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‘A toxic culture of overwork’: The graduate student mental health crisis

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Re: ‘A toxic culture of overwork’: The graduate student mental health crisis

#131

Post by mathattack »

omk wrote: post #39
skrebbel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My I ask what you studied and where? I'm curious because I did a Master's (CS) at a Dutch university (Eindhoven) and my experience was the total opposite. Lots of students were involved in extracurricular activities, there was time for study and time for fun, people generally seemed mostly relaxed. I'll concur that the program was a bit of an industry mismatch in that they don't teach software engineering but academi…

This was a Data Science program by TU/e and Tilburg hosted in Den Bosch. To be very honest I saw friends at TU/e relating well with their program and even manging trips to Spain while the folks in my program very occupied with mostly procedural assignments and struggled to find time to go out for drinks. This could very well be a one off thing because my program had a huge number of drop-outs through the first and se…

Cross functional programs are frequently suffer because they’re treated as cash cows by the university, but no home department owns giving them enough attention. A wise friend once advised “beware interesting grad programs.” (Example: MIT has world class engineering, and a Top 10 business school. The anecdotal reviews I’ve heard from graduates of both are higher than joint engineering-business programs, even if the latter look better on paper)

Re: ‘A toxic culture of overwork’: The graduate student mental health crisis

#133

Post by currymj »

edhu2017 wrote: post #13

Disclaimer: Our field is extremely competitive (deep learning) and other labs may have better working styles depending on their lab size and member composition. My lab's workload on average is 8 - 12 hours a day for 6-7 days a week, ramping up even more closer to deadlines. That being said, a lot of this time (50% or more) is for thinking and discussing. This schedule, while hard, seems to be effective for publishing…

This seems pretty excessive even for one of the very competitive benchmark focused areas in deep learning. It is not necessary and probably harmful, and lots of very good groups don’t do this kind of thing.

Re: ‘A toxic culture of overwork’: The graduate student mental health crisis

#134

Post by king_magic »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #130
king_magic wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but candidly, this just reads as a bunch of lame excuses to continue a blatant cycle of abuse. Nothing in my professional 15 year career has come anywhere remotely close to the brutal, absurd reality of what I’ve seen graduate/PhD students go through. I think academia is nearing a kind of crisis akin to what the the Catholic Church is going through with rampant sex abuse. Diminishing, unimpressive returns in o…

Well, my experience in the industry was that I changed five jobs in six years because in order for my work to be valued as highly as it was really worth, I had to sell it to someone new every year. What is really brutal in academia is the competition to get your research published and appreciated (by being cited and reused by others). This doesn't happen automatically. The pressure to find something useful to contrib…

This still sounds like a bunch of excuses to continue abusing people. Intense pressure exists everywhere: don't put academic work on a magical pedestal, there's a lot more to working in the industry than just keeping your boss happy (and uh, a lot more happens in the industry than just building the next Uber for X).

Still no excuse to overwork people to near death (yes, there are extreme outliers like Goldman Sachs & whatnot, but this kind of overwork is a pandemic in academia).

Re: ‘A toxic culture of overwork’: The graduate student mental health crisis

#135

Post by hjk05 »

Something often overlooked because it doesn’t fit the “evil professor overworks students” narrative, is that students themselves elect to put in more hours because they feel reaposible for their projects. During my graduate studies I worked under a professor who literally banned lab access to prevent people from working weekends. I hated that rule, but obeyed it, though I know some others snuck in anyways.

Re: ‘A toxic culture of overwork’: The graduate student mental health crisis

#136

Post by solotronics »

This is probably a stupid question but with the internet as a distribution method is there anything stopping someone from doing their research independently and publishing on their own? I am sure if you are doing quality work you would still be able to get a hold of a professor somewhere who would be interested in working with you. Of course this would not apply to situations where there is lab equipment involved but I am thinking of the perspective of math, computer science, etc. where the work can be done on any commodity computer.

Re: ‘A toxic culture of overwork’: The graduate student mental health crisis

#137

Post by dd36 »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #130
king_magic wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but candidly, this just reads as a bunch of lame excuses to continue a blatant cycle of abuse. Nothing in my professional 15 year career has come anywhere remotely close to the brutal, absurd reality of what I’ve seen graduate/PhD students go through. I think academia is nearing a kind of crisis akin to what the the Catholic Church is going through with rampant sex abuse. Diminishing, unimpressive returns in o…

Well, my experience in the industry was that I changed five jobs in six years because in order for my work to be valued as highly as it was really worth, I had to sell it to someone new every year. What is really brutal in academia is the competition to get your research published and appreciated (by being cited and reused by others). This doesn't happen automatically. The pressure to find something useful to contrib…

Lots of academics do “Uber for ice cream but with AI.” Academia is iterative.

Arguably, it’s even less competitive than the real world. It’s theory vs. practice. Guess what’s hard? Getting enough paying customers to be sustainable.

Re: ‘A toxic culture of overwork’: The graduate student mental health crisis

#138

Post by chrisseaton »

zwaps wrote: post #123
roel_v wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Europe, a Masters is not 'graduate' level. A masters (in Europe) is just a continuation of a bachelors, and someone graduating with just a bachelors is basically someone who's only half finished their education. Consequently, the work load is nowhere near as bad as it is at the PhD level (although even there, it's not that bad either). Of course this very closely aligns the bachelors and masters level courses, mea…

There is in fact two things here. Most continental EU countries used to have a different system before the Bologna Bachelor/Master system. In the prior case, many countries simply did not have a Bachelor equivalent. In France, Spain, Netherlands and Germany, you'd by default do a Masters-level degree. As such, a Masters is more continued education - it does not imply a big cut from a "practical degree" toward researc…

> It is still the case that many jobs (like nursing) are not taught at a university, simply because there is no path to academic research.

You can do research as a nurse. There are nurses with PhDs even.

Re: ‘A toxic culture of overwork’: The graduate student mental health crisis

#139

Post by _uhtu »

solotronics wrote: post #136

This is probably a stupid question but with the internet as a distribution method is there anything stopping someone from doing their research independently and publishing on their own? I am sure if you are doing quality work you would still be able to get a hold of a professor somewhere who would be interested in working with you. Of course this would not apply to situations where there is lab equipment involved but…

A friend of mine just told me she's going back to school for a doctorate despite being a successful researcher at an Ivy league school. Basically if she wants to run a lab or lead projects with good funding, she needs the title, even if she doesn't learn much along the way.

Re: ‘A toxic culture of overwork’: The graduate student mental health crisis

#140

Post by currymj »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #117

>> “It felt as if I was telling him he didn’t respect me, and he essentially said, you’re right,” he recalled. I'm a PhD research student on my second year. It's unfortunate to frame this in terms of respect for the student's person, rather than his work, which is most likely what has lost the advisor's respect. I've come to my PhD after six years in the industry. Because of this I see my research as a work assignmen…

I’ve seen your posts before so I am pretty sure you’re a CS PhD student. It is important to remember that getting a PhD in CS is unusually good. There’s a lot of money, limited need for expensive equipment, good job prospects in academia, and little stigma about going into industry.

Also, it seems to me that a culture of abusive behavior and hazing has not yet set in.

None of this is true in the natural sciences, and advisors often do not treat students with even the basic dignity due to any human. This kind of thing is rare in computer science.

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