6 ms·

This style of editorial is becoming more common, and IMO is almost useless. Saying that "Advisors should take care of their students' well-being." doesn't accou

This style of editorial is becoming more common, and IMO is almost useless. Saying that "Advisors should take care of their students' well-being." doesn't account for the fact that incentives are for advisors to overpromise to funding agencies and drive their students hard to make up the difference. They control funding/compensation, graduation, and paper piblication/author order, and are set to personally benefit from faster results at higher difficulties. In my advisor's lab, this was done by encouraging competition between students. If a student didn't make experimental progress in a month, a second student was told to work on the same problem. If that didn't work, he would collaborate with postdocs in other labs, sharing ideas and results to get high impact publications quickly. Students needed to publish results as first authors to graduate, so becoming a mere coauthor on someone else's publication after a year of work was a huge setback. One (independemtly wealthy) student was desperate to graduate and published as a first author through another lab with our advisor as a coauthor, and was told that the paper would not be counted. I don't know a single student who graduated without having a breakdown on the way, but the professor in question has become quite famous and received many awards and fellowships in professional organizations for their high-impact work, the department is becoming famous in that field, and the funding agencies have extended funding to pay for five more years with 50% more students. These hand-wringing editorials suggest nothing that will change incentives or hold ruthless PIs accountable.

noobermin 8y ago
Unionizing graduate students is the answer.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mattkrause 8y ago
  This came up frequently when I was in grad school. I doubt it is the right solution, especially for PhD students doing experimental work. For disciplines where PhD students are mostly independent and funded via TAships (humanities, sometimes math or social science), a lot of their aggravation is due to university or department policies: how many classes does each person need to teach, how many students per section, how are the classes assigned, how is summer funding allocated, and so on. Collective bargaining could be an effective way to sort this out. In the sciences, however, the model is very different: students are essentially apprenticed to one professor. If there are problems in that relationship, it's not clear to me how a union could successfully intervene since many of the disputes are both a) highly specialized and b) incredibly subjective. My PhD advisor, for example, sat on manuscripts forever. Could a union have forced him to provide timely, constructive comments on them? Probably not. Very few labs set explicit working-hour "quotas", which a union could regulate. Instead, there are productivity expectations: "this should just take an afternoon" and it's unclear how a union could ensure those are reasonable, especially for research stuff which, by definition, has never been done before! Finally, a lot of academia runs on reputation: recommendation letters are essential to get jobs, grants, and promotions. Even if there was an effective grievance procedure, it could get you through to a PhD--and then promptly doom your career. The biggest change I would like see is a transition from students "belonging" to one PI towards a model where all of the faculty are invested in all of the students' success. Management training would be good too. As a grad student and postdoc, you're judged on your ability to train the rats, run the reactions, or image the stars. This is how we pick faculty, and it's a surprisingly small chunk of the actual job, which is mostly people/grant management, with a lot of writing thrown in.
marmaduke 8y ago
This rings true. And it’s not just the students but postdocs, engineers who have to make up the gap. Students bear the brunt as being most disposable. When one student worked in a kebab truck to support themselves, my advisor said “well better to have the PhD than not, yes?” There is no accountability for PIs, for funding agencies, but at least at my university there are independent committees that assess well being from time to time, but to little effect: the university itself has little incentive to limit this behavior as it will limit impact factor, end of discussion.
RMarcus 8y ago
This would be considered absolutely batshit at all three of the R1 research universities I've been around, which spans a significant range of prestige. I think it goes to show how much variance there are in PhD programs. I frequently advise undergrads to find the right lab (i.e., a lab that doesn't have such a competitive environment) instead of picking a school based on some other criteria like prestige, but this is far easier in hindsight. I got super lucky -- a small lab with a good advisor. Maybe (in addition to a strong union) we need a "Yelp for labs" where advisors can be penalized (or recognized) for their behavior. If it were publicly available and student testimonial could be somehow verified and anonymous (potentially impossible), I bet administrators would put at least some pressure on problematic PIs...
- rsfern 8y ago
  Definitely agree with assessment of high variance in programs and even individual groups. I think ‘yelp for academic groups’ is an interesting idea, but I really doubt the administration would step in unless it got really bad. But giving prospective students better information could disrupt the flow of good students to toxic labs, which might actually create some incentive for change. I’m not sure I would actually post to such a service though, even though I have a pretty good relationship with my Ph.D. advisor. Too many bridges to potentially burn in such a small community. For any prospective students who might read this, in the meantime you might try briefly emailing a few current and former group members asking for their perspective.
- trombonechamp 8y ago
  > we need a "Yelp for labs" It exists: https://www.gradpi.com https://www.gradpi.com There was an article in Science about it last year: https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2018/02/crowdsourcing-goes-academic-platforms-reviewing-advisers https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2018/02/crowdsourcing-goe...

noobermin 8y ago

Unionizing graduate students is the answer.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mattkrause 8y ago
This came up frequently when I was in grad school. I doubt it is the right solution, especially for PhD students doing experimental work. For disciplines where PhD students are mostly independent and funded via TAships (humanities, sometimes math or social science), a lot of their aggravation is due to university or department policies: how many classes does each person need to teach, how many students per section, how are the classes assigned, how is summer funding allocated, and so on. Collective bargaining could be an effective way to sort this out. In the sciences, however, the model is very different: students are essentially apprenticed to one professor. If there are problems in that relationship, it's not clear to me how a union could successfully intervene since many of the disputes are both a) highly specialized and b) incredibly subjective. My PhD advisor, for example, sat on manuscripts forever. Could a union have forced him to provide timely, constructive comments on them? Probably not. Very few labs set explicit working-hour "quotas", which a union could regulate. Instead, there are productivity expectations: "this should just take an afternoon" and it's unclear how a union could ensure those are reasonable, especially for research stuff which, by definition, has never been done before! Finally, a lot of academia runs on reputation: recommendation letters are essential to get jobs, grants, and promotions. Even if there was an effective grievance procedure, it could get you through to a PhD--and then promptly doom your career. The biggest change I would like see is a transition from students "belonging" to one PI towards a model where all of the faculty are invested in all of the students' success. Management training would be good too. As a grad student and postdoc, you're judged on your ability to train the rats, run the reactions, or image the stars. This is how we pick faculty, and it's a surprisingly small chunk of the actual job, which is mostly people/grant management, with a lot of writing thrown in.

marmaduke 8y ago

This rings true. And it’s not just the students but postdocs, engineers who have to make up the gap. Students bear the brunt as being most disposable. When one student worked in a kebab truck to support themselves, my advisor said “well better to have the PhD than not, yes?” There is no accountability for PIs, for funding agencies, but at least at my university there are independent committees that assess well being from time to time, but to little effect: the university itself has little incentive to limit this behavior as it will limit impact factor, end of discussion.

RMarcus 8y ago

This would be considered absolutely batshit at all three of the R1 research universities I've been around, which spans a significant range of prestige. I think it goes to show how much variance there are in PhD programs. I frequently advise undergrads to find the right lab (i.e., a lab that doesn't have such a competitive environment) instead of picking a school based on some other criteria like prestige, but this is far easier in hindsight. I got super lucky -- a small lab with a good advisor. Maybe (in addition to a strong union) we need a "Yelp for labs" where advisors can be penalized (or recognized) for their behavior. If it were publicly available and student testimonial could be somehow verified and anonymous (potentially impossible), I bet administrators would put at least some pressure on problematic PIs...

rsfern 8y ago
Definitely agree with assessment of high variance in programs and even individual groups. I think ‘yelp for academic groups’ is an interesting idea, but I really doubt the administration would step in unless it got really bad. But giving prospective students better information could disrupt the flow of good students to toxic labs, which might actually create some incentive for change. I’m not sure I would actually post to such a service though, even though I have a pretty good relationship with my Ph.D. advisor. Too many bridges to potentially burn in such a small community. For any prospective students who might read this, in the meantime you might try briefly emailing a few current and former group members asking for their perspective.
trombonechamp 8y ago
> we need a "Yelp for labs" It exists: https://www.gradpi.com https://www.gradpi.com There was an article in Science about it last year: https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2018/02/crowdsourcing-goes-academic-platforms-reviewing-advisers https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2018/02/crowdsourcing-goe...