My own experience with PhDs was an aborted one around '97 in Melbourne. I fully own the end of it - I just was not interested in the topic I had (BIG mistake), plus the more I saw of academia, the less I wanted to deal with it's politics.
But what was startling was how the PhD students were treated like cattle by our department. Shoved into the shittiest room in the building, where the airconditioning ducts were in backwards so it was freezing all the time, I watched number-crunching computers destined for PhDs get redirected to admin temps, amongst other general shake-your-head day-to-day stories.
The kicker story for me was that the dean had managed to poach some prestigious astrophysicist ("Astrophysicist? But this is Biophysical Sciences...") from another university, and in the afternoon of the last faculty day of the year, three days before christmas, one of the supervisors came and said we might want to talk to the dean as there were rumblings. Our office was receiving the astrophysicist and his staff on the next day the faculty was open and naturally they wouldn't be expecting a room full of people. The dean didn't even bother to proactively inform us that we had to move out! Did we have another office tagged for us to go to? Not really, no. So the dying hours of that afternoon were spent shuffling our stuff out and into some storage/office somewhere.
My supervisor hated the way we were treated. Basically we were a head count. Dean gets funding, then fuck 'em after that. My supervisor said that when he did his PhD back in the early 70s, a doctoral student was handled like gold. They were effectively considered another member of faculty. In only two decades we'd become 'room meat'...
But what was startling was how the PhD students were treated like cattle by our department. Shoved into the shittiest room in the building, where the airconditioning ducts were in backwards so it was freezing all the time, I watched number-crunching computers destined for PhDs get redirected to admin temps, amongst other general shake-your-head day-to-day stories.
The kicker story for me was that the dean had managed to poach some prestigious astrophysicist ("Astrophysicist? But this is Biophysical Sciences...") from another university, and in the afternoon of the last faculty day of the year, three days before christmas, one of the supervisors came and said we might want to talk to the dean as there were rumblings. Our office was receiving the astrophysicist and his staff on the next day the faculty was open and naturally they wouldn't be expecting a room full of people. The dean didn't even bother to proactively inform us that we had to move out! Did we have another office tagged for us to go to? Not really, no. So the dying hours of that afternoon were spent shuffling our stuff out and into some storage/office somewhere.
My supervisor hated the way we were treated. Basically we were a head count. Dean gets funding, then fuck 'em after that. My supervisor said that when he did his PhD back in the early 70s, a doctoral student was handled like gold. They were effectively considered another member of faculty. In only two decades we'd become 'room meat'...