‘A toxic culture of overwork’: The graduate student mental health crisis • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 3:09 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #167

lewis500 wrote: post #120

I’m a professor. I have a few thoughts about this. First, the grad student/professor relationship is inherently asymmetrical, much more so than most employer/employee relationships. The degree has to last years or else you get nothing, and there are no hard and fast terms of the relationship like there is in many jobs. The professors recommendation might be the most important thing you get, and that is always running…

[deleted]

I’d also add to this that the quality standards in academia are generally piss poor, and my own type A perfectionism was a big reason why I did not follow in my advisor’s footsteps after finishing grad school: I saw that he rose to fame and rank by essentially creating low-quality demoware to be pleasing to the eye at conferences, and had zero ambition to work on results or problems important to the field.

Professors are not self-selected for any notion of quality at all. Some of them happen to focus on quality, some of them on politics, etc., just like anything else.

In many companies, being promoted to senior levels of engineering is a far more meaningful mark of quality effectiveness than post-graduate degrees or research publications.

Regardless of any of this, treating students with respect, working with them to define their work based on their career goals, and respecting a healthy standard work/life balance is a basic requirement of professionalism.

By this notion, a lot of professors are not professionals in their field, rather just compulsive amateurs.

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

#172

Post by imtringued » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 3:17 PM UTC

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #115

JanSt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like Berlin, which is totally different than pretty much every other place in Germany :-) FREE healthcare means that everyone is covered, even if unemployed or working for low wages. The more you earn, the more you pay (capped at ~400€). Your family is insured for no extra payment. You obviously don‘t fit the system because you believe you should pay less (single, young, healthy) but that‘s exactly not what it…

FREE healthcare means that everyone is covered... Sounds like universal healthcare, not free healthcare.

Yes it is universal healthcare but one of the biggest complaints merely attacks the word "free".

The complain is that how can something be "free" when someone else has to pay for it. The definition of free literally means that someone else has to pay for it (externalities and labor to extract resources from the land count as payment). Real "free" anything where nobody pays anything doesn't exist. It's a strawman.

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

#173

Post by screye » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 3:22 PM UTC

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…

> And remember that academics are always required to do something genuinely new, not just "Uber for ice cream, but with AI".

This hasn't been my experience. A lot of papers coming out today are quite iterative.

They sound exactly like:"what if system X had feature Y". Just with more scientific jargon.

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

#174

Post by cwbrandsma » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 3:32 PM UTC

lewis500 wrote: post #120

I’m a professor. I have a few thoughts about this. First, the grad student/professor relationship is inherently asymmetrical, much more so than most employer/employee relationships. The degree has to last years or else you get nothing, and there are no hard and fast terms of the relationship like there is in many jobs. The professors recommendation might be the most important thing you get, and that is always running…

So few places I’ve worked did an engineer actually get promoted to manager. Mostly product managers with little technical expertise...they used to be in sales. I’ve had a few engineers as managers, they were mostly really good. Just not many.

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

#175

Post by digitalixus » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 3:32 PM UTC

expertentipp wrote: post #89

JanSt wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, maybe in Berlin. There are a few reasons for people living in the streets. Drugs is a big one, especially in Berlin. You won‘t find that in most of Germany. Fact is, most people who are legally in Germany for >3 months are legible for Hartz 4: a free apartment, free heating and a few hundred Euro. And free healthcare.

> Fact is, most people who are legally in Germany for >3 months are legible for Hartz 4: a free apartment, free heating and a few hundred Euro. And free healthcare. Free apartment for a foreigner living in the country only over 3 months?! Dude, people on employment contract with over average income, staying in the country for years are having difficulties to find anything for rent in any major city, buying is out of…

That is the exact kind of post I refer to - post any negative thing about Germany and the PR team is out in full force to perform damage control.

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

#176

Post by BeetleB » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 3:35 PM UTC

lewis500 wrote: post #141

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…

I don’t think they’re excuses. They’re explanations of how things happen. The asymmetrical relationship especially explains how professors can get away with treating students badly, but it isn’t a justification. If you read Bad blood, for instance, E Holmes and sunny treat everyone horribly, but ultimately lots of people quit because they have other options. The pressure on the professor and the selection for obsessi…

Let me explain why it can sound like excuses.

Collectively, professors are the ones who set almost every aspect of the culture in academia. They are the ones who populate committees that set all the rules, and decide when a professor is being abusive and when he/she isn't. Professors decide how much is "enough" for a PhD. Even the pressure on professors comes mostly from other professors. A lot of people in the funding agency's committees are professors or former professors. If any change is to occur, it has to come from professors. No external or internal group really has any say in the matter.

So as a professor, the burden of change is pretty much on you. It's probably risky for you to do anything about it[1], but no one else can. When an outsider looks at the situation, all they see are professors pointing fingers at other professors as the cause. It is your profession to fix. And you have less to fear than most workers in most industries: Once you have tenure, attempting to fix the problem will not cost you your job. It will cost other things, but that's the point where it becomes clear what a professor's values are.

And you kind of skirt around it, but a big aspect of it these days is essentially the "rite of passage". As an example, I had a group mate who continually cursed his advisor because he wasn't letting him graduate and was being given work unrelated to his thesis just so that the professor could squeeze as much out of him as possible. Yet when he graduated, he said "Of course I'll treat my students the same. If I had to go through all this, then so should they!"

That's not an uncommon sentiment amongst professors.

Let's all keep in mind: This is mostly a US problem.[2] I don't normally hear these complaints in Europe, and most students there get their PhD in 3 years after their MS.

[1] Not really - there are lots of small things an established professor can do that help.

[2] Well, OK. Maybe also a Korean problem.

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

#177

Post by mattkrause » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 3:35 PM UTC

dd36 wrote: post #137

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Arguably, it’s even less competitive than the real world.

This might be true at an "organizational" level but I have a hard time believing it's true for individuals.

There are a few people in academia who have incredibly lavish funding (HHMI investigators, people with rich 'patrons'). A few tenured professors can opt out of competition, though this either dramatically limits their impact (no money for students/equipment --> much less research).

Everyone else is constantly scrapping for money and attention and the results are mostly assessed individually, or at best across a small group (PI + 2-4 trainees). In industry, this is at least averaged over the whole company or division.

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

#178

Post by ambicapter » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 3:36 PM UTC

lewis500 wrote: post #151

king_magic wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s fair, and I think my wording might have been too harsh in the context of your post. But outside of this context, these same explanations are exactly the excuses that professors and administrators will ultimately make. Don’t get me wrong, industry isn’t perfect either. But I know which one I’d rather pick, and it sure as hell isnt academia.

I agree I would recommend industry to almost everyone. In fact, engineers ask me about grad school several times per year and I almost always discourage them. Too many people think of grad school as sort of a vague "next step" that will "open doors" or else a way of "leveling up" as though life is an RPG and a grad degree is a special badge or skin you can get. I encourage them rather to think concretely about what a…

> Too many people think of grad school as sort of a vague "next step" that will "open doors" or else a way of "leveling up" as though life is an RPG and a grad degree is a special badge or skin you can get.

I have a Masters, and all the interesting jobs I want to do are held by PhDs (sometimes with a couple years of postdocs). And everyone who's on that team has a PhD and they're definitely not going to let anyone lesser than that onto their team.

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

#179

Post by mattkrause » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 3:43 PM UTC

goalieca wrote: post #168

lewis500 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree I would recommend industry to almost everyone. In fact, engineers ask me about grad school several times per year and I almost always discourage them. Too many people think of grad school as sort of a vague "next step" that will "open doors" or else a way of "leveling up" as though life is an RPG and a grad degree is a special badge or skin you can get. I encourage them rather to think concretely about what a…

I really love research but here I am stuck in a coding job. I tried my shake at academia but I got depressed at the lack of stability. I wanted to start having a life but there was just no stability in any of it. It's hard to plan long term when you're always 6-12 months away from having your income dry up. Moral of the story: there's always someone willing to sacrifice more than you whether its their health, money,…

Along with the personal cost, this instability can't be great for producing good science either. My lab has learned and lost some techniques over and over again, as people churn through.

If it were up to me, I'd convert some MS/PhD slots into staff scientist roles with longer contracts. I think you could probably do this in a way that increases productivity, and makes more people more happy to boot.

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

#180

Post by spenrose » Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 3:47 PM UTC

Excerpt: "In 2015, Sophie — a recent graduate of the School of Earth’s Ph.D. program who wished to remain anonymous in order to preserve her relationship with her advisor — and five others in her Ph.D. cohort took a prospective Ph.D. candidate out to dinner.

Sitting at a restaurant on University Avenue, the prospective candidate mentioned that she was in therapy. One by one, the current students at the table said that they were, too, but none of them had ever discussed it with each other.

“Unless it’s your really good friends, you don’t talk about it,” Sophie said. “It’s still stigmatized, and it’s still seen as a sign of weakness. It took someone to be honest … [and then] everyone else opened up.”

According to statistics provided by CAPS director Bina Patel, CAPS counselors saw 22 percent of the graduate student community over the 2017-2018 academic year, for an average of 4.5 visits per student. Graduate students make up 59 percent of the students CAPS serves, which Patel said is consistent with peer institutions. "