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Pittsburgh Mike's avatar

Way back when I was a grad student in CS, I missed a qualifier question, which I thought was graded incorrectly. I wrote an appeal, and while it was pending someone showed me the response from the question’s author, which was a long personal attack on the gaul I had questioning a Professor. Now, I’m Jewish and he had a definitely German name, and I did wonders if anti-semitism was the issue — his personal attack was so crazy.

But I was being hypersensitive, and I’m glad that I forced down that paranoia. Life would have been much worse had I retreated into being scared of being a victim of anti-semitism instead of participating fully in American society.

FWIW, years later, apres Google, I learned that professor came here as a Jewish refugee from the Nazis. My bad — turns out he just didn’t like being questioned by annoying students.

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Steve QJ's avatar

"FWIW, years later, apres Google, I learned that professor came here as a Jewish refugee from the Nazis. My bad — turns out he just didn’t like being questioned by annoying students."

😂 Forcing down that paranoia is a great way to put it. It's so easy to jump to conclusions when we think we've been treated unfairly. The maturity to stop that train of thought until there's some evidence to back it up is a tragically dying skill.

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