I was with you until that rant in the second paragraph, it's pretty insulting to treat your grad students as if they must've spent their time partying.

Being as green as grad students are, it's entirely understandable for them to feel good about themselves about their first publication, especially when you also consider the problem of imposter syndrome. Working on my first publication, getting feedback on drafts, finalizing results etc has been a big confidence booster when working directly with people who've been doing research longer than I've been alive.

Then again, I understand the work the advisor/professor has done to set things up for me (was even surprised that I'm supposed to be the lead author despite being under their supervision) and my advisor is always pretty clear on matters relating to credit, often even more than I expect. So perhaps I just haven't seen the sort of friction leading to your rant.

> it's pretty insulting to treat your grad students as if they must've spent their time partying.

Sorry I thought I was clear I had gone of on a tangent with someone in particular in mind. That wasn't literally directed at all grad students.

I had gotten that, I could've sworn I added a caveat about "unless you know that the student you're referring to was like that" but looks like I did not.

I’m sorry, but you sound like a terrible, patronizing advisor; anyone who views their students as “cogs in the machine” is someone I would not want to work with.

Yes, professors work hard, but let’s not kid ourselves that they’re involved with the nitty-gritty research work. You just sound like someone who’s bitter at young people.

Again, kindly see my reply about attacking me personally. If you feel affronted by my calling grad students cogs, make a case for why they are not. I spend plenty of time shaping those cogs into fine researchers, and they're all better for it, so my results speak for themselves. But you're kidding yourself if you think a green 22 year old fresh out of undergrad is able to perform at a level much higher than a cog in a research lab. There's usually a researcher in there, but it takes a lot of work, usually years, to properly shape their minds.

I'm quite young myself so I don't understand why you would say I'm bitter at young people, but I guess it just goes to show I hit a nerve and you want to lash out at me even though you know nothing about me, not even my age. You want to form an opinion about me and my personality and my entire professional posture based on a rant go ahead, but keep it to yourself.

As for professors not being involved in the nitty gritty research, there's just no basis for this statement. Like I said I've spent almost a literal decade getting my research agenda up and running, and that's pretty much the common case. It takes at least 6 years to get tenure. Students joining me today are getting involved in a project that began when they were preteens. Students claiming full credit over research done at that point is pure hubris.

How do you think research labs come to be without professors getting involved in the "nitty gritty"? Research happens over a long timescale, longer than any one grad student's tenure.

"Yes, professors work hard, but let’s not kid ourselves that they’re involved with the nitty-gritty research work. You just sound like someone who’s bitter at young people."

This week I've:

- Worked on a research grant that doesn't have any students on it, so who else is doing the "nitty gritty research work"?

- Gone through a student's research code line-by-line to try to hunt down a particularly pernicious bug.

- Done a ton of data wrangling for another project to minimize the number of hands currently using a restricted-access server.

If the parent poster is painting with an overly broad brush, so are you.

>I’m sorry, but you sound like a terrible, patronizing advisor; anyone who views their students as “cogs in the machine” is someone I would not want to work with.

He pointed to the state of affairs, not how he treats them. Understand?

lol I hope for the sake of your graduate students that your institution has a union. Your personality sounds exactly like the countless professors I've seen abuse their workers.

edit: sorry I'm just going to disengage from this, I feel trolled so that's that. If you want to interrogate my position, then maybe ask a question. No questions have been asked so an interrogation is not what's taking place here.

Ranting about a third party not involved in the discussion here, who nobody knows, is completely different than writing a response to someone, attacking them directly, and calling into question their professional capabilities directly, then doubling down and tripling down on that even after they asked you to stop is just rude and unnecessarily antagonistic. I asked you to make a point a couple times now and you don't have a point to make except to attack me personally, so kindly find someone else to troll.

i'm sure that your students are very happy to criticize the person that pays them, and who has a complex about them not being deserving enough, to their face

edit: if you expect to be able to use your own anecdotes as evidence against unionization, expect them to actually be interrogated. if this is how you handle conflict with a random person on the internet, i shudder to imagine how you handle conflict with someone who works for you.

bruh you spent all of your first post writing a rant attacking one of your grad students don't act all high and mighty now

The grant that covers the largest portion of my salary doesn't even have grad students on it.