11 ms·

For anyone not familiar with the world of academia, grad students actually have a good bit more power available to them by organising sensibly than you might th

by g_p 5y ago

For anyone not familiar with the world of academia, grad students actually have a good bit more power available to them by organising sensibly than you might think. The same is also true for early career postdoctoral research staff. This is because most of the work that actually matters is being done by these individuals, in a very pyramidical structure, but the money stops rolling in without the work that the base of the pyramid is delivering. Tenured professors and others win research grants, and are only as good as their last grant. If they stop running on the treadmill, they won't get any more grants, as their pitch becomes less compelling than others'. They win a grant, but the actual research work is then done by postdoctoral researchers and grad students. They do the actual work, write it up, and pretty much everything else. Often they even win the grants in the first place. The exception is that when there's some credit to be gained for the work, the professor will reappear to take center stage and give interviews. If the grad students organise, the wheels could begin to fall off quickly - if projects are delayed, grant payments won't come through. If they are not teaching classes, someone else has to teach them. If the research isn't getting done, someone has to speak with funders on calls. Someone has to write reports. There's more to be done than the professor can do, and they will rapidly end up snowed under, unable to function, and unable to deliver papers on their grant. That will make it harder for them to get their next pet project funded. Unfortunately, many people go into academia believing it to be a bastion of meritocracy where their efforts and skill will be rewarded, and they spend some number of years believing this before they start to realise what is actually going on. Some will make it to be a professor, others become disillusioned and go elsewhere. In my view though, the model is quite broken, and too reliant on a professor claiming credit for others' work without challenge, even though the work of their (hidden) team was the meaningful intellectual input, and some of them would probably be better as the professor.

amitport 5y ago
If a professor is only taking credit for underlings' work he / she will, at some point, stop getting good students...
- neutronicus 5y ago
  Yeah in my experience professors are pretty good about giving credit (the student is the first author on the paper, does the conference presentations, etc). The comment above is right about the general structure (professors pitch, students deliver), though. And perhaps right about claiming credit in some fields, although not mine.
  - g_p 5y ago
    I'd agree it very much depends on the individuals. I have worked with people all across the spectrum. My advisor was absolutely in the "good" camp - we'd openly describe call academia the "world's biggest hidden pyramid scheme". He led a small, tightly knit group, and the group followed the two pizzas rule. I've also dealt with people who tried to come across like this, but were the absolute opposite - they'd grown a pretty large research group to get their chair, but had a reputation of over-promising and under delivering. They'd promise things without the technical knowledge to understand what they were saying they'd do, then causing morale problems among their team when people found out what had been promised. They absolutely didn't follow the two pizzas rule - you could barely find their whole group, let alone fit them in a room. This prof would try to give the impression they wanted others to grow and succeed, but ultimately it was all about them, and preserving their carefully crafted hierarchy. They didn't like to hear "no", and couldn't bear the thought that they were over stretched and not delivering, so everyone would tell them things were fine, as they under-delivered, exacerbating the situation...
- g_p 5y ago
  In theory this should be true, although the information asymmetries involved (especially for international students who go based on citations or notable papers or "reputation") mean that it can be hard to lose the flow of good students. Ultimately if they are a tenured prof and can keep winning grants, they can offer postdoc and postgrad contracts, and that is effectively the only internal currency that matters for a student that needs to find a postgrad position. With a limited number of chairs, it's hard for someone else to get a "rival" chair post and then compete internally, to give students the choice (which you'd get in a free market). If the institution has a good reputation, they'll likely have a flow of willing students regardless of how they act.
neutronicus 5y ago
On the other side of this equation, I think international students comprise a potent reservoir of strikebreakers.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  In fairness, these already seem to form the majority of PhD students at universities near me
- walkhour 5y ago
  There's a reason why Academia and Big Tech love immigration. And then there's the argument they use to justify why immigration is good, like diversity, inclusion, globalization, ... which may be valid or not. But isn't it just perfect when your objectives are so closely aligned with what is considered morally right. To regard these agents as moral actors instead of self-serving profit seekers is just lunacy.
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    Except in general people from other countries may be more amenable to union organizing and joining, since they often come from cultures where unions are viewed more positively than in the US, and where more of the workforce is unionized, and may possibly even have experience themselves with unions, or else have family members who do -- or if not with unions, with other kinds of collective political action of sorts that have become less common in the USA I think this has been shown to be true in grad student unionization drives in the US.
    - walkhour 5y ago
      > where more of the workforce is unionized Is this fact coming from the weighted average of how unionized is the workforce in the diferented countries from which workers comes to USA? Is this true for high and low paying jobs? Are the migrants from these countries representative of the workforce of their country? Could you provide proof? My first reaction is to be agnostic upon this claim.
canjobear 5y ago
> They win a grant, but the actual research work is then done by postdoctoral researchers and grad students. They do the actual work, write it up, and pretty much everything else. In this scenario, which does happen but is not the only way it works, the convention is that the student or postdoc is first author and the advisor is final author on the paper. That seems fair to me.
- g_p 5y ago
  Order of authorship is quite dependent on discipline - in comp sci and engineering the convention is as you say. In other fields they prefer alphabetical order or other orders, as I understand. Some journals have started requiring specific disclosures of activities that each individual carried out. Interestingly for some of the professors, some publications' ethics codes don't consider merely obtaining funding as meeting the requirements for authorship of a paper. Of course they'll claim other activities, but a quick review of the papers and input they claim to have made will likely give rise to probable doubt. There's a few papers looking at "prolific authorship" in different disciplines.
ModernMech 5y ago
> They do the actual work Used to think this as a grad student. Now as a professor I see how naïve this attitude is. There is so much work beyond what grad students are tasked with including getting research funded, staffed, and results out the door. Grad students are cogs in a research machine, cogs that need to constantly be readjusted and recalibrated because they are quite green (sorry, it's true) for a number of years. Most 22 year olds coming out of undergrad into a PhD program are not doing what you would consider publishable research for a number of years, and what work they do is usually heavily based on a foundation of research that was laid to get funding in the first place (usually by the professor), based on ideas that have been thought of and refined over a number of an entire research career (not by the grad student doing the "actual work"). Grad students may have great technical ability, but they have next to 0 research sense and ability. As I said, doing research is so much more than the technical aspects and writing the paper. Grad students love to feel like since they got a paper published, that they are 100% responsible for what happened in that paper, and I just have to ask: where were you 2 years ago when I was up at 4am finalizing the Nth draft of the grant application, based on research that I have been working on since 6 years before that? Oh, you were partying, drunk off your ass at a frat in undergrad, and when I started this research project you were learning your times tables. So tell me again how you're 100% responsible for the results here, and I'm just taking credit for all you have done on your own? Sorry if you haven't noticed this post has turned into a rant at someone I have in mind, not at you. But I just needed to say this.
- thylacine222 5y ago
  lol I hope for the sake of your graduate students that your institution has a union. Your personality sounds exactly like the countless professors I've seen abuse their workers.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    edit: sorry I'm just going to disengage from this, I feel trolled so that's that. If you want to interrogate my position, then maybe ask a question. No questions have been asked so an interrogation is not what's taking place here. Ranting about a third party not involved in the discussion here, who nobody knows, is completely different than writing a response to someone, attacking them directly, and calling into question their professional capabilities directly, then doubling down and tripling down on that even after they asked you to stop is just rude and unnecessarily antagonistic. I asked you to make a point a couple times now and you don't have a point to make except to attack me personally, so kindly find someone else to troll.
SantalBlush 5y ago
I just went through this with a small grant. My only colleague in our dept. quit just before COVID started, so I was doing both full-time jobs on the grant. The university froze hiring and raises in 2020. I wrote all reports, wrote the new grant, handled all of the budgeting and admin. In late 2021, our PI retired and we finally filled the vacant admin position, so I had to train the new hire and the new PI about how the grant worked. During that time, I received zero merit raises, and as a thanks from the university, they took more money from the grant so we could no longer afford a research assistant. My new colleague with zero years of experience was hired at the same rate as me; she almost immediately started venting to me how she doesn't get paid enough. She wants to earn a big promotion, so she is making her own changes to our reports that end up taking a lot more time. I put my notice in last week. I need to recharge for a month or two before I get back out there. Basically, most of the value I created went to the university and our PI, and I was expected to be thankful for the opportunity. In spite of that, I think I left the dept. in better shape than it was in when I arrived.
cycomanic 5y ago
You write like the professors are just sitting around raking in the glory, but not doing anything while they let everyone else does the work. The reality is that professors tend to work just as hard as their grad students. I completely agree that academia is very disfunctional, but it actually affects all levels. I am familiar with many academics that work >60h a week every week, in fact I believe the most outrageous examples of overworking grad students comes from academics who work crazy hours and expect everyone else to do the same. What many don't see is that the way academic financing works is that academics spend probably >30% of their time on writing grants and evaluating others grants and then they have to report on the grants as well. Then there is all sort of other buerocratic work that they have to do, and the view by most of the admin staff that surround them is that academic time is not counted, which means most reporting systems are made so it's easy for the administrators but not the academics.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  > You write like the professors are just sitting around raking in the glory, but not doing anything while they let everyone else does the work. I've worked at two major research universities in multiple labs. While this is not entirely true, it is more true than not. Professors work hard, but many are not working hard on the actual research work, especially once they have been tenured for a long time.
  - asdff 5y ago
    It depends on the lab. Just like in private industries, some superiors merely phone it in, while others are a lot more hands on with their subordinates.
aardvarks 5y ago
It's true that professors rely on grad students/postdocs to do work. And, at least in my experience, advisors are actually pretty good about giving students credit for their work -- having successful students reflects well on the advisor. But a student is even more dependent on their advisor than vice versa. It's not like undergrad where the main thing that matters to your future employment is to collect the diploma, because for most fields the main reason to get a PhD is to continue in academia, and academia right now is an extreme employer's market. The things you need to leave grad school with are 1) impressive recommendation letters, like "best student in N years, reminiscent of <mid-career hotshot> at that age", and 2) (lots of) refereed publications. If you manage that, the diploma should be automatic. Yes, you can push back against advisors who require 12 hrs a day in lab. But if that means you take longer to produce work, your letters might be just good instead of positively glowing, which might mean you fail to launch in academia. Several hundred other people will apply for each tenure track job you apply to; those with "just good" letters tend to get crowded out. The tenured advisor might have a bruised ego because their publication rate has slowed, or be more frazzled because they have to save money and write more proposals, but at least they still have a job. Also, PIs themselves generally work a lot as well (often the ones insisting on lots of hours from their students think, rightly or wrongly but based on their own experience, that that's the only way to succeed....). I agree academia is broken, but think it's at a deep structural level, and more complicated than schools exploiting students and hanging them out to dry.
- adminprof 5y ago
  I think your comment is pretty spot on. Just three things I'd add to, are that 1) the advisor is not intentionally downgrading your letter to "just good", but it's that they're obligated to write a better than "just good" letter for someone who has been more productive both in terms of research and in being a leader in the community (these two things go hand in hand). Writing the same letter for two students regardless of what they accomplish would be unfair. And 2) sometimes getting more funding is simply not possible, as in the advisor has basically reached the limit of what they can do. There's a limit to the number of proposals that one can submit and the number of calls that fit their research agenda. So what I think you're missing is that if an advisor has less funding, there's going to be more pressure to finish sooner and less freedom to explore ideas beyond what's written in a previous grant proposal. 3) I've never heard of a tenured professor that concerned about their publication rate. In fact, most of them don't even update their CVs or websites with the last few years of papers. It's always the student who is trying to get more papers.

by g_p 5y ago

amitport 5y ago

If a professor is only taking credit for underlings' work he / she will, at some point, stop getting good students...

neutronicus 5y ago
Yeah in my experience professors are pretty good about giving credit (the student is the first author on the paper, does the conference presentations, etc). The comment above is right about the general structure (professors pitch, students deliver), though. And perhaps right about claiming credit in some fields, although not mine.
- g_p 5y ago
  I'd agree it very much depends on the individuals. I have worked with people all across the spectrum. My advisor was absolutely in the "good" camp - we'd openly describe call academia the "world's biggest hidden pyramid scheme". He led a small, tightly knit group, and the group followed the two pizzas rule. I've also dealt with people who tried to come across like this, but were the absolute opposite - they'd grown a pretty large research group to get their chair, but had a reputation of over-promising and under delivering. They'd promise things without the technical knowledge to understand what they were saying they'd do, then causing morale problems among their team when people found out what had been promised. They absolutely didn't follow the two pizzas rule - you could barely find their whole group, let alone fit them in a room. This prof would try to give the impression they wanted others to grow and succeed, but ultimately it was all about them, and preserving their carefully crafted hierarchy. They didn't like to hear "no", and couldn't bear the thought that they were over stretched and not delivering, so everyone would tell them things were fine, as they under-delivered, exacerbating the situation...
g_p 5y ago
In theory this should be true, although the information asymmetries involved (especially for international students who go based on citations or notable papers or "reputation") mean that it can be hard to lose the flow of good students. Ultimately if they are a tenured prof and can keep winning grants, they can offer postdoc and postgrad contracts, and that is effectively the only internal currency that matters for a student that needs to find a postgrad position. With a limited number of chairs, it's hard for someone else to get a "rival" chair post and then compete internally, to give students the choice (which you'd get in a free market). If the institution has a good reputation, they'll likely have a flow of willing students regardless of how they act.

neutronicus 5y ago

On the other side of this equation, I think international students comprise a potent reservoir of strikebreakers.

the_only_law 5y ago
In fairness, these already seem to form the majority of PhD students at universities near me
walkhour 5y ago
There's a reason why Academia and Big Tech love immigration. And then there's the argument they use to justify why immigration is good, like diversity, inclusion, globalization, ... which may be valid or not. But isn't it just perfect when your objectives are so closely aligned with what is considered morally right. To regard these agents as moral actors instead of self-serving profit seekers is just lunacy.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  Except in general people from other countries may be more amenable to union organizing and joining, since they often come from cultures where unions are viewed more positively than in the US, and where more of the workforce is unionized, and may possibly even have experience themselves with unions, or else have family members who do -- or if not with unions, with other kinds of collective political action of sorts that have become less common in the USA I think this has been shown to be true in grad student unionization drives in the US.
  - walkhour 5y ago
    > where more of the workforce is unionized Is this fact coming from the weighted average of how unionized is the workforce in the diferented countries from which workers comes to USA? Is this true for high and low paying jobs? Are the migrants from these countries representative of the workforce of their country? Could you provide proof? My first reaction is to be agnostic upon this claim.

canjobear 5y ago

> They win a grant, but the actual research work is then done by postdoctoral researchers and grad students. They do the actual work, write it up, and pretty much everything else. In this scenario, which does happen but is not the only way it works, the convention is that the student or postdoc is first author and the advisor is final author on the paper. That seems fair to me.

g_p 5y ago
Order of authorship is quite dependent on discipline - in comp sci and engineering the convention is as you say. In other fields they prefer alphabetical order or other orders, as I understand. Some journals have started requiring specific disclosures of activities that each individual carried out. Interestingly for some of the professors, some publications' ethics codes don't consider merely obtaining funding as meeting the requirements for authorship of a paper. Of course they'll claim other activities, but a quick review of the papers and input they claim to have made will likely give rise to probable doubt. There's a few papers looking at "prolific authorship" in different disciplines.

ModernMech 5y ago

> They do the actual work Used to think this as a grad student. Now as a professor I see how naïve this attitude is. There is so much work beyond what grad students are tasked with including getting research funded, staffed, and results out the door. Grad students are cogs in a research machine, cogs that need to constantly be readjusted and recalibrated because they are quite green (sorry, it's true) for a number of years. Most 22 year olds coming out of undergrad into a PhD program are not doing what you would consider publishable research for a number of years, and what work they do is usually heavily based on a foundation of research that was laid to get funding in the first place (usually by the professor), based on ideas that have been thought of and refined over a number of an entire research career (not by the grad student doing the "actual work"). Grad students may have great technical ability, but they have next to 0 research sense and ability. As I said, doing research is so much more than the technical aspects and writing the paper. Grad students love to feel like since they got a paper published, that they are 100% responsible for what happened in that paper, and I just have to ask: where were you 2 years ago when I was up at 4am finalizing the Nth draft of the grant application, based on research that I have been working on since 6 years before that? Oh, you were partying, drunk off your ass at a frat in undergrad, and when I started this research project you were learning your times tables. So tell me again how you're 100% responsible for the results here, and I'm just taking credit for all you have done on your own? Sorry if you haven't noticed this post has turned into a rant at someone I have in mind, not at you. But I just needed to say this.

thylacine222 5y ago
lol I hope for the sake of your graduate students that your institution has a union. Your personality sounds exactly like the countless professors I've seen abuse their workers.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  edit: sorry I'm just going to disengage from this, I feel trolled so that's that. If you want to interrogate my position, then maybe ask a question. No questions have been asked so an interrogation is not what's taking place here. Ranting about a third party not involved in the discussion here, who nobody knows, is completely different than writing a response to someone, attacking them directly, and calling into question their professional capabilities directly, then doubling down and tripling down on that even after they asked you to stop is just rude and unnecessarily antagonistic. I asked you to make a point a couple times now and you don't have a point to make except to attack me personally, so kindly find someone else to troll.

SantalBlush 5y ago

I just went through this with a small grant. My only colleague in our dept. quit just before COVID started, so I was doing both full-time jobs on the grant. The university froze hiring and raises in 2020. I wrote all reports, wrote the new grant, handled all of the budgeting and admin. In late 2021, our PI retired and we finally filled the vacant admin position, so I had to train the new hire and the new PI about how the grant worked. During that time, I received zero merit raises, and as a thanks from the university, they took more money from the grant so we could no longer afford a research assistant. My new colleague with zero years of experience was hired at the same rate as me; she almost immediately started venting to me how she doesn't get paid enough. She wants to earn a big promotion, so she is making her own changes to our reports that end up taking a lot more time. I put my notice in last week. I need to recharge for a month or two before I get back out there. Basically, most of the value I created went to the university and our PI, and I was expected to be thankful for the opportunity. In spite of that, I think I left the dept. in better shape than it was in when I arrived.

cycomanic 5y ago

You write like the professors are just sitting around raking in the glory, but not doing anything while they let everyone else does the work. The reality is that professors tend to work just as hard as their grad students. I completely agree that academia is very disfunctional, but it actually affects all levels. I am familiar with many academics that work >60h a week every week, in fact I believe the most outrageous examples of overworking grad students comes from academics who work crazy hours and expect everyone else to do the same. What many don't see is that the way academic financing works is that academics spend probably >30% of their time on writing grants and evaluating others grants and then they have to report on the grants as well. Then there is all sort of other buerocratic work that they have to do, and the view by most of the admin staff that surround them is that academic time is not counted, which means most reporting systems are made so it's easy for the administrators but not the academics.

whimsicalism 5y ago
> You write like the professors are just sitting around raking in the glory, but not doing anything while they let everyone else does the work. I've worked at two major research universities in multiple labs. While this is not entirely true, it is more true than not. Professors work hard, but many are not working hard on the actual research work, especially once they have been tenured for a long time.
- asdff 5y ago
  It depends on the lab. Just like in private industries, some superiors merely phone it in, while others are a lot more hands on with their subordinates.

aardvarks 5y ago

It's true that professors rely on grad students/postdocs to do work. And, at least in my experience, advisors are actually pretty good about giving students credit for their work -- having successful students reflects well on the advisor. But a student is even more dependent on their advisor than vice versa. It's not like undergrad where the main thing that matters to your future employment is to collect the diploma, because for most fields the main reason to get a PhD is to continue in academia, and academia right now is an extreme employer's market. The things you need to leave grad school with are 1) impressive recommendation letters, like "best student in N years, reminiscent of <mid-career hotshot> at that age", and 2) (lots of) refereed publications. If you manage that, the diploma should be automatic. Yes, you can push back against advisors who require 12 hrs a day in lab. But if that means you take longer to produce work, your letters might be just good instead of positively glowing, which might mean you fail to launch in academia. Several hundred other people will apply for each tenure track job you apply to; those with "just good" letters tend to get crowded out. The tenured advisor might have a bruised ego because their publication rate has slowed, or be more frazzled because they have to save money and write more proposals, but at least they still have a job. Also, PIs themselves generally work a lot as well (often the ones insisting on lots of hours from their students think, rightly or wrongly but based on their own experience, that that's the only way to succeed....). I agree academia is broken, but think it's at a deep structural level, and more complicated than schools exploiting students and hanging them out to dry.

adminprof 5y ago
I think your comment is pretty spot on. Just three things I'd add to, are that 1) the advisor is not intentionally downgrading your letter to "just good", but it's that they're obligated to write a better than "just good" letter for someone who has been more productive both in terms of research and in being a leader in the community (these two things go hand in hand). Writing the same letter for two students regardless of what they accomplish would be unfair. And 2) sometimes getting more funding is simply not possible, as in the advisor has basically reached the limit of what they can do. There's a limit to the number of proposals that one can submit and the number of calls that fit their research agenda. So what I think you're missing is that if an advisor has less funding, there's going to be more pressure to finish sooner and less freedom to explore ideas beyond what's written in a previous grant proposal. 3) I've never heard of a tenured professor that concerned about their publication rate. In fact, most of them don't even update their CVs or websites with the last few years of papers. It's always the student who is trying to get more papers.