, when it was too late to do anything about it, I found out that he had taken on one of my classmates as a grad student because of that student’s strong interest in the field. If I had known that earlier, I would have pursued that option myself.
Edit: I’ve realized the title makes it sound like Maryland wasn’t a good choice or something where it wasn’t suited to me and maybe that’s why I did go to grad school at University of Houston. That was a completely different life moment and choice. I would have loved to have gone to grad school at Maryland then, or even now. I still bleed four colors.
