Sarkar was just one year younger than Prof. Klug. I wonder if Sarkar’s mental instability was in any way fed by professional jealousy at all Prof. Klug was able to accomplish at such a young age.
It’s possible, but not enough information has been released for us to know one way or another.
It would also be quite problematic to have such a chip on one’s shoulder considering one will have many encounters with genius types who accomplished much more by the age of 39 or much less.
For instance, one undergrad classmate who was a few years ahead of me whom I looked up to as an academic model GRADUATED with honors from our college at 17, did some public service related work for 2 years abroad, and completed his PhD and got hired as a tenure-track Prof at a well-respected NW university at 24.
One alum who graduated from my public magnet in the '80s managed to become the youngest tenured Prof at Harvard at 26:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Elkies
One HS classmate who overlapped with my graduating class graduated HS and was admitted straight into a STEM PhD program at 15.
Unless one plans on being a hermit on a deserted island or in a closet for his/her entire life…meeting and competing with those more accomplished than you at the same/younger ages is another thing to deal with in the course of living one’s life.
I agree… the guy got his BS at Stanford, and there too he likely met some. The more elite the school, the more often one is humbled by the abundance of really, really smart people 
What baffles me is that the shooter got his PhD in 2013… so what happened between then and now? Did he not succeed post graduation?
Maybe not succeed to the level he wanted/felt entitled to. From another report, he was hired to work for some engineering firm in the midwest and was given reasonably good reviews for his skills and quality of work. However, it was lacking in detail and doesn’t specify his current status with the firm.
Also, it’s very possible he may have had issues landing an academic job if that was his ultimate desire considering the reports he had to be handheld to graduation by Prof. Klug and the fact he may have been a sub-par PhD student…even if engineering may not be as lacking in academic job prospects compared to other fields.
Incidentally, one good friend who graduated with a PhD from a top 8 program in her field in the same year is still adjudicating despite having a prestigious post-doc and a topflight Prof in her field being very supportive because there’s simply too many PhD graduates/candidates coming on the market competing for too few tenure-track openings in her field.
It’s probably not worth the effort to try to figure out why he did it. It’s such a vile thing that only pathological mental illness can explain it.
More background on Sarkar. Apparently, he and Hasti, whom he married in 2011, were estranged and separated in 2014. That was also the year he left his last known job, although he got permanent residency that year.
http://www.sfgate.com/news/crime/article/Police-Minnesota-killing-preceded-UCLA-7960997.php
From that, it seems one possible issue might have come from his earlier graduate education background. The fact he left with a Masters degree without proceeding onto a PhD at Stanford…one of the tippy-top engineering departments in the country/world indicates he was either rejected to continue on or received a "consolation Master’s before being quietly asked to leave for not meeting his former adviser’s/department’s academic standards to proceed onto the dissertation research/writeup stage.
Going on to UCLA may have likely felt like “dropping down” academically for him as while UCLA engineering is strong, it’s not in the same league as schools in the Stanford/MIT/Caltech/CMU/Berkeley tier. And his struggling to finish his PhD there even with Professor Klug’s handholding help likely aggravated that feeling.
Especially considering he attended and graduated in the top of his class at an IIT whose graduates are well-respected internationally.
Is there any evidence to support any of that or is it pure conjecture.
Re: #87, #88
Although that is possible, note that Stanford also offers terminal master’s degree programs in various engineering subjects, including the one that Sarkar studied. For example: https://aa.stanford.edu/academics/graduate-programs/masters-program/how-apply .
From that article, it states he spent 2 years at Stanford from 2003-2005 where he received his Masters.
According to Stanford’s Aeronautical & Astronautics department website where the killer did his Masters, the majority of their PhDs are admitted from the pool of MS students and they strongly recommend applicants interested in a PhD from their department to apply to the MS program first:
https://aa.stanford.edu/admissions/phd-admissions
From that and the fact he later tried and got his PhD in the same field from UCLA, it’s a strong possibility he applied to Stanford’s MS program in that field with the intention of continuing on to their PhD program only to be denied.
Another factor which illustrates the serious academic issues he had as shown by reported witness statements from those who knew of his relationship with Prof. Klug at UCLA is the fact that despite having had a MS degree and thus, having some advanced standing due to prior graduate coursework upon entry to UCLA’s engineering PhD program in the same field, he ended up taking another 7 years to graduate. And reportedly only with a lot of handholding help from Prof. Klug.
It’s one thing to have taken 7 years to graduate with an engineering degree from start to finish including the MS degree along the way*. It’s another to take 7 years AFTER having already earned an MS degree in the same engineering field from a comparable/higher ranked graduate department. Especially considering there was only a break of a year in between his MS at Stanford and his commencing his graduate studies at UCLA.
In light of that, it sounds like he’s had some serious academic issues/struggles at UCLA as most grad students in his field with some advanced graduate standing from a comparable/higher ranked department would have finished their PhD in around half that time.
- 7 years from start to finish including an MS degree along the way is already on the long side for most engineering PhDs....though only a bit. 9 years with advanced graduate standing from another comparable/higher ranked graduate engineering department would be considered unusually long. Most people I knew who did engineering PhDs finished within 4-6 years including the MS along the way.
He is dead so is his wife and Klug so we would never know about what lead to these murders but it is quiet obvious that he had mental illness. I can imagine sane people getting upset and starting a physical alteration or even trying to seriously hurt someone due to sudden animal rage but driving long distance to shoot someone is beyond that.
How is it “quite obvious” that he had a mental illness?
I reject the notion that just because someone kills people, s/he is mentally ill. There are plenty of places where we consider it socially acceptable to kill people- police using deadly force, the military, state-sanctioned murder (death penalty). What makes those “acceptable” whereas this makes someone “mentally ill?”
Sorry, but I think calling people who murder others “mentally ill” is a cop out. It’s our way of making excuses and moving on rather than trying to figure out WHY this happens so often here but so (comparatively) rarely elsewhere.
Not necessarily.
Someone who is highly entitled and angry from slights/setbacks…whether real or imagined may be quite capable of planning out and carrying out such a premeditated plan for revenge killings without necessarily “obviously being mentally ill”.
That’s not to say this murderer wasn’t mentally ill. However, without a definitive diagnosis from a qualified mental health professional, one can’t necessarily assume that.
Well there was the note he left at the scene asking somebody to take care of his cat. That is just a little bit nutty.
Why? If I knew I was going to die, I’d ask someone to go take care of my dog. I don’t want my furbaby to suffer.
Besides IIRC, that was his way of telling them to find his wife’s body.
@anomander - How is your kid doing? You made me laugh when you posted about the Thursday quiz since my kid also had a Thursday test. She said that they were all so distracted from Wednesday that no one could really focus on it.
@Fish125 Thanks for asking. I hope your D is ok. My D says a lot of kids are freaked out and some had a tough go of it during the lockdown, but she’s doing fine. She gets a lot of anxiety from studying, but somehow this incident didn’t bother her in the slightest. We were joking about it - “Anxiety from tests yes, life-threatening situations no biggie”.
@romanigypsyeyes I dunno, seems like if you just murdered somebody in cold blood in public and were about to kill yourself, you’d maybe be thinking about why you did it, how you got there, what happens next, not so much worrying about your cat. But I don’t have a cat, so maybe cat people are different.
@anomander Yes, this - “Anxiety from tests yes, life-threatening situations no biggie”. They truly all had to dust themselves off quickly, and go straight into finals. BruinStrong indeed. Much success to your Bruin during finals. I’m looking forward to getting mine home!
@romanigypsyeyes , THANK YOU! I get so very tired of the circular logic of “he shot people because he was mentally ill; he was mentally ill because he shot people,” especially when there’s really scientific evidence that people with mental illness (excluding substance abuse and probably anti-social PD) are more likely to commit violence. Violence can, and usually does, exist outside of mental illness.
Also, reading the article that @bluebayou posted, I don’t see how that FB post would warrant police action or monitoring. There’s nothing violent or threatening in it at all–saying that someone is a bad boss or bad professor or sketchy isn’t a crime. Of course, in hindsight, we see that there obviously was a (tragic, horrible) threat, but I’m not sure how that FB post should have been a red flag.