We Need a Yelp for Doctoral Programs
community.chronicle.com
community.chronicle.com
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. Professor A may be exploitative, while Professor B may fight tooth-and-nail for student success. The statistics are low, too. Most professors will only graduate a few students per decade.
This wouldn't work in all fields, but there are quite a few disciplines where the biggest barrier to research is having funding and someone to do the work.
One could say the same of most social sciences.
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.
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.
Every day tons of people form garage bands and have dreams of becoming rock stars. But...they do so knowing they almost certainly won't make it.
This professor said that starting a doctoral program should be viewed the same way, as a sort of moon-shoot that will take a lot of time and resources from other pursuits. If you're okay with that, go for it, and if you're not, find a path that works better for you.
Unfortunately, the administration of the school he worked for told him he would be removed from his position if he shared this philosophy with prospective students.
In contrast, universities and their faculty absolutely need a large supply of low-wage teaching and research assistants to function today.
The students who did their PhD the quickest in my program did exactly that. The students who failed or took longer usually slacked off, skipped days, focus on other stuff, etc etc etc. I know one person who disappeared for weeks and then quit. Thing is, he could still have come back and resumed his PhD even after that disappearance.
You could argue that it’s difficult for students to plan and do work on a consistent basis while having full academic freedom and very little direction (my advisor when I joined with almost no research experience told me to “read papers” and then we’ll discuss what to do after you do; like what does read papers mean anyway; I had no idea at the time but I learned by asking fellow students). But it’s not something that you get lucky in. It’s something that you keep at it until you finish it.
I’m thinking someone could work at Facebook over the summers while studying because they take PhDs
Grad students on the other hand, come with a huge range of:
-- Motivations for doing a doctorate (say, purely for job prep, versus wanting a life of academia and intellectual fulfillment),
-- Skills and knowledge (some already essentially begun their doctoral work and have achievements already, versus those who will be wandering around searching for a topic for years),
-- Tolerance or willingness to engage in ambiguous, possibly dead-end leading places with no clear sign of success,
-- Need for financial reward / subsistence and productive return for time or opportunity cost traded off.
Add to that in many fields, the supervising professor is the greatest variable, more than the program or university -- and any rating system will be irrelevant or worse, misguiding. One person's paradise could be another's hell. Unless the rating is so dumbed down to generic factors in which case what are you really informing people about?
To echo some advice of a contrarian grad school dean, go into grad school because you know what you want to write about, who you want to work with, and what you want to come out the other end with. Otherwise, the bulk majority of people going into grad school "on autopilot" or based on a Yelp rating are going to be sorely disappointed at some point.
All of that said, some set of general statistics (size of program, distribution of research group sizes, percentage of those who wanted a Ph.D. and then got one, etc.) plus a general satisfaction survey among graduate students might be a good complement to the usual ratings one sees in US News.
Our department had amazing advisors and horrible advisors. Two people could be in the same PhD program and have polar opposite experiences.
In fact, if you want reviews it’s not hard - just ask current students about other advisors. Rumors move fast and I’ve found you’ll get an honest opinion.
I think there are a few things in life we must decide carefully - like a partner, which doctor to consult etc. Reading reviews for most of the other stuff is overthinking, and pointless.
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.
However, I think the problem isn't stars or a lack of nuance, it's that you get what you pay for. If you don't pay for reviews, you mostly get two kinds of reviews, which are at the extremes:
1. I'm angry enough that I went online and wrote a review.
2. I own the business or I'm a true believer in the business.
Neither case is actually what you want from a review. But people don't post middle-star reviews because they don't feel strongly enough about it to feel an incentive to do that.
The nuance comes when you pay someone to write an opinion they don't feel strongly about, which is the only time they can maintain anything resembling an objective opinion. I've found very good products by paying for Consumer Reports, for example.
"But it doesn't scale!" says HN. Sure. Lots of working solutions don't scale, and lots of scalable ideas don't solve any real problem. Bad things happen to good people.
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 community that gives us an "in" for the next stage of our career, while also being mentored by world-class experts in our fields.
In a not so good program, we're used as TAs for a few years and then rapidly encouraged to drop out.
Either way, most of what we do is not like most of what an undergraduate student does. It is like what an entry-level professional does.
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.
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?
Give us what we want or you have no teachers and your research output drops to near-zero. Most of the actual work of scientific research is done by what we politely euphemize as "early career researchers" or "junior authors": grad-students and postdocs. Tenured and tenure-track professors don't do the bulk of the bench-work, even when they really enjoy it.
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.
The membership is based of being a GSI, but a lot of the negotiations apply to all PhD students.
What field do you work in? Modern science is team science. I think the paper I have under review right now has... six authors? That's pretty average for the particular interdisciplinary collaboration I happen to work in right now.
It would just be silly to claim that every other junior author on the paper is working for me, as the first author, rather than admit that I work for my adviser (who I haven't complained about here because I lucked out and got a very good one).
Computer science.
> It would just be silly to claim that every other junior author on the paper is working for me
Exactly - the all work for themselves. I'm sure they all have their own research goals and they come together on papers along the way.
But what you need to focus on is the publications you achieve. You achieve them for yourself not your advisor.
Collective bargaining could certainly help negotiate stipends and (lack of) benefits. Standardized degree requirements and access to funding could be agreed upon. Working conditions, especially related to non-research duties like teaching, could be on the table as well. These are certainly a source of misery for some PhD students in some fields.
However, I’m not seeing how a union could rein in an individual’s advisor, which is often the major source of stress. A union could certainly set working hours, but that will just move the debate to “expected productivity/quality per hour.” Moreover, a lot of things that are essential to building an academic career are technically optional. A union cannot force someone to write a positive recommendation letter, expand their scientific network, or anything like that.
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 all 10 from her institution? (Networking)
Do fresh doctors land post docs, tenure, or good private sector jobs? (Outcome)
A lot of this can be deduced by google (scholar) and scanning conference proceedings and video recordings.
(defended my doc in 2016 in Finland, been fairly succesful at post doc funding as well as private sector)
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.
Writing as second author was a very positive factor very early on. I was an assistant to a research fellow from my second year at uni, mostly because of coding skills. Pretty soon they encouraged me to write a pragraph or two about the implementation details, and I got added to the author list. I felt that was appropriate and a great kickstart to a research career (got my first MIT press journal credit before my bachelor)
I agree however that professors growth-hacking their publication lists with student labor is problematic indeed and looking at first/second author creds is a good way to flag such behavior.
- 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.
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!
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.
Data: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/
Data documentation: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/documentation/
“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.
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.
Is there an Internet equivalent of "coffee and conversation"? Steam game gift and discord maybe...
Of course you lose something when physical presence is impossible, but in my experience you can always find someone who is happy to write, chat or call.
I found that the difference between faculty members at the same institution can be immense. This is because faculty have great control over your life due to how doctoral funding works in the United States. If you wish to continue a Biology degree, you must be willing to work with this faculty member, in this area, on this specific problem. Some faculty are rigid about a specific problem, some are not.
Even more complicated is that some students need more guidance than others. Or some students want much less. And the student doesn't necessarily know what they need before entering the program.
This is why I think it's smarter to give doctoral students more freedom and flexibility in switching faculty. The school should be supportive of a student in this process rather than focusing on their job placement numbers.
Absolutely!
> This is why I think it's smarter to give doctoral students more freedom and flexibility in switching faculty. The school should be supportive of a student in this process.
This is important, but it's not enough. The nature of a PhD means that switching faculty is often not an option. Students 3 years into their thesis work with a budding publication record on a topic often can't realistically just switch to another professor, even if everybody is on board with it. In most cases that means starting over from scratch with a new topic.
So instead students will grind out a final couple (or more) miserable years in order to finally get their degree.
I got this kind of advice from people who already finished their PhDs while I spent a year in industry before grad school. Not everyone can do this but maybe there is some other way to cold-contact finished PhDs and see what they know about the faculty you're considering.
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.
Any good program will have a built in process, for example an admitted students event, with this kind of interaction. Any good advisor will encourage you to talk to their students. If not, that is already a red flag.
Talk to current and former students! I was fortunate to have a great advisor, and I was always happy to talk to admitted students.
If you get lucky, you get a professor that believes in you (this can be one of the most rewarding experiences I know of).
If you aren't lucky, then things will get really rough. I've seen professors: - Spike their student's candidicy at the last minute (meaning the student had to switch groups in their last year, essentially having to redo their PhD in another group) - Spike student papers - finding out where their former student was applying for jobs, calling and spiking their job application (talking shit) - various abuses (yelling at student for not working on Christmas, humiliating student for years in public, sexual harassment)
I could go on. If you haven't been through grad school, you might ask "why not leave/vote with your feet?"
But understand the power dynamic: in really broad strokes, the student works towards a reward (being a Dr/PhD) that will take, on average, 5-6 years. Getting that reward is completely up to your supervisor's discretion. It's like if you worked at a startup for six years for minimum wage, but if your boss agrees to it, you will get a million dollar payout (also, your boss can't be fired, ever.) And that's just a minimum-- success in academia is dependent on getting full throated letters of rec from your supervisor, so they also have to really like you.
So your professional success is completely up to one person: if they decide to fuck you over, that can be 4 years of work down the drain.
When I was in graduate school, I never saw the faculty/department intervene in any of the abusive situations. The only thing that protects students are soft processes, like knowing which professors are really bad. The Yelp idea is good, simply because it increases that ability.
And those abuses I talked about? A majority of my cohort dealt with that (at a large, well known University), it's not isolated to a few bad apples.
It comes with all the same features (it's even baked into the history of education being baked in to the Church).
Among my friends in graduate school:
* One was told by their adviser they had enough for a thesis in their second year, and found time to organise a university-wide Dance Dance Revolution championship.
* One was shouted at by their adviser for not coming in to tend to their experiments on Christmas day - the first day they'd taken off that year.
I think a prospective student would like to know which of those experiences they're in store for, regardless of future earnings.
Indeed, if you want to maximise your salary, I'm not sure you should go to graduate school at all...
We need a Yelp for doctoral thesis advisors.
I think the author was reluctant to “go there.”
I have been looking at WGU for an online MBA degree. Reviews are just scattered everywhere from Reddit to affiliates websites.
I can't speak to the motivations of the person considering it, but perhaps s/he only needs to check a "do you have an MBA?" box on an application to be able to move forward in their career.
I'm sure I'm not the one who ran into so many shitty tutorials/how-to guides/videos through the years.
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.
Here’s yelp for grad programs. Write down the name of the program you’re looking at and make an asterisk. One star — it’s already more accurate than Yelp on restaurants.