Whee!

[sakecake]

I finally managed to find time to have my students fill out the semi-official department midterm evaluation form thingums (the lead instructor forgot which problems he had already assigned for us to do in recitation and reassigned some of them...usually we have more to cover than there is possibly time for).  Other than the typical "you should do

Comments

[oxeador]

There is a prof here that has the theory that students complaint when the lecturer isn't good, and if the lecturer has an accent, that is the easy thing to complain about. A good lecturer with an accent does not get complaints. I do not entirely agree (the accent has to be understandable) but there is something about it.

[vampirecoffee]

If I have to understand accents to do the whole grad school thing, I think I will probably pass on grad school. The worse my hearing gets, the harder it gets for me to understand accented English, and at the rate I'm going I probably will have lost about half of my hearing by the time I got to the end of grad school. :\

[sakecake]

How important it is to be able to understand accents depends a lot on the particular school. Georgia Tech is an unusually international community (to give you some idea, among the 17 first year math students, only 4 of us are from the US). Based on the anecdotal evidence of conversations I've had with my friends at other grad schools, Tech is probably one of the most international. Essentially (assuming you are interested in grad school), I would not allow the accent thing to be a deterrent - just pay attention to things like the ratio of international students/professors when you are researching departments.