21–30 of 118 posts
In fact, I have heard that minimally there's kind of a toxic labs blacklist maintained in some Chinese message boards. At least that's what a fellow postdoc told me when I mused why we suddenly stopped getting applicants from China to our lab!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reviews seem like the biggest need. “The culture in the X department is terrible, everyone works 80 hours a week and is miserable” “Night life is great at least, the grad students usually go out for student nights at blah blah after seminar” “Underrated X program because at university Y, don’t be fooled we literally have 4 of the 5 top researchers in field Z” Etc.
But it is so hard for people to give reviews. People seem to give good review when are they are very pissed off or very happy. Later seems to be a very rare case.
Any product or service will have occasional customers who are either unreasonable or have bad luck. If you have a lot of bad reviews, then as a prospective customer you want to see if all of them fall under the two categories or whether there is a pattern that is relevant to you.
It seems to me that a review database works fine even when all the reviews are bad, and the only regulation it really needs is an effort to prevent one single individual with a vendetta from overwhelming it.
No. We don't need a consumer review website, because PhD students (I am one) are not the consumers of doctoral programs. We're the workers. We need a union. If we're in a good program, we're receiving valuable training both in our coursework (or before PhD in an MS/MA if your country does it that way) and in our research work. Ideally, we're building up a network of collaborations and acquaintances in the scientific…
I wish I had the reference, but I remember reading about a study which showed (unsurprisingly) that the high research productivity per dollar in the US is primarily due to the below-market salaries of graduate research assistants and postdocs.
Not so much capitalism - more like a guild system with a lengthy (and perhaps semi-permanent for many postdocs and adjuncts) period of apprenticeship and indenture.
Good luck getting honest reviews. Graduates and recent post-docs are dependent upon good letters of recommendation from their advisors for perhaps a decade after leaving their research groups. The truly disillusioned won't mind complaining, but those with even constructive criticism will feel constrained in their ability to speak out and be specific. The graduate-student experience is deeply advisor-specific. Profess…
Good luck getting honest reviews. Graduates and recent post-docs are dependent upon good letters of recommendation from their advisors for perhaps a decade after leaving their research groups. The truly disillusioned won't mind complaining, but those with even constructive criticism will feel constrained in their ability to speak out and be specific. The graduate-student experience is deeply advisor-specific. Profess…
We dont need a Yelp for doctoral programs, we need a Yelp for research labs! It's more about the lab you join than the program itself that makes or breaks your life. In fact, I have heard that minimally there's kind of a toxic labs blacklist maintained in some Chinese message boards. At least that's what a fellow postdoc told me when I mused why we suddenly stopped getting applicants from China to our lab!