This Youtube channel focuses on chemistry (a la Nile Red), but occasionally the author'll put out pieces like this one, which sheds some light on the process of getting a PhD in Australia, and on...
This Youtube channel focuses on chemistry (a la Nile Red), but occasionally the author'll put out pieces like this one, which sheds some light on the process of getting a PhD in Australia, and on the publishing process overall.
TIL that peer reviewers are unpaid volunteers, and that researchers often need to track them down themselves! Also that -- at least in the author's discipline -- PhD students are effectively compensated less than minimum wage.
In the US at least, a lot of that is a function of having to bear almost all of the costs. Every dollar going to a grad student is one less available for financial aid and so forth. That said,...
In the US at least, a lot of that is a function of having to bear almost all of the costs. Every dollar going to a grad student is one less available for financial aid and so forth.
That said, grad students need to be paid more. No less than $25/hr.
I was a grad student in the US from 2004 to 2013. Back then stipends were a pretty flat $2k/mo. Part of why I chose CMU was because that's a living wage in Pittsburgh, but it's barely lodging in...
I was a grad student in the US from 2004 to 2013. Back then stipends were a pretty flat $2k/mo. Part of why I chose CMU was because that's a living wage in Pittsburgh, but it's barely lodging in Cambridge or Palo Alto. Because faculty are responsible for raising their own funding, each one is a little fiefdom, and they have nearly absolute power over the career trajectory of their students. If there is some conflict with other faculty that mainly affects a student, their advisor may not "go to bat" for them because the students are transient, but the relationships with other faculty must be maintained for a long time.
I think the biggest determiners of a grad student's success will be
whether their advisor is a good fit personality-wise. If you think grad school is a 50-60 hours-per-week job and your advisor wants 100 (especially if they work that schedule themselves), it's going to be rough going.
whether their advisor has a stable source of funding - going through grad school on a well-funded project means having lots of access to tools, more senior students students to work with and learn from, and plenty of interesting problems to solve. In a funding drought, you're getting pulled from one topic to another in order to pursue small grants that may be topically unrelated. That (plus some medical issues) is how you might end up in grad school for 9 years.
how their advisor is doing personally and professionally - a family issue, a startup that takes off, a startup that fails - All of these affect the energy that the advisor is putting into their students and their grant and paper writing.
My favorite part of grad school was getting to design a new lab for an embedded software engineering class. The teaching was great, but the rest of it is so ... unreal that I could not have stayed in academia.
This Youtube channel focuses on chemistry (a la Nile Red), but occasionally the author'll put out pieces like this one, which sheds some light on the process of getting a PhD in Australia, and on the publishing process overall.
TIL that peer reviewers are unpaid volunteers, and that researchers often need to track them down themselves! Also that -- at least in the author's discipline -- PhD students are effectively compensated less than minimum wage.
In the US at least, a lot of that is a function of having to bear almost all of the costs. Every dollar going to a grad student is one less available for financial aid and so forth.
That said, grad students need to be paid more. No less than $25/hr.
I was a grad student in the US from 2004 to 2013. Back then stipends were a pretty flat $2k/mo. Part of why I chose CMU was because that's a living wage in Pittsburgh, but it's barely lodging in Cambridge or Palo Alto. Because faculty are responsible for raising their own funding, each one is a little fiefdom, and they have nearly absolute power over the career trajectory of their students. If there is some conflict with other faculty that mainly affects a student, their advisor may not "go to bat" for them because the students are transient, but the relationships with other faculty must be maintained for a long time.
I think the biggest determiners of a grad student's success will be
whether their advisor is a good fit personality-wise. If you think grad school is a 50-60 hours-per-week job and your advisor wants 100 (especially if they work that schedule themselves), it's going to be rough going.
whether their advisor has a stable source of funding - going through grad school on a well-funded project means having lots of access to tools, more senior students students to work with and learn from, and plenty of interesting problems to solve. In a funding drought, you're getting pulled from one topic to another in order to pursue small grants that may be topically unrelated. That (plus some medical issues) is how you might end up in grad school for 9 years.
how their advisor is doing personally and professionally - a family issue, a startup that takes off, a startup that fails - All of these affect the energy that the advisor is putting into their students and their grant and paper writing.
My favorite part of grad school was getting to design a new lab for an embedded software engineering class. The teaching was great, but the rest of it is so ... unreal that I could not have stayed in academia.