Grad School and Damaged Planes
Why everything sucks on Twitter
Last night on Twitter, somebody I follow replied to or retweeted into my timeline (I forget which) a question about getting through grad school, which I separately followed up on:
My answer there stands in pretty stark contrast to the replies, which are full of stories about hazing (or the moral equivalent thereof) and abuse. It’s a true answer, though— grad school was never especially traumatic for me, because I worked with good people. It sucked not having much money, but I wasn’t forced to work unreasonable hours (I sometimes did, but by choice), and wasn’t pressured or belittled. There was a stretch of a year or so where everything broke in the lab, and that was a bit of a slog, but my supervisors let me work through that, and it paid off in that once I had fixed all the things that broke, I knew every tiny little trick of that apparatus. The couple of years after that, we reeled off a string of papers that I’m really proud of. (You can read about them on my old blog, if you’re so inclined.)
Some of this is obviously a matter of me coming from a relatively privileged position in terms of class and race and gender, some of it is personality (I’m easily annoyed but not easily distressed, if that makes sense), and a lot of it is the particular situation I was in— I did my lab work at NIST, so my supervisors had stable funding and minimal publication pressure, so they weren’t imperiling their jobs by giving me room to break stuff and repair it at my own pace. Mostly, as I said, it’s that they’re good people, who I still consider mentors and friends, and they just aren’t inclined toward the sort of petty tyrannies that are at the root of most bad grad school experiences.
I could go on about this at some length, but in the general manner of basically-happy stories, it’s not that interesting. (I mean, I can make individual anecdotes interesting, but the overall arc is not super exciting…) It’s also not the specific thing that I felt moved to write about. What was more interesting to me as I was thinking about blog fodder was the little mental gymnastics I did before tweeting that, which I go through basically every time this subject comes up.
The issue is precisely that my grad school experience was basically positive, and I always hesitate to share that on Twitter. I hesitate because I know without clicking on the tweet that the replies will be dominated by unpleasant stories, and my “It was fine…” will stand out in a way that’s sometimes not well received. I’ve been accused of hiding ugly reality (I’m not, honestly), flaunting privilege, or belittling the bad experiences of others (despite taking pains to say that I speak only for myself). That’s part of why my response was a quote-tweet— it pulls it out of the main thread of replies so it gets read mostly by my readers (who are used to my boringly upbeat take), not so much the people who are there to reply to the original.
At the same time, though, I think it’s important to actually post more positive takes on things like grad school, because I think the picture people otherwise get ends up being distorted. I don’t think those stories of trauma and abuse are expressing the real universal truth of graduate school— they’re far too common, and should not be accepted in the way that they are, but not everyone is tormented by the experience. A great many people have grad school experiences that are basically like mine— parts of it sucked, parts of it were great, all in all it was fine. They’re just not talking about it on Twitter.
When people talk about the corrosive effects of Twitter, they mostly talk about active abuse of the platform— insults, slurs, offensive content. That’s a set of problems with relatively straightforward technical solutions, though— blocking, muting, and officially sanctioning bad actors. The tools to fix that problem exist, though they need to be wielded more effectively by those with the access to do so.
The more insidious problem is the background negativity that happens through things like the grad school stories, on a massive scale. There are great topical swathes of Twitter that feel like a kind of mirror-universe version of the famous diagram of a plane with red dots for bullet holes: our picture gets skewed because we’re only hearing from the people who got shot down. That creates a kind of miasma of bad feeling that I suspect is just as corrosive to the collective mental health of everyone using the site as the active and direct abuse.
It should go without saying that it would be inappropriate in the extreme to try to fix this by silencing the people with the bad experiences. Those stories are important, and they need to be shared. I’m not sure it’s even a good idea to try to directly match them where they are (which is why I end up with wishy-washy compromises like posting replies as quote-tweets to keep out of the reply thread). People who’ve had bad experiences need space to share without being overwhelmed with “Oh, it wasn’t really that bad…” That’s clearly disrespectful at best and abusive at worst.
That’s what makes this such a difficult problem, because it’s not something with a straightforward technical solution. It’s the inverse of the direct abuse problem— not a matter of negative people being present who can be kicked out, but a matter of positive people being absent. And it’s not a simple matter to round up a bunch of basically happy people with Ph.D.’s to come tell boring and upbeat stories of their good experiences. (As any graduate admissions department can probably tell you…)
When I end up feeling like I need to get off Twitter, though, it’s basically never because of direct attacks (admittedly, as a white man who largely avoids politics, I’m not subject to all that much of that), but the negativity that comes from this kind of anti-survivorship bias. On topic after topic, the people talking the most are the ones who’ve had unhappy experiences, and the cumulative result is an oppressive sense that everything sucks and the only way to escape it is to unplug for a bit.
So, yeah, that’s a cheery set of thoughts. Really going to brighten some people’s mornings, good job by me…
On the off chance that you’d like to read more of this kind of thing on the Internet, here’s a great big button:
If you’d prefer to inflict it on somebody else, here’s a different one:
If you just want to yell at me here, well, I’ll leave the comments open.
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).