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My wife’s very recent PhD experience at Oxford was a little crunch time around conferences, a nice 20/25 hour week, and enough spare time to row with the Oxford
by exdsq 5y ago
My wife’s very recent PhD experience at Oxford was a little crunch time around conferences, a nice 20/25 hour week, and enough spare time to row with the Oxford Uni boat team. She stayed a year as a postdoc and it was much the same. She’s now a postdoc at Stanford and she’s working 16 hour days, weekends, and very stressed for it. Academic output is the same - it’s just different work culture. I know this is about PhD students but I imagine it’s no easier for them than early career postdocs, so this seems to make a lot of sense.
- sheikheddy 5y agoStanford is notorious for "duck syndrome". People are calm on the surface but are always paddling below the water. I would say the CS papers out of Stanford tend to be nicer than the ones out of Oxford though, at least for Systems research. (This is a huge generalization: I don't read every paper and there's enough variation between authors that it doesn't really make sense to do a cross-institution comparison, but this is only my half-formed intuition).
- exdsq 5y agoI think it's going to be very lab specific there, but you could be right for systems research (I've not read any myself)!. FWIW, she's in medical engineering. Edit: All it takes is one tenured professor who strongly filters submissions for good papers to keep standards high for a department to look much better, but then you'd be stopping your lab from playing the citations/publications game which is necessary for future postdocs. I may be cynical.