61–70 of 118 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Give us what we want or... we'll quit our degrees and throw away years of our lives?
For real. But the title itself is something worth a moment of reflection. Doctoral programs are supposed to be scarce, selective and of high profile. Now they are being treated as a service that can be requested and compared against.
There is a huge problem in academia where the number of PhDs is growing exponentially, and the number of positions is staying basically flat. I strongly disagree with this "participation award" mentality of "you deserve it." It's... leading a lot of people to make really stupid career decisions and I think a lot of people are doing it just to get this gilded club to bludgeon people who don't have PhDs -- that's the only reason I can think of for a person to hope for an "easy" PhD experience.
My advisor being rough at the right times (and in good spirit) was absolutely essential to the defense, which is essentially gladiatorial combat against your father (well, mother in my case), when both you and your advisor hope you can defeat the master in your specific realm. I would not have been able to do it if my advisor pranced about making everything pleasant and easy and convenient.
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!
This is in principle illegal, but because the institutes don't have any automatic time-tracking, you are instead expected to lie on your time-sheets and to underreport the time you've worked.
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!
More that the lab you’re in it’s about your specific advisor. Two advisors in the same lab could work in a completely different way.
What you need to ask is: does the instutition side with the academic in cases of misconduct (e.g. inappropriate behaviour?), or do they side with the student? Do they have a robust pastoral program? Would the students say that they feel supported?
I can categorically say there are awful advisors in all institutions.
A friend got a position in Cambridge. While their advisor was on vacation my friend - innocently - set up a group Slack. When the advisor returned, friend was accused of trying to steal the group. It was a bizarre situation.
I know people at less well-known universities with more mundane issues, like not being supervised, and it's taken them years to get the department to do anything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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!
The membership is based of being a GSI, but a lot of the negotiations apply to all PhD students.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On a PhD you work for yourself - you shouldn’t need a union against yourself!
Here is a link to University of Michigan's grad student union: https://www.geo3550.org/ The membership is based of being a GSI, but a lot of the negotiations apply to all PhD students.
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 f…
The average consensus of people on how good a thing is on some sort of scale, is pretty worthless. The consensus of people who seem to be like you on previous works is kind of useful. Strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree is just a 5 star system with a different name.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I don’t ask students to do research projects because I expect “free labor” from them (unless they’re my PhD advisee, in which case it’s just poorly-paid labor.) In fact, most of the time I expect that undergraduate and MS projects will fail, or only be partially finished simply due to the schedule constraints those students have with other courses.
For students who are actually interested in conducting real research, the value to the student in being advised by me comes from the fact that they’re working on a research project that’s in my area of expertise and interest. The value to me is that sometimes I learn something new. There’s much less value in my advising students to do projects in areas that I wouldn’t be interested in researching myself, not because I’m looking to cash in on students’ labor, but because I won’t be able to offer them as much guidance.