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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

#161

Post by devilmoon »

Something I have noticed throughout my studies is that some countries seem better equipped to let university students shine and not suffer from high stress, or at least help them decompress.

This might be anecdotal experience, and I am not currently in a PhD programme so I am not sure it would aplly there as well, however this is what I have noticed:

In my country universities are usually an environment quite similar to High School wrt how students usually fit into the greater social circle of the institution, meaning that you usually go in for your lectures and leave as soon as you're done, have only a few ties with other students and there are almost no extra curricular activites to partake in through which you could bond with other people. During my undergraduate studies I spent a year in a university in the UK and this experience opened my eyes to how detrimental this environment is to students' performance; The university I attended explicitely encouraged students to set up "Student Associations" centered around whatever topic the person setting up particularly cared about, and in my experience I attendend events from many different ones, ranging from my department's one to anime/manga, to gaming, to my native country's culture. This has helped me so much in connecting with other people I would've otherwise never met who shared some of my interests, and in turn I was always able to have someone to speak to about common problems that students face, or to attend social events in order to decompress from a particularly hard day; at the end of the year I gave some of the best exams of my career, I made friends I am still in contact with years after, I was able to land an internship through one of these societies' events, and generally enjoyed life and university MUCH more than I ever did in my country. After coming back home and moving on with my life I am currently pursuing a Masters in my own country, and after a bit more than a semester I already feel the same feeling of dread I felt during my undergrad experience kick in since there are no avenues or ways to actually enjoy life as a university student.

I firmly believe that if more countries / universities adopted the same stance I experience in that UK university students would generally be way better off, both with respect to their mental health and their track record.

Unfortunately I have never met someone who has shared the same experience as me and hence has the same outlook on the problem, and even when speaking up about these issues with my department or colleagues many seem to not particularly care or understand what that particular system would entail for everyone involved. It is really a shame.

I am wondering if there are any scientific studies that have been done on this particular issue that I could bring up to shift perception around this?

Anyway, just my two cents.

tl;dr: make students more involved in their university's community and provide the means to self-organise around common interests so as to create comraderie and avenues to decompress, everyone will benefit from it.

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

#162

Post by badpun »

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…

What’s on opinion on prevalence of scientific dishonesty and fraud? Given how the incentives work, and that the publications are not checked thoroughly (peer revievers don’t redo the experiments to see if the results were not made up), it just seems to me that modern academia heavily incentivises people to produce fake science.

From what I’ve heard, industries which should heavily depend on academic publications (such as ours, or pharma) are exteremely vary of them because, in their experience, the „findings” and ideas presented usually don’t replicate, or that the papers are just intellectually dishonest in various ways to present the author’s method as better that state of the art (salesmanship instead of science).

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

#163

Post by [deleted] »

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]

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

#164

Post by crankylinuxuser »

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 been offered a teaching position. When English is obviously a 2nd or 3rd language, and you're teaching a complicated topic, and we can't understand you - you shouldn't be teaching it. I'm not making insults on intelligence, because they were intelligent... But when every student struggles to understand every word (example word: theta , pronounced:fee-ter ) they shouldn't be teaching.

I've also had "professors" who taught light and sound physics, discussing electricity, who didn't know what a capacitor was. And it was in the middle of the partial differential plate field equations for... capacitors. He was also known at putting questions on the test that did not pertain to the class proper. He would also create his own (wrong) answer key, and then refuse to accept corrections. Good scores for the class were around 18-22 out of 100.

I have no clue how one would accomplish this, but the university ALSO needs to be accountable to the students who throw it money.

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

#165

Post by grigjd3 »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #149
currymj wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Machine learning actually- in particular, Inductive Logic Programming. But, yes, it's basically CS. I appreciate that there's a difference between different fields. I'm also aware that the article above is about research students in the US- I'm in a UK university.

So the natural sciences aren't universally bad. My PhD advisor in relativity was a terrific guy to work with and I saw him as a friend and mentor. The problem is that the supply of people seeking PhDs, post-docs, and tenure track jobs in the natural sciences so far outstrips the available jobs (often a hundred to one) that there is little natural pressure to suppress bad behavior. In fact, the assholes tend to thrive because it turns out that taking advantage of others can get you ahead.

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

#166

Post by mattkrause »

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…

> by delivering strong results

The thing is...you shouldn't be able to guarantee that, and the idea that you can is the root of a lot of academia's problems.

The results of your experiment should be determined by the nature of whatever you're studying, nothing more. Sometimes, they'll be very clean with obvious, high-impact applications. Sometimes they'll be muddled with unforeseeable complications. Obviously, skill can help you turn the latter into the former, but there's a huge amount of luck involved there too.

It would be far, far better if people were judged on their ability to find and rigorously test interesting questions, rather than whatever crapshoot nature spits out.

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

#167

Post by [deleted] »

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]

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

#168

Post by goalieca »

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…

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, life, ethics, whatever.

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

#169

Post by walshemj »

digitalixus wrote: post #41
luckydata wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a single thing about China is attractive to me. Not how you work, not your politics, not your view of what's important in life. We have nothing to learn from you and I hope we don't become more similar than we are now.

If there's one thing living and working in Europe (Germany) has taught me is that all countries are more or less the same. It's just how well the culture manages to mask the "unattractive" traits we love to criticize in places like China (or America, as of late), and the PR/propaganda campaign they run to convince everyone they're the best place on the planet. China is a prime example of subpar image/PR management. T…

Tax evasion is a bit of a national sport.

And paying into a national health system might not be free its a lot cheaper than the USA's model.

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

#170

Post by Mirioron »

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.

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.
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