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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

#181

Post by [deleted] »

jdietrich wrote: post #150
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…

There is an absurd oversupply of graduate students. Where there is an oversupply of labour, there are always abusive conditions. Academia can do all the soul-searching it wants, but the only meaningful solution is to rebalance supply and demand in academia; a very useful first step would be the provision of impartial and informed careers advice to high school and college graduates.

[deleted]

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

#182

Post by wool_gather »

Mirioron wrote: post #170
jdietrich wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an absurd oversupply of graduate students. Where there is an oversupply of labour, there are always abusive conditions. Academia can do all the soul-searching it wants, but the only meaningful solution is to rebalance supply and demand in academia; a very useful first step would be the provision of impartial and informed careers advice to high school and college graduates.

I think this is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle. Graduate students are so common they they can't differentiate themselves from the rest by simply being graduate students. They need to do more to be above the rest and this leads to the bad circumstances.

Why do they need to "differentiate" or "be above the rest"? (Honest question, not rhetorical: I don't understand your point.)

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

#183

Post by cortesoft »

ambicapter wrote: post #178
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…

> 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 le…

Can I ask what field you are in? I work in software, and many of my colleagues have PhDs... and many of my colleagues never went to college.

They all seem to get along fine, and the ones who have PhDs are usually playing down their credentials.

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

#184

Post by james-mcelwain »

mattkrause wrote: post #179
goalieca wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of my friends who is a graduate student complains about the difficulty of collaborating with other scientists who lack strong coding skills. They are so focused on the science that there's no time to learn or practice good code hygiene.

If often wondered why labs don't hire regular developers to increase research veliocity. I have no interest in research, but would happily work in the context of academia doing thing like handling merges, ensuring code modularity, maintaining infrastructure, writing unit tests, etc.

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

#185

Post by Nydhal »

mathgenius wrote: post #159
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the privilege to do what they really want to do, i.e. study something they are really interested in. For myself, I am interested in logic programming and machine learning. I started a PhD in Inductive Logic Programming, which is machine learning of logic programs from examples. There's no way I could follow this interest in any other structure but a PhD on ILP. In the industry? I can forget right about it. Even o…

> machine learning of logic programs from examples. This sounds like it would have use in industry. You are really saying that it does not?

It's out of fashion, so there's not much investment in it.

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

#186

Post by anon946 »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #164
BearsAreCool wrote: post #153

I'm working on a masters degree at the moment for context. The fact that a professor has the ability to deny me the piece of paper I've been told all my life is my ticket to a better life based on arbitrary grading rules is horrifying. In my program there is a different professor for every class and how they grade and what they want has always been different, some demand title pages for every paper, some demand some…

Exactly. Professors have no, I repeat, NO accountability. Inside their classroom, they are the petty dictators they are empowered by the university to be. Some do a good and just job at education... But that's not their real goal. Their goal is to get the university more money and more students - teaching is the secondary objective. If it happens, it's good. I've seen a large handful of people whom should have never…

I assume that you are mainly discussing undergrad education. In that case, the way to pressure universities to be accountable is by not going to such universities, as you imply in your first paragraph: "Their goal is to get the university more money and more students". So don't go to such universities. They will lose students. Losing undergrad students won't directly impact research funding, but it will have an impact at any public university.

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

#188

Post by dominotw »

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…

> but having a professor as a boss is like if a famous open source developer was your boss.

This would be a dream for me :D. Instead we get 'jira assigners' as managers in tech.

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

#189

Post by jdietrich »

wool_gather wrote: post #182
Mirioron wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle. Graduate students are so common they they can't differentiate themselves from the rest by simply being graduate students. They need to do more to be above the rest and this leads to the bad circumstances.

Why do they need to "differentiate" or "be above the rest"? (Honest question, not rhetorical: I don't understand your point.)

Commodification. The easier you are to replace, the lower your market value and the weaker your negotiating position. Software developers can earn six-figure salaries and work in offices that look like holiday resorts because demand for their skills massively outweighs supply. Grad students get treated like dirt because the supply of grad students vastly exceeds demand.

Most people who choose to be grad students have better options, which we should encourage them to take.

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

#190

Post by zwaps »

woah wrote: post #148
zwaps wrote: post #127

Another point that contributes to academia as "perfect storm", in addition to the points mentioned before, is that in many countries the chances of having a career are slim for the median student. Not everyone can gain a top position in any field. But in most industries, there are plenty of positions where you can make meaningful contributions. We know that most humans need to feel useful for mental health. In academ…

This seems strange. In industry, it seems that great cachet is attached to academic experience. In AI, there are a lot of positions paying a half million per year and up that are only available to PHD's. In blockchain, there have been many projects that have had little to show besides a powerpoint and the letters after the founder's name but still raised tens of millions of dollars in funding from big name VCs. For a…

No, in fact I would classify AI as a special case, because there is a high premium on experience, and even more on theoretical knowledge - rare as it is. It is a new field.

In many other fields, PhDs are too expensive and specialized relative to other candidates.

This is also relatively speaking. PhDs will certainly find some sort of job, but given how much income they forgo during their studies, the starting position is often relatively underpaid.

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