phdonewiththis

Thank you for this. I should have been clearer in my post -- with respect to "professional development", I meant primarily "dedicating time to finishing papers describing the students' work." Of course, publishing papers is directly in the interests of both supervisor and student.

The difference, though, is that the supervisor might publish four papers a year where he was the primary supervisor of the work, while the student might have a single first-author paper that he spent three years on. That paper is critical for the student to graduate and progress with his career, but for the supervisor, that one paper doesn't matter nearly as much, especially after hitting tenure. Both in my lab and others, I've seen projects stall for months or years because the supervisor is unwilling or unable to devote the time to revising a paper and preparing it for journal submission.

Thank you for this perspective.

There is no worse thing that, after so much work, feeling that you have no control over your situation and you have no margin to improve it, without significant additional sacrifices.

This crystallizes how I feel, and how many of my peers feel. We're all going to escape with our degrees, but many of the problems that arose because of the points you mentioned are completely unnecessary -- we can drive science forward and train the next generation of researchers without subjecting them to this.

Thank you for this perspective. My supervisor is in many ways a caring and kind person, and I appreciate his job (and yours!) is difficult and has lots of pressures, many of which are invisible to trainees. But at the same time, I can't imagine being in his role and treating trainees as he's treated me or others. I hope to keep that feeling with me as I progress in my career so that I don't subject people over whom I have power to the same treatment that I've experienced through grad school.

Recognition of my work, at least earlier in my graduate program, was actually one of the few things I've been happy with -- good supervisors will be very clear in crediting their students for implementing projects (early in the students' grad careers) and figuring out how to extend projects and drive them forward (later in the students' grad careers). For instance, when giving conference talks, my PI and others will put a small photo of the student when presenting slides corresponding to the student's work.

Working with early-stage PhD students and helping supervise them has convinced me that the job supervisors have is legitimately hard. Sure, the supervisor wouldn't have anything to show for their efforts without students to do the grunt work, but understanding what the frontier of research is, and figuring out how to push that frontier in achievable ways that are relevant to the rest of the community, is extremely difficult. Most supervisors I know work insane hours to keep their labs running.

My issues arise with the personal mistreatment I've received from my supervisor -- none of what makes his job hard requires making abusive comments directly to me or other profs about my personality and work, nor does it require refusing to work with me for >12 months on the paper describing a project so we can get the work published.