Grad school sucks — The need for an overhaul of the doctoral degree system
I remember how when I first joined my current PhD program,I was mostly sensed with a feeling of excitement— As an Engineer who had worked in an industrial setting, I had imagined that a PhD program would give me more freedom to test out hypotheses with a lot more control than typically possible in a non-Academic, non-Research environment. It didn’t take me long to find out that wasn’t the case.
Firstly, there are many similarities between working elsewhere, and working in Academia — For example, The influence of one’s boss’s management style on the morale of the workplace is important in both places. Also, being able to be self-directed is a useful trait to have in both situations. But of course, the similarities are fairly trivial, such as the ones that I’ve mentioned here, and there are far more differences than similarities, and this need not necessarily be a bad thing, but more often than not, it tends to be. For example, Academia gives a lot of power to one’s adviser. This tends to result in a situation where abuse can be very rampant — I have heard of far too many graduate students having advisers who have unreasonable expectations from them, such as having to be in the office for up to 15 hours a day, having to always come in on Sundays, not being able to take school-sanctioned holiday breaks etc. And more often than not, there is nobody to report this to (Faculty in a department tend to be a fairly close-knit group, and university ombudsman services etc tend to work in favor of a faculty member who might be bringing in research grants etc, over graduate students, who. for all intents and purposes, are ‘disposable’, and any complaining etc can signal the end of one’s term as a graduate student in a department).This tends to especially weigh heavily on international students, who tend to have other things at stake such as being able to maintain legal immigration status in the country, and any conflicts can potentially result in an expensive and abrupt end to it all.
Perhaps, the most pertinent problem associated with academia is the general sense of masochism that tends to pervade — I’ve met my share of people who were proud to have not eaten in the last few days, choosing to work on their paper instead, or old faculty members who look back fondly to the days where they used to stay awake. I have actually been asked by people when I go to bed at night, and any truthful response has usually been met with a pretty dismissive and critical look. This is in spite of the fact that I have never failed to meet deadlines etc. The main thing to note is that my experiences, and those of my peers in the current institution we study at are not unique — A quick internet search on any relevant discussion board will reveal other graduate students elsewhere having similar experiences as well.
I believe that the reason that academia suffers from such underlying issues is due to the fact that the academic environment has remained fairly unchanged for a long time — The general idea of awarding different degrees at different levels of education can be dated to medieval European universities/monasteries, where monks would take apprentices under their wing. Our current academic systems generally follow the same structure as these medieval centers of knowledge, which are somewhat anachronistic, given that social circumstances that led to making these places centers of excellence have changed. For instance, a lot more engineering and technology research is spearheaded by the private sector than was done a few decades ago.
Basically, my propositions are as follows — Graduate school needs to be run more like private corporations are, with clearly defined objectives, regular performance reviews, having an unbiased third party to serve as mediators, and abolishing our current system of tenure to faculty. Also, more collaboration between groups, and between industry and academia has to be encouraged. Of course, none of these are particularly novel thoughts, and I haven’t said anything here that hasn’t already been said before, but it is important that these sorts of points be raised regularly so that things can start changing for the better soon.