This is where good quality surveys can distinguish between the horrible to most vs horrible to some things. It gives space for all types of experiences. While my PhD experience at NIST was stressful at times, I feel positive about it overall. But I do know of people who had it really bad with the system (not in my group).
Yeah, I would agree with that. I'd say that most of the people I know who went through grad school had a generally okay experience, but I definitely know of people who had a bad time. The exact balance of those is tough to estimate, though, and there are self-selection/ survivorship problems all over the place. I don't envy anyone trying to put a really good study of this together.
I had a similar experience at grad school (I think I even met you when you were a postdoc and I was a student in physics). I had a good advisor, who was also a very good scientist. My post grad experience though was not quite the same. I think there is a lot of variability depending on the field. Physics and physics adjacent fields tend to treat junior scientists well, and treat them as more or less equals when it comes to science, in my observation, but this is not the case in fields where labs have a lot of trainees either as postdocs or as students, like in many areas of biology. There trainees are more often than not treated as a pair of hands to have work done from and not really as peers in training.
This is where good quality surveys can distinguish between the horrible to most vs horrible to some things. It gives space for all types of experiences. While my PhD experience at NIST was stressful at times, I feel positive about it overall. But I do know of people who had it really bad with the system (not in my group).
Yeah, I would agree with that. I'd say that most of the people I know who went through grad school had a generally okay experience, but I definitely know of people who had a bad time. The exact balance of those is tough to estimate, though, and there are self-selection/ survivorship problems all over the place. I don't envy anyone trying to put a really good study of this together.
I had a similar experience at grad school (I think I even met you when you were a postdoc and I was a student in physics). I had a good advisor, who was also a very good scientist. My post grad experience though was not quite the same. I think there is a lot of variability depending on the field. Physics and physics adjacent fields tend to treat junior scientists well, and treat them as more or less equals when it comes to science, in my observation, but this is not the case in fields where labs have a lot of trainees either as postdocs or as students, like in many areas of biology. There trainees are more often than not treated as a pair of hands to have work done from and not really as peers in training.