My professor says I would not graduate my PhD, but I fulfilled all requirements | Hacker News Reader

My professor says I would not graduate my PhD, but I fulfilled all requirements

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55 points9woc46 comments

A long time ago I was given an opportunity to spend some time working at a lab in a foreign university. I was invited to explore the possibility of doing a PhD there and got an appointment with a professor that might have become my PhD supervisor.

When I got to that appointment someone was already in his office. The professor invited me in, but told me to sit and wait until they finish with the other student. He then proceeded to berate the guy in front of me. He used no kind words. Told him his work on the PhD thesis was completely incompetent, he wasted his years and stuff like that. It shook me deeply that someone would do that to his student, not to mention do it in front of a stranger.

Needless to say, I passed the offer to do the PhD at that place. It's still one of my most vivid memories from the time I spent there - which was otherwise full of interesting work and I'm grateful for the people that made it possible. I still wonder if that was real or the scene was played to find out if I'm able to handle pressure like that. In either case, it left the impression of a toxic environment that I did not want to have a part in.

I was that other student - the one who was being berated. My PI acted terribly towards his subordinates just because he had it badly during his years as a student. That is not an excuse to act this way to another human being IMO.

I went to a U.S. PhD program during the '08 recreation out of necessity. It was a terrible experience and ultimately I ended up quitting. I've never quit anything before in my life so this was an especially jarring experience.

I left, got a job in tech (my original true passion if I'm honest), and never looked back. I learned a few things from that experience.

I learned that if you don't know what you want to do, then just try a lot of different things so you can compare. I learned that you shouldn't do something solely because of external expectations. I learned how important it is to treat people like humans no matter what their job is. I also learned how warm, interesting, and inviting the tech community is.

I'm appreciative every day for that last one as that's why I'm here with you right now.

I could have written the same post. The bullying is passed from one generation to the next, those profs have no (or even negative) pressure to change because their prestige keeps students coming back for more.

China?

I've seen that exact behavior at a number of institutions in the US. In fact, it's actually worse here, because a lot of PIs in the US have international students on visas, so there's even more room / leverage for abuse.

You wish, this kind of a abuse happens all the time in our nice civilized world too.

Unfortunately the final stages of PhD is a very sticky situation for many people. It boggles me (after my own PhD defense), how arbitrary the arguments are for 'sufficiency'.

I learned it by experience that if a advisor wants the student to graduate, he will go the extra mile to make sure the committee & department are okay with it. Same holds in the opposite as well. Unfortunately there is too much power vested in the hands of a few for good or the bad.

The OP in SE tells about 8 papers, but what is unknown is if the papers connect the dots in his thesis theme. I know lot of people who hop around several topics in their PhD work & the hypothesis presented is either connected weakly or none at all (For e.g. in my case a early virtualization paper couldn't fit into the overall theme of system optimization. It's a published paper but how does it contribute to the story? It doesn't. I couldn't even add that to my thesis).

It is also quite possible that OP misconstrued 'preparing the thesis' with 'sufficiency to defend'. Too often advisors tell this so that grad students catch their loopholes early, as to where the logic & conclusions don't fit the story thread. And for this, they are also not totally at fault because PhD research work is supposed to be novel (and thus merits earning the degree). He is at times as clueless at the developing picture as the student himself.

That being said, he should have been paying more attention if he has already authored 8 papers together with student. It sounds more like the PhD Farm/ Paper mill lab type of place. Hard to make guesses without the content of the research work

> how arbitrary the arguments are for 'sufficiency'

"If it had the same content but was 20-30 pages longer it would have been fine, but its only 140pages which just isnt enough these days"

If your PhD student publishes 8 papers with you and you only then notice or claim that they cannot graduate that is an enormous failure in supervision and mentorship in every imaginable case. Either the student is really not fit to do a PhD, or their research is not worthy of a PhD or you are intentionally sabotaging the student. All those options indicate a serious failure on the side of the PhD supervisor.

> If your PhD student publishes 8 papers with you and you only then notice or claim that they cannot graduate that is an enormous failure in supervision and mentorship in every imaginable case

There are open questions nature of these publications. How many are first authorships by the student? Are they peer-reviewed?

> All those options indicate a serious failure on the side of the PhD supervisor.

I feel this potentially harsh. It's possible that the student just needs to get one or two papers past a peer-review process to satisfy the Prof.

We hardly know anything about this situation.

I have to assume the facts stated in the post, I don't know if they're real or not. The facts stated there are that the PhD student has 8 publications, gave their thesis to their supervisor and that supervisor essentially shut down their PhD entirely. I am also assuming the publications are peer-reviewed, anything else would usually not be called a publication in this particular context.

This depends a lot on the field, but 8 publications is a lot. Which might mean there is more to this than told in the post, but almost all possible versions here still look bad for the supervisor. If the authorship is unearned the supervisor is just stuffing author lists which is unethical. If the student is not first author on any and their contributions are minimal, the supervisor failed to notice that the student hasn't been making progress for 4 years. In this case the supervisor might also have assigned the student to too many projects that are not PhD-relevant for this student. If there is at least one first authorship in there in a decent publication, that should be enough to justify a PhD thesis (not necessarily a good grade).

> If the authorship is unearned the supervisor is just stuffing author lists which is unethical.

Or the 2nd-3rd authorship is earned, but doesn't count enough as a scientific contribution to go into a thesis.

> If the student is not first author on any and their contributions are minimal, the supervisor failed to notice that the student hasn't been making progress for 4 years.

Or the student does have first authorships which have been submitted to a journal and put on the arXiv, but haven't been accepted yet so aren't enough for the thesis.

> If there is at least one first authorship in there in a decent publication, that should be enough to justify a PhD thesis (not necessarily a good grade).

Based on my experience (admittedly in the Netherlands, not Germany like in the OP), around three first authorships is the benchmark. But naturally there are variations between subjects/institutions/countries.

This is highly dependent on field. In neuroscience, the bar in the US is typically one paper submitted (which can take six years to get to)

> How many are first authorships by the student? Are they peer-reviewed?

These are still supervision/mentorship failures. It is doubtful that the PhD student independently submitted papers to non-peer-reviwed venues without the Prof. having any say. And it is doubly doubtful that the student sneaked themselves as 3rd-4th authors in that many papers without the Prof. approving of that.

> It's possible that the student just needs to get one or two papers past a peer-review process to satisfy the Prof.

That is certainly possible. Still, having contributed to 8 papers over 4 years without enough of them qualifying as material for your thesis is bad supervision.

It is really hard to judge a situation with so little and one sided information. But the person got useful advice specific to german phd processes and whom to contact for advice with some insight.

Retelling of emails and conversations always makes me sceptical, especially about the followups. The professor suddenly wrote

> that I would not be graduating anymore

For sure, this must have had a followup question from the PhD student of what to do next then. Or some form of discussion.

Murray Rothbard waited a decade to get his PhD. His supervisor didn't like his politics and never let him graduate. Rothbard had to sneak in and graduate after his supervisor left to join the Eisenhower administration.

I'm surprised that PhDs aren't further abused. Your multi-year investment can be taken away at any time on a whim at your supervisor's discretion. It's a great deal of discretionary power.

> Your multi-year investment can be taken away at any time on a whim at your supervisor's discretion.

I disagree:

I often say that the true value of the PhD/doctoral studies is that you have the opportunity to work on deep questions/problems on the boundary of human knowledge that you won't find anywhere else. The PhD or doctoral degree is just an icing on the cake that you will get at the end.

If you do your PhD/doctoral studies for the degree on your business care, you will, in my opinion, not be happy. Better look for a career elsewhere since if you are not insanely passionate about the scientific topics that you work on, PhD/doctoral studies will become a nightmare for you.

Before starting a PhD/doctoral program, you should ask yourself: is there anything that you would desire more than working 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on your research topic? If the answer is yes, you have, in my opinion, either not the character traits necessary for science or at least a topic of research that is a bad fit for you.

Bull.

Plenty of excellent science is done by people who aren’t working 90 hour weeks under slave driving advisors. Incredible workaholism is not a “necessary” characteristic of a useful researcher. It just isn’t. This is a story that people tell themselves to allow them to abuse others or be abused.

Research is a job like any other. Your work will still be there on Monday if you do other things over the weekend.

> Incredible workaholism is not a “necessary” characteristic of a useful researcher.

Formally, workaholism might not be necessary to be a useful researcher. But it helps a huge lot.

Sure, it can help. You'll advance in a lot of careers if you work more than 100% more hours than your peers. And if you are aiming for a good faculty position then a massive volume of papers is indeed expected nowadays. You might even perform more good science than your peers.

But that doesn't mean that your lab mate who is working sane hours isn't producing useful research that contributes to the community. Telling people that they simply don't have the personality to do science if they aren't allowing themselves to be abused is unhealthy.

> Telling people that they simply don't have the personality to do science if they aren't allowing themselves to be abused is unhealthy.

The purpose of a PhD/doctoral degree is to boostrap a career in science. The positions there are highly competitive (not to mention that few tenure track and tenure positions that are available). If you don't work insanely hard, you are out.

Better tell people the harsh truth upfront instead of this insane feel-good and you-can-do-it nonsense, which often sooner than later leads to the problem that students are not prepared for the hard reality that they will get to see.

> The purpose of a PhD/doctoral degree is to boostrap a career in science.

It can be. I like to think that the doing science part is also valuable and that people can still contribute meaningfully to the world even if they come out the other side without a R1 faculty position. I like to think that my research ended up that way.

> If you don't work insanely hard, you are out.

I'm very good friends with a CS professor at MIT who didn't work unreasonable hours in grad school. Working incredibly long hours probably increases the chances of this sort of outcome and you are indeed competing with a lot of people for very few jobs.

People should be aware of the low success rate in the PhD -> R1 TT faculty pipeline. People should make informed decisions when attending a PhD program. But it is absolutely not the case that people are simply unable to produce good science if they aren't willing to spend their entire lives in the lab.

I am toying with the idea of going to grad school, especially law, but with zero careerist ambitions, so nothing can be lorded over me.

>After about four years of research, my supervisor told me to write my thesis. After I sent him my thesis, he told me that he now thinks my work did not have enough scientific soundness

What even happened here? Did he not once talk to his supervisor during the time he wrote his thesis. To me this is quite bizarre, you would want to talk to your supervisor regularly surely you have to have some questions about the content, details, structure and formalities.

The most interesting question here is why the professor has that opinnion about the thesis. I think the total irrationality of the professor, which is alleged is very weird. And until there is some clarity on that this whole thing is impossible to unravel.

The obvious thing to do is talking to other professors and administration about this. What do they think about this?

> What even happened here? Did he not once talk to his supervisor during the time he wrote his thesis. To me this is quite bizarre, you would want to talk to your supervisor regularly surely you have to have some questions about the content, details, structure and formalities.

It's an interesting angle for sure. However, the tone of the post doesn't suggest the issue with structure but content. Even if the professor's opinion were true - it would be quite bizarre considering the prof himself suggested to write the thesis.

> considering the prof himself suggested to write the thesis.

Perhaps the professor thought that the student was capable to do this in acceptable quality - but afterwards the professor saw that he was too positive in his judgement of the capabilities of the student to be able to do this.

But you would also talk about the contents with your professor, even just in rough strokes.

It seems extremely strange to me that in the months it has to have taken to write the thesis none of this came up between student and professor.

If that's the professor's scientific judgment, then there is no reasonable way to challenge it. If the supervisor doesn't support a thesis, then it's going to be hard to convince a PhD committee of its merits.

Before doing anything else, that PhD student needs to find a new supervisor ASAP.

Thats not really true everywhere. My ex-gf basically pressured her professor to fianally give up on critiquing her rather unscientific way of writing, and give her the PhD because he was basically afraid of what a woman with a disability could do to his reputation.

Was a rather traumatic experience for me, because I had to watch and learn that a degree these days isn't really worth much.

I feel like maybe there are a few other reasons why it was a traumatic experience.

Hahaa, separation can do that, right. But in this case, I was only refering to me having to watch as someone uses their gender and disability to gain unfair advantages...

That sounds more like the current state of scientific research.

It's far from trivial, but certainly possible to challenge this. If the student has produced research that would be considered worthy of a PhD by most experts, they have a chance to still get their PhD unless the local university politics are extremely dysfunctional.

It is not for thesis professor to decide graduation as it done by committee – in theory professor input does not play big role when defense starts. There are lengthly procedure with personal reviewers for thesis which dissects it through and through. Although on hand is hard to judge form one sided information, it can be just professor want to have extra published papers, the scientific worth is questionable (i saw few times - thesis is like rewritten book) or just academic nepotism starting show signs.

is he wanting to publish your work under his name? it happened to a friend of mine in Italy.

Long story short, I had to physically prevent him from running the guy over.

He eventually got his PHD and is now doing cool neurology stuff that I don't really understand.

I am not sure why people post these questions. How is the audience supposed to answer the question without knowing the relevant information? Can you share your CV, publication, your advisors reason that you don’t qualify, etc?

I have seen problems with supervisors as well as students.

You can never judge the individual case, but you can give possible options on how to proceed. Whether this PhD student will succeed with them depends on the details we cannot know, but that is still useful information for them and others that read this and are in somewhat similar situations.

There is limited useful advice that could be given (which is also common sense).

It’s unusual that the person says they have 8 papers and the supervisor thinks he still doesn’t meet the requirements. If they have 8 meaningful papers in 4 years, no supervisor will be able to defend an argument to the graduate office for stopping the thesis (usually, they would want to promote such success in the department).

The supervisor may think, the student is productive, maybe he could stay longer. But that’s far from an argument that the student doesn’t meet the requirements.

There are regulations, checks and balances, various offices at universities that involve decision making and dispute resolution, etc. It’s not so arbitrary!

Why? Because they're desperate, need help and hope for someone, anyone to give them some guidance they don't have locally. Academia can be a horrible environment where whole faculties can be incredibly abusive and strange - outside look is pretty much critical to know whether it's you who's losing their mind or if you're trapped in an asylum.

This isn't hard to understand.

Unfortunately, the power dynamics between tenured professors and graduate students is very skewed to the prof. I spent some time in academics and for the most part things worked fine, grad students worked through the programs and support from the profs ranged from meh to excellent. However, every once in a while there would be case where the prof was overtly attempting to screw over the student. Just blatant abuse of power. Avenues for recourse for the student were weak at best, especially if the prof did things that was in their discretion to do, like evaluating the 'soundness of the science', but not break any actual rules. The only real solution was for the student to find another prof to take over as their supervisor, but it wasn't always possible for them to keep the same project because of funding and proprietary info, etc. So the student could just end of losing years of work.

Why are people surprised? Master apprentice relations are closer to equality than master slave but it’s not like there’s any pretence of equality or some kind of mutual respect in the way the system is set up. Similarly with PIs and postdocs. You would be hard pressed to design a system that was better at encouraging abuse.

I think it's a bit bizarre that someone edited his suicidal thoughts out (https://academia.stackexchange.com/posts/190464/revisions)

It's not and the edit reason explains why it was done: to focus on the problem and not on its side effects.

He also commented on the post:

> Welcome to Academia SE. I somewhat streamlined your question to focus on your problem. That is not to say that the consequences on your psyche are not important, but we can do little to help you with those (except informing you that your situation is not as bad as you might think it is). Please consider seeking professional help on this. –

Possibly, the result presented is not consistent with what is expected, and might cause damage to the professor. Either because the result is really wrong, or it is in a field which is driven by researchers group think bubble, not reprodrucibility.

To me, this reads like he had papers that were good, but then the thesis itself is bad or too little new stuff.

Maybe a misunderstanding on your part but the thesis is usually constructed directly from research papers. In some places you may graduate simply by publication. No thesis required.

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