I have several friends with PhDs who paid somewhere between a fraction and none of their class expenses over the course of their programs through scholarships or departmental funding rather than loans, and who got additional money on the side at points through TAing or the like. I wasn't exactly living the high life during my MA, but my experience was broadly similar - I watched my expenses closely and finished the degree with about as much in my bank account as I had when I started. (A big chunk of that was probably not owning a car, but still.)

Someone in a doctoral program having some discretionary money from some point in the past, or from occasionally doing stuff on campus, is one of those things that just can't surprise me, especially if the student is as capable as everyone was saying this guy was. He was apparently on top of things during his undergraduate work as well, so that leaves me doubly unsurprised if he didn't actually have to pay much of anything for his doctoral work.

I mean REALLY. You have a very unusual group of friends, at least in my experience. Most of us in my cohort lived on $8-$12K a year (early 1990s) and it has only gotten harder. Grad students live pretty simply.

to grad students in the neuroscience program. I imagine his family helped too.

My friends, who finished at PSU, UCSC and UMich in the last few years, each got more or less full rides. (The one doing his doctorate at PSU actually didn't know what his tuition was, since they waived it entirely while he was teaching.)

I know a lot of people who went through graduate studies and only a handful who had to pay the whole thing, in any case.

In the program I was in, because I taught undergraduates classes, and I was a research assistant, my tuition was heavily discounted, and I was paid a small salary.

But it those together still didn't cover everything, None of my housing or living expenses were covered.

I covered those expenses with loans and credit cards, which put me in about 60k of debt or so by the time I finished.

It's a major reason why I never did any post-doc training. I had rent to pay and loans coming due. The budget would have been impossible.

have any interest in the PhD program. A friend who was working on his PhD in nuclear pharmacy got checks from pharma companies. He did not apply for them or request them in any way - they just arrived in his mailbox - to help him out.
I guess the student is supposed to remember this and use their products when they are employed.

Credit? What he did isn't really that complex.

Parts of it weren't complex, but other parts were. Parts of it were cheap, but parts were expensive. Some parts took very little knowledge, others took a lot. Some parts took little skill, others took a lot. Parts of what happened make some sort of twisted sense, parts don't.

He shows up out of fucking nowhere with both the knowledge and skill to rig a boobytrap like that. A trap that he set to go off (with the music as bait to attract neighbors/cops), a deadly trap that almost does its business, and then he just casually tells the cops his place is wired before going completely silent on them?

This whole thing smells.

What was his main doctoral area again?

Nothing I've seen in the news so far requires specialized training. Rigging a bomb or incendiary devices with a trip wire is fairly simple.

Have you ever tried to rig one?

let's just leave it as yes. Both in a professional setting and private setting when younger. Who among us has not created napalm for fun as a child lol.

Had all the formulas and workarounds for a lot of different explosive stuff from an entirely practical standpoint..

Good thing I never had much quantity in the way of raw materials I guess..

and a lot of other places it shows up as easy knowledge.

Neurobiology requires that you take chemistry. Experiments in Physics experiments often have triggers that could be used for other things. Heck, even parts of a garage door opener could be used for this kind of crap. And let's face it, nothing went off so this little terrorist doesn't seem to know anything about timers or cell phone triggers. He is less sophisticated than the Iraqi's at least, not that even those kinds of things take a lot of special knowledge.

Remember that in Vietnam it was little kids and people who had never been to school who were rigging booby traps.


I don't know AT ALL why you think that any knowledge can't be found easily in this day and age.

Hell. I just cooked a chicken recipe from 1532 the other day, but I didn't have to get a time machine, just a book, scanned on the net.

They practiced, and they were given the equipment they needed by their superiors. Where does a science nerd in Colorado go for training like that, without leaving a trail?

It's a whole lot easier for things to go wrong than right in the improvised explosives business, especially if you're doing it on your own. There are a fair number of eight-fingered kids who thought stuffing a copper pipe full of match heads was simple to do on your own.

It's a long way from reading the "Anarchist's Cookbook" to successfully rigging one of those things without training or previous experience.

It's the whole damn package that doesn't make sense to me.

I keep thinking about Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury for some reason...

You know, like tracking Muslims, stopping and frisking black people, closing down medical marijuana stores, hunting for deadly MP3 pirates, that kind of thing.

A madman stockpiling ammo and explosives, he's small fry compared to that.

all the crap he bought was legal. He wasn't even red flagged.

I don't know if he was getting quite that much, but if he was as smart and accomplished as is being claimed, he is likely getting some sort of well-financed (for a grad student) assistantship. And, who knows how much money Mommy and Daddy have been sending him.

that money then becomes disposable income, right

as long as they don't have to live afterwards.

Don't pay next Tuition = 5-6k
Sell car = 2-3k
Don't pay rent for a month or as long as you can = 1k
Sell TV and all hobby games and other toys = 1500
Sell laptop = 750
Sell your bed & all furniture even what came w the apt= $750
Sell kitchen stuff including stove and fridge = 1k
Sell off every book you bought = up to 800 bucks
Max out your many credit cards that has been extended because you have a lot of student loan debt = 2k to who knows? Indy film makers used to raise 20-60k this way.

Ive got 11k easy just from that.

As for the trap and other knowledge, easy to find free and easy to cover your tracks on the net. In fact many of the manuals that teach this kind of terrorism are from the CIA run School of the Americas. I wouldn't be too surprised if you could still get them from the govt. by writing Pueblo, Colorado, 81009.

It's really the fixed expenses that tie most of us down financially, don't worry about them for two or three months and you can do quite a bit..

Collect Off Dad.

He was on a training grant. Meaning he was paid a stipend to go to school.

I know of one fool who had $30k in credit card debt that he racked up flying around the country going to Grateful Dead shows

DENVER (AP) — The University of Colorado says shooting suspect James Holmes had a federal grant to study neuroscience.

University spokeswoman Jacque Montgomery said Saturday that Holmes was one of six neuroscience students at the school to get National Institutes of Health grant money. She didn't know how much money he got.

From: http://hosted2.ap.org/OREUG/f7ded15e4d4846268a17b79c1c4b7cb8/Article_2012-07-21-Colorado%20Shooting-Suspect/id-8e53f630781d48cdb54c369b05b4fc99

..."Holmes was given tens of thousands of our tax dollars by the Obama administration and liberal educators, allowing him to carry out his massacre. Guns don't kill people -- liberal big government kills people!"

First, there's the Rush Limbaugh dog-whistle. At first I thought this chump was just one of Rush's lemmings, but it has since been shown he was a meticulous planner who had been at work for months. So the next question one has to ask when dealing with his ilk is: Did Rush know?

Second, thirty-five cops were on the scene within 180 seconds? That sounds a bit like when Dorothy Hunt's plane crashed virtually on top of an NTSB investigation team and a field full of federal officers.

Third, the guy stepped out into the firing line of 35 cops... and surrendered. Normally, suicide by cop is the expected end result. This guy was apparently trying to get away, and gave up when he couldn't.

Fourth, he wired his place to explode, created a noise violation to bring the police, left the door unlocked... and the cops didn't even peek. I came out of the bathroom once to find a cop eating my potato chips on my couch, because I knew a guy who knew a guy, and my screen door was unlocked.

And then there's the magic money, the string of online purchases which tripped no alarms--WHICH IS WHY OUR GOVERNMENT SPIES ON EVERY FUCKING THING WE DO, by the way--and the amazingly convenient timing for the GOP, just when Mitt was on the ropes and I was beginning to wonder if he could survive even to the convention.

Something isn't right. Long experience leads me to then ask, "what's next?"

"What's next?"

The whole thing is about as hinky as it gets, IMHO.

Heard that on one of the programs today