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Comment by GlenTheMachine | Hacker News Reader

MIT is FAR from the only offender here, so much so that I find it odd to be calling MIT out in particular.

And abuse takes a lot of forms. My advisor once went eighteen months without ever laying eyes on one of his doctoral students.

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>so much so that I find it odd to be calling MIT out in particular.

Because the author is relaying their personal experiences as a student at MIT.

Yes, that's right. An MIT grad student should perform a study across all universities to get a representative sample before writing a blog post about his experiences. This is the only acceptable thing. He is not permitted to share what happened to him.

That’s a fair amount more snarky than I intended my comment to be taken.

When I was a grad student I talked to grad students from a lot of other schools. I went to conferences, made friends, sent emails to folks doing research in my field. In the course of events we compared notes on advisors. As a consequence I knew that the professors in my department weren’t outliers.

You didn’t do this?

For what it's worth, I've actually been warned against their physics department for grad school. The other rumour I heard is that Harvard is even worse (for physics grad students). Tons of toxic behaviour like sabotaging labmates in the name of competition and advisors holding onto students for like a year after they should have graduated to pump out that last paper from them.

Physics and bio departments tend to be the most toxic. Students have no BATNA.

I'm a bit surprised to hear it put this way. Aren't physics students usually welcome in finance as quants?

(1) Most don't want to be quants. It's a soul-sucking no work-life-balance career path. You're getting paid better, but it's a hyper-abusive work environment.

(2) Quant hiring is super-competitive. most physics students wouldn't get jobs. A lot of quants are physicists, but the converse isn't true.

(3) And students? Not so much. Quants like to hire Ph.Ds or possibly ABDs.

Ones who are ALSO good programmers can go the CS route, but most aren't. You need to do basic programming to do physics, but not industry-grade software engineering.

Most employed programmers can't do "industry grade engineering". Physics grad students are plenty capable, with a boot camp if needed.

It's not a hard set of skills for physics grad students to pick up, but it's a bit more than a boot camp. Most of the deep stuff is there. There's a lot of shallow stuff at this point, though.

Most don't want to do the work (not implying laziness -- it's about interest / fit / etc.).

There are definitely unpleasant quant shops. But there are pleasant ones, too. Interviewing with shops is like asking people to dance. If you stop after the first rejection, you're doing it wrong.

Actually, I've heard that chemistry departments are a standout in terms of abuse and that seems true just from the students I've talked to at my institution. There's like this weird old school attitude of "this is the way we've always done it" so I'm going to pass you through the flames too. Add that to the motivation of "if I can just get through this then I can get a cushy pharma job".

Come to think of it, the news stories I remember (just off the top of my head) of advisors pushing their students to the point of suicide were chem. advisors.

Chemistry leads the pack in toxicity. See E.J. Corey. Physics is pretty okay these days on average, though I've heard of a few icky groups.

I went to a SUNY school. My advisor kept me waiting 20 minutes after outside of his office for an appointment made a week earlier, only to walk out with coat on, announcing that he was going to happy hour. He suggested that i set up another the following week through the department secretary.

I walked over to do that, discovering that he was actually going to happy hour at the airport, and from there India, and wouldn't be back for a month. Ended up getting locked out of classes as I couldn't register.

Sounds like you dodged a bullet there. Imagine if you were successful in registering.

Lol. In all seriousness it was for the best as I met my new advisor who helped me sort it out, whom I remain in contact with 25 years later!

I’ll second that - I went to a decent uni (in EU) and while I escaped a lot of the negativity a few very close colleagues of mine in an almost identical lab went through years of hell at the same institution. It totally could have been me in their position if my focus had been just slightly different. It was kinda just was luck I ended up where I did.

I think about it a lot and how I’m sure a lot of brilliant people are not able to fulfill their potential due to these issues.

caltech

As someone who wanted to apply at Caltech for my masters, would you mind elaborating?

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