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Abuse isn’t an “advising style”: Consequences of MIT sheltering abusive mentors
- GlenTheMachine 6y agoMIT is FAR from the only offender here, so much so that I find it odd to be calling MIT out in particular. And abuse takes a lot of forms. My advisor once went eighteen months without ever laying eyes on one of his doctoral students.
- wittyreference 6y ago>so much so that I find it odd to be calling MIT out in particular. Because the author is relaying their personal experiences as a student at MIT.
- djaque 6y agoFor what it's worth, I've actually been warned against their physics department for grad school. The other rumour I heard is that Harvard is even worse (for physics grad students). Tons of toxic behaviour like sabotaging labmates in the name of competition and advisors holding onto students for like a year after they should have graduated to pump out that last paper from them.
- wegs 6y agoPhysics and bio departments tend to be the most toxic. Students have no BATNA.
- fireflies_ 6y agoI'm a bit surprised to hear it put this way. Aren't physics students usually welcome in finance as quants?
- wegs 6y ago(1) Most don't want to be quants. It's a soul-sucking no work-life-balance career path. You're getting paid better, but it's a hyper-abusive work environment. (2) Quant hiring is super-competitive. most physics students wouldn't get jobs. A lot of quants are physicists, but the converse isn't true. (3) And students? Not so much. Quants like to hire Ph.Ds or possibly ABDs. Ones who are ALSO good programmers can go the CS route, but most aren't. You need to do basic programming to do physics, but not industry-grade software engineering.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoMost employed programmers can't do "industry grade engineering". Physics grad students are plenty capable, with a boot camp if needed.
- wegs 6y agoIt's not a hard set of skills for physics grad students to pick up, but it's a bit more than a boot camp. Most of the deep stuff is there. There's a lot of shallow stuff at this point, though. Most don't want to do the work (not implying laziness -- it's about interest / fit / etc.).
- RhysU 6y agoThere are definitely unpleasant quant shops. But there are pleasant ones, too. Interviewing with shops is like asking people to dance. If you stop after the first rejection, you're doing it wrong.
- djaque 6y agoActually, I've heard that chemistry departments are a standout in terms of abuse and that seems true just from the students I've talked to at my institution. There's like this weird old school attitude of "this is the way we've always done it" so I'm going to pass you through the flames too. Add that to the motivation of "if I can just get through this then I can get a cushy pharma job". Come to think of it, the news stories I remember (just off the top of my head) of advisors pushing their students to the point of suicide were chem. advisors.
- gaze 6y agoChemistry leads the pack in toxicity. See E.J. Corey. Physics is pretty okay these days on average, though I've heard of a few icky groups.
- Spooky23 6y agoI went to a SUNY school. My advisor kept me waiting 20 minutes after outside of his office for an appointment made a week earlier, only to walk out with coat on, announcing that he was going to happy hour. He suggested that i set up another the following week through the department secretary. I walked over to do that, discovering that he was actually going to happy hour at the airport, and from there India, and wouldn't be back for a month. Ended up getting locked out of classes as I couldn't register.
- renewiltord 6y agoYes, that's right. An MIT grad student should perform a study across all universities to get a representative sample before writing a blog post about his experiences. This is the only acceptable thing. He is not permitted to share what happened to him.
- GlenTheMachine 6y agoThat’s a fair amount more snarky than I intended my comment to be taken. When I was a grad student I talked to grad students from a lot of other schools. I went to conferences, made friends, sent emails to folks doing research in my field. In the course of events we compared notes on advisors. As a consequence I knew that the professors in my department weren’t outliers. You didn’t do this?
- iokevins 6y agocaltech
- belval 6y agoAs someone who wanted to apply at Caltech for my masters, would you mind elaborating?
- jjcon 6y agoI’ll second that - I went to a decent uni (in EU) and while I escaped a lot of the negativity a few very close colleagues of mine in an almost identical lab went through years of hell at the same institution. It totally could have been me in their position if my focus had been just slightly different. It was kinda just was luck I ended up where I did. I think about it a lot and how I’m sure a lot of brilliant people are not able to fulfill their potential due to these issues.
- waterhouse 6y agoOn that subject, from 24 years ago: > I need from you a few paragraphs describing your personal interests, > advising style or philosophy, background and professional interests. > ... I'm preparing a document to give the freshman for them to use to > select an advisor. I need to receive your info by early next week. I was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, majored in mathematics and Computer Science at Yale University, and I got my PhD in Computer Science at CMU. I've lived in Paris, Hong Kong, Peking, and New Jersey. I tend to look for weak, uncertain students and feed off of their insecurities; by preying on their poor self-images, I manage to temporarily assuage my own feelings of inadequacy and failure. I've also found undergraduate advising to be a terrific vehicle for venting a lot of my own pent-up rage and frustration. I'm not sure if this counts as a philosophy, but it's the closest thing I've got to an "advising style." > Thanks again for volunteering to advise! My pleasure.
- pavanky 6y agois there any more context to this? All I could find is this: https://www.ccs.neu.edu/~shivers/advisor-stmt-original.txt https://www.ccs.neu.edu/~shivers/advisor-stmt-original.txt
- jimhefferon 6y agoOS also has this: https://scsh.net/docu/html/man.html https://scsh.net/docu/html/man.html (I understand it to be intended as humorous, BTW.)
- VectorLock 6y agoMaybe we are a bit more "puritanical" but I think yes today even joking about pulling a gun would be seen as a "bad idea."
- mcguire 6y agoBack then, it was a "no one would do that" thing. Now it's more of a "would he really?" thing.
- pavanky 6y agoThis is especially harder for international students because they are likely entering a new educational system and dont know what is the right thing to do in this scenario.
- hprotagonist 6y agoIHTFP: alive and well, apparently.
- NicolasGorden 6y ago> Too often I have been told to be proud of the great work I am a part of, as if this should outweigh the negative and harmful things myself and others have experienced. Actually, that's how it works in the real world from my experience. Most geniuses have terrible shadows that are as dark and long as they are brilliant and tall. Most of us feel really lucky to get things done and be a part of something, and when we have to bear an unkind comment here or there... well, we're emotionally developed adults who balance the positive with the negative. It takes a lot of entitlement to expect to never hear anything negative or offensive or unkind.* College should prepare you for the real world, not shelter you from it. * Obligatory before someone makes a strawman: Of course if the advisor does something illegal, that's another matter, but the article never stated anything illegal being done. Just unkind from what I read.
- pavanky 6y agoThat is just a terrible terrible thing to say to excuse abuse. You cant expect others to toil away to benefit your "genius".
- NicolasGorden 6y ago> You cant expect others to toil away to benefit your "genius" Brilliant reply. Except... I never said my genius. The fact that you make up arguments and distort what I said is evidence of the emotive nature of your response. I'll invite you to improve the quality of your discourse. I have respect for people who I disagree with as long as they can show the basic decency of engaging with what I said and not behave dishonestly by making up fake and silly arguments. I really dislike sophism.
- pavanky 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you
- ivraatiems 6y agoI am deeply sorry that the sentiment you express has been your experience. That is not the way it is or must be everywhere, and I hope you are treated better in the future. Even so, I want to say explicitly that the idea that we should allow geniuses to abuse us and harass us because they are geniuses is dangerous and misguided nonsense. Being smart is not an excuse to behave poorly. With rare exception, producing something great for the world, or believing you are working on something great, is not justification for hurting others or not taking into consideration their needs or feelings, especially when they are working for you to try to help you. I also think that your reduction of 100-hour-minimum work weeks, no free time, emotional manipulation to prevent reporting, and frequent unnecessary cruelty disguised as "advice" or "help" to "unkind comments" is absurd. If people chose this lifestyle, knowing what they were getting into, that's one thing (and even then, it would still be dubious to demand it in the first place) - but clearly the author and their peers were mislead and manipulated into it. Finally, what is illegal and what is immoral are not the same thing, and we can and should hold people, as a society, to a higher standard than "guess they didn't break the law" when we put them in positions of power over other people. Edited to add: I had the pleasure of working as an undergrad with several professors and PHD students in a research capacity. Some of these people, I would absolutely consider "geniuses" in terms of both intellect and achievements. I still speak with many of them, and consider some of them good friends. I never, not once, observed or heard of people being treated in the ways described in this article (nor was I myself), despite the relatively prestigious people I worked with and their relatively prestigious work. It is not that way everywhere.
- m0zg 6y agoFair warning: you _never_ get the full picture if you only hear one side of it. It is possible that the advisor is a manipulative asshole (though it's unlikely that they are to such an extent), or it is possible that the author grew up always getting participation trophies and now isn't getting any (far more likely, IMO). So before you render your judgment, wait for at least some semblance of corroboration.
- croissants 6y ago> it is possible that the author grew up always getting participation trophies and now isn't getting any (far more likely, IMO) Why do you think it's "far more likely" that the student is the problem?
- m0zg 6y agoBecause you don't get to stick around if you abuse people to the extent described in the article. At least I haven't seen it, in a quarter century of my adult life. I quite frequently see folks who treat any demands that they do what they've signed up to do as "abuse" though. Think about it: say you are a judge and you wanted to _really_ understand why someone is divorcing their spouse. Would you listen to just one spouse or both?
- croissants 6y ago> you don't get to stick around if you abuse people to the extent described in the article It's very uncommon for student complaints to affect a professor's employment, especially a tenured one. As long as the professor brings in grant money, doesn't piss off the entire department, and graduates at least a few students, they are probably fine. It would take something beyond generic cruelty to students for a person that checks all three boxes to not "stick around" --- think something illegal or against university rules, and with clear evidence.
- m0zg 6y agoIf this account were to be taken at face value (which it shouldn't be until evidence is presented), then the professor was abusing everyone for years, not just a handful of students. That, indeed, would not be allowed to continue. I'm getting sick and tired of people taking on the role of judge, jury, and executioner, with zero corroboration or hard evidence.
- yardie 6y agoI was an undergraduate work-study student working in my university lab. I got to talking with a Ph.D student helping set up his equipment, "how long you been working on this?" "Almost 10 years." "Seems really long." "Yes, normally it's 5 years but I can't enough time to finish it. I'm always working on Prof. Engineer's research projects." "I mean can't you just leave?" "No, not at all. You are completely beholden to your advisor. Can't get money, lab time, assistants without them. I'd have to walk away from all my research." I was gobsmacked. Professor Engineer was teaching a course I was taking, though he wouldn't recognize me in my shop bunny suit. His attitude towards students was nothing like his attitude towards his graduate researchers. This was not the first story I heard and I assumed that's how grad school worked.
- tyingq 6y agoOuch. Think I'd just research real world salaries for the Masters degree and likely flee.
- leetcrew 6y agoI'm told this is a common path, at least in CS. apply to a phd program to get funding, do some research, take some courses, then drop out because you "just can't handle it" once you have enough credits for your free masters degree.
- Volt 6y agoMaybe you're just putting it this simplistically for the rhetoric, but if you're doing research it's not really free. You're actually getting paid (albeit not much) and having your tuition waived to do work as a researcher.
- leetcrew 6y agoI don't have any firsthand experience, this is just what a few of my friends at CMU have told me. they also complain about their paltry stipend, which I find kind of amusing considering that the waived tuition + stipend is close to what I gross for my fulltime SWE gig.
- croissants 6y agoUnsolicited advice for any potential PhD students choosing between schools/advisors: you should try very hard to talk to current PhD students, preferably in person or at least over the phone or video call (at any rate, not in writing). Try to talk to as many as possible. Good advisors will probably have a few students who will speak up for them, and great advisors almost certainly will. In contrast, bad advisors will probably have a few students who give middling recommendations, cryptic comments, or outright warnings. Good departments typically have meet-the-current-students-without-faculty-present events to facilitate exactly this discussion. If the potential advisor does not happily put you in contact with current or recent students, that alone is a red flag. This is not foolproof. Even a great advisor may have one bitter student, and a generally terrible advisor might still have some good student relationships. But having a bad advisor will make grad school so much harder. This is a situation where doing a bit of due diligence can have a huge impact. I was lucky; I had a great advisor, and I was always happy to talk to potential students, since I wanted my advisor to have more good students. Talk to students!
- wiredfool 6y agoAnother bit of advice, see if the lab has had any suicides in recent memory. Also, if one or more occurs, gtfo before the stress gets you.
- neolog 6y agoAre there labs with more than one recent suicide?
- wiredfool 6y agoI’m a little hazy on it now, but my sister's lab had at least one while she was there, and it directly led to her death a few years later. It was ... not a healthy environment. Some warning signs would have been easier to see from the same coast, and some of them were obvious in hindsight.
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- jbgreer 6y agoFriends told me that a former advisor started a side business counseling couples, and made some of his students pretend to be married participants during larger group sessions. One kicked a PhD student out of her lab after he spoke to a local news reporter about his line of research without her approval. Not even a scientific article, just a personal interview. He started over in a new line of research.
- sthnblllII 6y agoI think the problem here is credentialism. People have been incentivized too strongly to need a degree from the most prestigious institution and so put up with things they wouldn't have before. Great work is being done all over the world now, there is no reason people should still see one of a few schools as a requirement for a serious resume.
- anon09282020 6y agoThe same happens at other high profile universities and with bad managers at companies like Google. The organization seeks to protect itself, the same way that institutions handle paedophiles: pretend the problem doesn't exist, move the perpetrator elsewhere, and blame the victim.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago"Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" - Lord Acton The underlying issue is the huge power differential between advisers and students. Whenever there is such a power differential, abuse is almost inevitable. I fear that unless that power differential gets addressed, any solutions are going to just be superficial band-aids on a festering wound.
- hinkley 6y ago"It is said that power corrupts, but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power." - David Brin
- LanceH 6y agoBeing corrupt without power goes unnoticed.
- shuntress 6y agoI disagree. The power differential is not the underlying issue. Power is certainly a part of it but the underlying issue comes down to oversight + accountability. Both in specific written rules and in general societal norms that influence how those rules are used.
- wegs 6y agoLack of accountability is part of the power structure. At MIT, if you do something sufficiently nasty as a faculty member to embarrass the Institute, everyone is now pressured into signing NDAs / non-disclosures. If you don't, you're liable to get scapegoated yourself.
- vkou 6y agoPower corrupts, but more importantly, power reveals. You can only get a real measure of a man, or woman, when they have power over you.
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- xiaolingxiao 6y agoThis is very very common. As long as professors publish, they can get away with a lot of things, bonus points of the students are indentured to their H1B. I've seen Ph.D students in their 30s, mother of children, cry in front of me because of the abusive and neglectful actions of their advisors. They essentially run their lab as a personal fiefdom, and HR is powerless in this situation. Sexual harrassment cases are moth-balled, meanwhile the school prints tons of material talking about gender-equality, etc.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoNot H1B. Some Education visa.
- chasd00 6y agoI've been on a number of conference calls where people (both male and female) break down in tears from pressure or bad coworkers. Tears aren't all that rare or a big deal.
- DanBC 6y agoWTF yes they are. Only an utterly dysfunctional corporate culture would tolerate putting people under that amount of stress. Ignoring "be a decent human being" for a moment, and only looking at the money (because this is one way to communicate with dysfunctional corps): companies have a duty of care to protect their staff from harm, and this includes mental distress. By not addressing the abuse the company is leaving itself open to costly legal action.
- belval 6y agoTo be clear, I 200% agree with you (if there is such a thing), but it is still a normal state of affairs in multiple fields. I never personally lived it, but a few people close to me worked in healthcare and that kind of "brings you to tear" workplace abuse is downright common. Demeaning comments and forced overtime are a weekly if not daily occurrence. Should they accept it? I guess not, but once it's normalized they partake as well and it doesn't change.
- temp667 6y agoThis comes via Graduate Students for a Healthy MIT, Black Graduate Student Association, and Graduate Student Council Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee as a bit of context - the author themselves is anonymous. Note that I've seen advisors who came through an older system (ie, if this prof was older) not mesh well with new groups of candidates. You OBVIOUSLY need to talk to a few students - ideally those with a somewhat similar background to yours - to get a sense of fit. Some notes. In old system, if a grad student had kids (usually you waited till much more plentiful back then tenure track position to start family), the (male) grad student's partner stayed home full time with the children. Now families often have two working / studying parents - so your grad student is MUCH more likely to have more parental responsibilities - which despite what anyone says IS a big distraction (yes, I know lean in says you can have it all, but raising kids is wonderful but also takes time). Manner of speaking etc. The article mentions the advisor making fun of how folks speak (??). That's a weird thing to make fun of frankly, but groups someone advised used to be very homogenous. I notice this just with age gap - so much more shorthand / casual communication style. "My advisor’s words would pierce right through me and the period at the end of each sentence felt like a punch in the gut." Pretty intense stuff! A period = a punch? BTW - I think 80% of the phd system is a bit of a racket :) But that's only because I got to hear (daily) complaints about advisors and research and being a phd candidate (and then postdoc hell continues this!!).
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- zwaps 6y agoInfamous Professor at my university (eminent statistician): - Says he prefers Chinese students because they shut up and do the work without asking - "Your first research idea belongs to me" - Has apparently thrown coffee mugs at students - Walks out or stops grad seminars he is unhappy with He stays, because he brings in a lot of money.
- mxwsn 6y agoAs a current MIT PhD student, this ideas are incredibly important to hear. Establishing an appropriate widespread sense of what normal is crucial for changing culture. More people need to talk about changing labs as well. A surprising fraction of PhD students do this and is fairly normal as well. I switched labs in the middle of my PhD and had the unusual and lucky opportunity to be able to take my work with me.
- aidenn0 6y agoI don't want to condone violence or anything, but I've always wondered how advisors like this don't get murdered. I've definitely met PhD students who would prefer prison to the alternatives of quitting or staying under their advisor. I suppose people who are inclined in that direction would get out some other way before things get that bad.
- rendall 6y agoI only every heard of one murder of an advisor, that took place in 1978 at Stanford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Streleski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Streleski Edit: Here is a NYT article about 2 other incidents https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/27/science/27murd.html https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/27/science/27murd.html According to this article, Streleski bludgeoned his professor, not his advisor
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- jp0d 6y agoThis article seems to talk about one particular professor, if I'm not wrong. Does anyone know if the majority of the advisors at MIT behave like this? Has anyone else on this forum had any experience like this? I'm sure if the advisor is an influential person who brings in a lot of research money, the administrators would try to ignore these complaints. I recently read about a case in Melbourne Uni. The professor was accused of sexual harassment and the uni only gave him a voluntary retirement and protected him from prosecution.
- JimTheMan 6y agoI know of a case at Melbourne uni where a post-doc was extremely verbally abusive to the phd-students they were supposed to be helping. The several candidates came forward to HR, but HR apparently wasn't able to do anything about it because "it wasn't physical" and it "wasn't against a member of the staff". Completely disgraceful from the Uni . The only reason any justice was done was that those close to the matter did not renew their contract, so they were essentially let go. HR IS USELESS!
- jp0d 6y agoWOW.. That's terrible. I was thinking about applying at Melbourne Uni for a graduate course in sciences department. I've to admit that I was attracted to it mostly because of the uni's global reputation. It's very expensive. Now I'm reconsidering. Just because someone is an expert in a field doesn't give them the right to be abusive. There are plenty people who're outstanding in there field of expertise and are also very nice and humble people. I don't understand what people get from such behaviour.
- JimTheMan 6y agoI wouldn't say that this is a pervasive problem, this is single issue over a decade. And it was dealt with by the relevant Managers but not the University HR. It's more of an indictment of HR in general rather than the culture of the uni. I would still consider the Uni if I were you! What were you thinking of doing there?
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- Hickfang 6y agoI find it hard to believe Anonymous actually met his advisor. Bret Weinstein has fully called out the tactics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3sPIDm9bPs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3sPIDm9bPs