Grad school nightmare stories
Brandt Nature Levitt
Friday, 01 February 2008 20:30 UTC
I am interested in going to graduate school in a year and a half and I want to hear some horrible nightmare stories to temper my enthusiasm. Surely you guys have some?
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Replies
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Ummm…graduate school is great! Just make sure you’re doing something you like doing. You’ll be doing a lot of it. I seem to be lucky enough to find classes that fit together so well with each other and with my graduate project/thesis that it’s not as hard as some people say it is. It all just fits and makes sense. If you can achieve that graduate school will be a breeze.
Good luck!
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Hello Levitt,
There is not need to temper your enthusiasm, if you are interested in going to grad school.
I will just suggest that make sure that you go to good lab. And, check the folks working in the lab.
Most horror stories of the grad life are because of the research group chemistry. If you keep right set of company in the grad school, it will be fun.
Cheers
rahul -
I’m reposting a link here that was accidentally taken down. It’s for an article from Science called “Scientific misconduct: Truth and Consequences”.
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Thanks Ms. Corie for putting it back!!
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Anonymous
Graduate school horror stories? I had mostly a good time, until I was about to finish. Then my advisor harassed me and tried to manipulate me. After I left, he copied my work, “almost.” I say “almost,” because he changed words and put data together that wasn’t supposed to be, so it looked more scientifically distinguished than it was.
You can read my story here: http://www.plagiary.org/responses.htm
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I know more grad school horror stories than I have time to retell. I think most of them may be specific to my institution, which is not known for caring about people. I think the worst story I have in my arsenal is the one where a PI got a lucrative job offer from industry. He gave his lab members (including three grad students early in their research work) less than one week warning that the lab was going to be shut down. Then he left for good. That’s it. No warning, no consideration, just locked the doors and buh-bye. The students were absorbed into a neighboring lab, new advisor. If I were his student, I think I would have slashed his tires… if not worse. My own lab also shut down, but that was due to severe illness on the part of my advisor. Nothing to be angry about.
Really though, grad school is not going to be easy, and at times it is not going to be fun, but it feels so freakin’ good to be done. I would do it again.
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Hey Levitt,
I agree with what everyone else has posted, if you can, try to take measures to ensure a good fit with a future supervisor and lab. I’d definitely suggest meeting your supervisor in person and taking one of his grad students out to coffee and ask them if they’re happy. If you know any professors or grad students personally (i.e. you’ve worked in their lab, or done an honours project with one) ask them for some advising on the process, most of them will be happy to assist you on the path to research.
The only “horror” story I can offer up, is that scientific research will frequently involve lab hurdles—the experiments that will just not give you the results you expect. I know of a few Ph. Ds and Masters students who can’t get any results in their first year of grad school, and they’re among the most people talented I know. Sometimes it’s luck, there’s only so much we know about how nature would react to be being contained and prodded. But you learn to be a troubleshooter and as the saying goes, what doesn’t kill us, makes stronger. All else fails, a good supervisor will likely help you formulate new project ideas in another direction.
Good Luck!
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Oh shoot, I should have said I agree with everyone else’s postings to an extent, based on my own limited experience and the experience of other grads and former grads (now supervisors themselves) I have contact with. But i have to agree that those are some pretty nightmarish stories :S
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Anonymous
The problem with grad school is that tenured professors have almost unlimited power. The administration that is in place above them—deans, provosts, presidents, chancellors, etc—draws its senior members from the tenured professoriate, so what you in effect have is the fox guarding the henhouse. If you want a nightmare scenario of what happens in a bad grad school situation, check out www.graduatestudentabuse.com. Tenured faculty will ALWAYS protect their tenured brethren first of all. You should know this and remember this, especially when they review the department and tell you that everything you say will be held in confidence and that you will be protected from your faculty. If you don’t believe this, just go to the website.
What you need to do before going to a grad school is to talk to the graduate advisor and ask a number of questions:
• Which percentage of incoming graduate students finish within five, six, seven, eight, nine years?
• What sort of guaranteed funding can I as a graduate student expect?
• What are the criteria for success or failure in this department? Are these criteria explicitly spelled out, or are they very nebulous and thus interpretable in the most subjective way by the faculty?
• Ask if you can talk not only to those students who have done well and graduated, but also if you can be put in touch with those students who did not finish. THEY are the source of your best information. If the department won’t give you that information, then perhaps the students who did do well and finish (the students with whom the department is willing to put you in touch) would be willing to do so. With the internet these days it is very easy to find people even if you just have a first and last name and know a little bit about them. Do yourself a favor and invest the time and energy into contacting these people and asking them why they did not finish.
• Above all, keep your options open. If you get into a program that is not delivering what it promised, do not throw good time after bad. Get your Masters out of that program and while you are so doing, immediately begin the search for a new graduate school. Many departments admit students for a two or three year window,knowing that some students end up not liking their first choice and wanting to switch.
Good luck!
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Anonymous
Actually, the correct address is www.graduatestudentabuse.org .
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