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We Need a Yelp for Doctoral Programs

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Re: We Need a Yelp for Doctoral Programs

#51

Post by fastball »

abakker wrote: post #29

We barely need a Yelp for restaurants. I think it is time for the internet to acknowledge that the pointless drivel in star rating systems is just not helping anyone. If you’re going to start a system for rating things, give it more nuance and value.

I actually have a plan for this!

I want to build a ratings website where you rate things in the same way they generally structure psychological tests, by responding to affirmative statements with something between "strongly agree" and "strongly disagree".

As an example, if you were rating films, questions could be:

"This film was enjoyable."

"This film had an engaging plot."

"The acting was believable / appropriate for the film."

etc. Ideally you'd have about 5 standard statements that you respond to for a particular thing you want to rate (whether its films, books, food, or a university course).

Better than a star rating system, because the problem with stars is that you end up with scores that always hover from 5-8 (if out of 10) in a very not useful way (see IMDB).

It's also better than what RT / Netflix / many others have moved to (just voting with up/down) as those require a lot of data in order to really give interesting results, where as with this system you can start to find interesting insights almost immediately, or within a single person's own collection.

Re: We Need a Yelp for Doctoral Programs

#52

Post by kayaeb »

aspaceman wrote: post #9

This article really rubs me the wrong way. I don't think I would find a Yelp very valuable, and the most important metric for a PhD program isn't job placement numbers. The idea that job placement correlates to PhD quality is just plain wrong. Incredibly intelligent students leave PhD programs through no fault of their own, and people who get nothing out of a PhD program can get a cushy job easily. It's a horrible me…

I disagree a bit about freedom and flexibility in switching faculty, and I disagree strongly about the phrasing of "willing" to work with x faculty on y problem.

I don't care how smart a student is, they are in no way prepared to select a project that will lead to interesting findings, which is a must if you plan to continue in any capacity. A good mentor will have a project with proprietary data that has a 95% chance of successful publication. In this way the student won't get scooped (not through any fault of their own, it's just that a PhD student, even a good one, just can't compete speedwise with someone like me who already has a code library built up to do complex analyses, this is why proprietary data is essential, or an extremely good prof who has an idea that they are confident no one else is on). My projects were a mix, I had one with proprietary data, and one which was a legit eureka finding. But as you say, most profs just aren't good enough to do these Eurekas (not an insult, 90% of science is gruntwork), so they need the cloistered data playground that the child student can crash around in until they manage to build their horrible little sandcastle. That data depends on funding, which depends on a proposal, which depends on a promise to do project X on data Y, and the prof is going to get reamed next time they apply for funding if student Z decided it wasn't "fun" and went to some other prof.

Caveat: We had one turkish guy who was straight up getting academically abused by his advisor (like literally timing his lunch breaks, sending spies to make sure he attended class, super weird shit), and thank the heavens there was a judicial oversight in place for him to get a new placement.

Caveat the second: I thrive in a low-input environment, so my prof just put me in the sandbox and I built the most magnificent and beautiful sandcastle the world has ever seen and roared my way to a whopping like seven citations (lol). My prof was also the director though and the low-input environment wasn't like optional, and not everyone did well in this low-input environment.

Re: We Need a Yelp for Doctoral Programs

#53

Post by AndyMcConachie »

jseliger wrote: post #40
ISL wrote: post #19

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…

In many disciplines, too, the answer is "don't go to any program." Most humanities fields, for example, have numerous essays written about why doing grad school in them is a poor life choice, like my contribution: https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befo... . One could say the same of most social sciences.

It's not really any better outside of the humanities. Maybe the prospects are slightly better, but grad school is still a crappy choice.

I got a bachelors in Computer Science and then worked for 15 years before going back and getting a masters. While there I was asked to work for free on numerous occasions, we can call if different things, but that's how I saw it. Already knowing the value of my labour I finished my masters and then left. I definitely had the option to continue with a PhD, and I'm almost certain that had I applied I would have been accepted. But I just wasn't interested in being exploited.

I remember one class which I dropped in which the entire class was project based, and we were to work on projects that aligned with the research of the professor. On the first day there was no syllabus given, so I asked what the readings were and received a grumpy response basically saying, "Readings, yeah there will be some readings." Or something similar. It was incredibly clear the instructor just wanted grad slaves to advance their stuff. I dropped that class, but I could cite numerous other examples.

I paid for the privilege of working for free and learned some stuff along the way. Maybe I should have spent the two years and money on travelling and seeing the world instead. I likely would have learned more, but I wouldn't have this fancy grad degree.

Re: We Need a Yelp for Doctoral Programs

#54

Post by catsarebetter »

Doctoral programs are at least 4-5 years long and crazy emotionally challenging as well as a pretty surprising drop out rate, if someone doesn't take time to research them deeply before they commit to something like that then I think that person needs to learn the lesson that that will teach them. Yelp is the surface level easy way. Networking and cold-calling tons of current phd and master's students over the course of undergrad and during internships is how everyone does it.

Re: We Need a Yelp for Doctoral Programs

#55

Post by kayaeb »

chrisseaton wrote: post #50
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #7

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…

On a PhD you work for yourself - you shouldn’t need a union against yourself!

Really depends on your mentor. I've seen some gross abuses where the union was absolutely essential.

Also the union hooked up like BBQs and whatever so like, that's nice.

Re: We Need a Yelp for Doctoral Programs

#56

Post by kayaeb »

vnorilo wrote: post #41

I am not sure a Yelp-like system would work for the reasons others have mentioned. I would suggest these metrics to help you evaluate a doc program from the outside: Do early-stage grad students get (any) authorship credits together with professors or post docs? (Getting started) Do they eventually get first author status? (Independence) Do students go to conferences and read papers? Or does a prof just go and read a…

protip: if your prof is tenured and still first author on more than 2 papers a year, they're siphoning their student's work, or they're setting you up for pipelining positions (which are not horrible, but, be aware that's what's up).

I've never had a prof insert my work into their own papers, they've hooked me up to contribute to other teams, but with us it was always "my" project.

If you get a chance to see them present at a conference (lots of these are on video online nowadays), check if they specifically mention their students in the presentation, that's a green flag.

Re: We Need a Yelp for Doctoral Programs

#59

Post by noelwelsh »

Any time education is discussed on HN it should come with a mandatory notice:

- Your experience is no necessarily indicative of others' experiences

- The US education system is not indicative of education systems in the rest of the world.

Re: We Need a Yelp for Doctoral Programs

#60

Post by C1sc0cat »

ISL wrote: post #19

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…

Yelp has its own problems with gaming reviews not sure applying that to PHD programs is a good idea.
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