A New Chapter

In August 2016, I entered CU Boulder as a burned out Applied Math PhD student looking for a change in direction. After seven months spent in limbo between graduate programs, I received my official offer of admission from the Mechanical Engineering PhD program in March 2017. I felt like I had finally found my place in a new program with a new advisor (He Who Must Not Be Named) and I accepted the offer immediately. Although I was a bit nervous to join an engineering department because I've never considered myself an engineer (I'm a mathematician!), I was excited to begin studies in a more focused environment where I could work on problems with direct, tangible, real-world applications.

I began research with You Know Who (hereafter YKW) over the summer and everything went well. After a brief adjustment period in which all I did was lit review (which is never much fun for me), I was motivated, enjoying the project, and produced enough work to become first author of a journal article - an uncommon achievement for a first-year PhD student on their first-ever paper. I knew it would be challenging to maintain this pace once fall semester started, as I would be taking two courses and serving as a teaching assistant for a grad-level math methods class of 60+ students (taught by YKW) in addition to doing research and attempting to continue high-level triathlon training. But little did I know what I was truly getting myself into.

Things went awry almost immediately once the semester began. The first week of classes, I was instructed by YKW to create a homework assignment for the methods class from scratch. I completely underestimated how long this would take - especially because I also had to create an answer key - and as a result, I was up until almost 4am the day before the assignment was supposed to be sent out. Every week, I was expected to create a new homework assignment and corresponding solutions in addition to holding office hours, responding to students' emails, and grading... and in addition to doing research with YKW, which I was not getting paid for. As I attempted to balance research with my teaching assistantship and training, methods papers piled up until YKW was able to secure a 5 hr/week grader for me. My research productivity dwindled, and my motivation began to suffer as I struggled to write the journal article with little guidance and unclear expectations from YKW.

But the worst was yet to come. Enter the week of the first methods exam, when I was expected to:

• Create the exam from scratch;
• Create exam solutions;
• Create practice problems for the exam;
• Create practice problem solutions;
• Hold my usual office hours (4 hours);
• Hold an additional exam review session (2 hours);
• Proctor the exam (2 hours);
• Create a grading scale for the exam;
• Grade the exam.

Not to mention that at the end of this week, I also had to create the following week's homework assignment for the class. Oh, and did I mention that I also had an exam in one of my own classes? Yeah. Such great timing.

I don't want to know how long all of this took me to complete. I didn't count my hours. But I know it was well over the stipulated 20 hrs/week, and it should be clear from looking at the above list that these duties are above and beyond what should reasonably be expected from a TA. Many of my first-year peers simply hold office hours and grade for their classes. That's it. Nothing else.

When I tried to explain to YKW how time-consuming my TA duties were becoming, he scoffed and called me a perfectionist. (Very original - it's not like I haven't already heard that 1000 times over the course of my life.) It was as if he had no conception of the time it takes to run his own class. (Probably because all he does is lecture 3 hrs/week... except for the times when he asks me to cover lecture for him. Yeah, there's that too.)

The insanity of that exam week put a dagger through the heart of my internal motivation. I wouldn't have had time to do research even if I'd wanted to, but my motivation to produce research was now completely gone due to YKW's lack of understanding as an advisor, and my desire to pursue a PhD was beginning to fade. Worst of all, this absence of motivation had begun to carry over to my own classes and to my training. I began to procrastinate on work more than ever before (generally I am an anti-procrastinator, so this was completely out of character), and I struggled to get out the door for workouts. My free time was spent on triathlon, and I had almost no remaining time to cook for myself, do chores, hang out with friends, or do anything fun outside of training. My lifestyle was not sustainable, and it was beginning to affect my emotional and mental health. I was barely able to take care of myself. Sometimes, my stress levels were so high that I would be paralyzed for hours and unable to do work. When I sent an email to YKW requesting to discuss my workload, he did not respond.

This went on for a few more weeks, until late October. While traveling to a race, I asked another student in my lab to cover one office hour session for me. The following week, I was forced to cancel one other office hour session due to sickness, and was unable to cover the next day's lecture for the same reason. When I told YKW I was unable to cover lecture for him, he replied with a passive-aggressive bombshell, essentially kicking me out of the research group. The key points from his email were:

• "I don't think it is ethically correct [to cancel two office hour sessions]."
• "Regarding research, you also have been performing below expectation, besides my several warnings and attempts to help."
• "This is a real disappointment for me... We lost some precious time, not only on research results but also on the opportunity of recruiting a fully dedicated PhD student."

This email floored me. First of all, in what world is it unethical to cancel office hours when I am sick, and to ask for a sub when I am traveling - especially when these were the only two times in the entire semester I had to do this? This is coming from someone who has asked me at least four times throughout the semester to cover his own class. This is a huge double standard.

Secondly, YKW provided no warnings. When I asked him a couple weeks earlier if he was disappointed with my research progress, he told me no. As far as attempts to help go, at one point he did offer to take over writing the journal article for me. But then, once he took a step back and realized how much work I had already produced over the summer, he put this task back on my plate. There were also no attempts to help with my TA situation - he either blamed the struggles on me and my perfectionism, or flat-out ignored my emails requesting to discuss my workload. He showed zero understanding of the time it takes to essentially run a large graduate-level class.

Third, looking at my summer research, YKW should know that I am generally motivated, dedicated, and capable of producing good work. Once the semester began, I was simply put in a situation in which I could not thrive as a researcher. My research progress was stalled out by my commitments as a teaching assistant and as a student. Not to mention I was not even getting paid for research. In general, first-year students in my program are not expected to produce much research while they are focusing on coursework and bogged down by TA duties. Thus, any research progress during the first year is typically a bonus, unless a student is being funded through a research assistantship.

Lastly, this should go without saying, but it is extremely unprofessional - and completely and utterly childish - to communicate news like this to a student via email.

When I brought some of these points up to YKW, he told me this:

"Regarding research, my assessment is not about your abilities (or capacity for hard work), but by comparison with previous graduate students at the same stage."

This. This, and everything I discussed above, is why academia is broken.

Academia focuses too much on results. In the end, it does not matter how capable I am. In the end, it does not matter how hard I work. Ultimately, the only thing that matters is the amount of work I produce. (Even if I am not getting paid to produce said work.) The same thing goes for faculty, who are often hired based on their prestige as researchers instead of their teaching capabilities. A faculty member like YKW should not be so focused on producing research results that he shoves off nearly all of his teaching responsibilities onto a TA.

Academia should not be one-size-fits-all. My situation this semester has been entirely different than that of a typical first-year graduate student in my program. I am almost certainly the only first-year student to ever TA for methods (most first-years TA for undergrad classes). And my duties as a TA have been far from normal. Yet, my productivity was compared to YKW's previous first-year graduate students, regardless of my individual situation.

Academia does not put students in the environment necessary to succeed. The duties of a grad student are seemingly contradictory. They must have a single-minded approach toward research, producing endless results while studying a very specific problem. Yet for the first couple years of their studies, they are asked to spread their energy over multiple areas: teaching, coursework, research. It is extremely hard to balance these three aspects of a PhD, let alone when expectations in one or more of these areas are unreasonable (which leads me to my next point). Very successful students are weeded out before they even have a chance to show what they are capable of in an environment where they are not spread so thin.

Academia does not define clear expectations for what is reasonable. My program (and probably many others) does not have any guidelines outlining what should be expected of TAs. This means that - theoretically - faculty members can put whatever responsibilities they wish onto their TAs, no matter whether they are reasonable or not. Meanwhile, advisors can require their students to produce research even when they are not being paid for it. In both cases, it becomes the grad student's job to speak up if she feels that she is being treated unfairly.

Academia does not prevent abuse of grad students by faculty members. Abuse can come through advisors and faculty members overworking their students as TAs and unpaid researchers, as discussed above. But it can also come through unprofessional behavior, as I experienced with YKW. And there are no protocols in place for preventing this either. It seems as if faculty members can get away with whatever behavior they want - they can be rude, childish, passive-aggressive, and overly demanding - and to a certain point, no one can stop them. Either the grad student puts up with this silently, or chooses to speak up.

I chose to speak up. Luckily, my program has a figure known as the lead TA - a senior grad student who serves as a liaison between TAs and the grad committee to ensure we are not being overworked. I went to him with my concerns and originally, he was able to help by bumping my grader up to 10 hrs/week. Unfortunately, by this point, my motivation was already so far down the toilet that these additional grader hours did not help my situation much, if at all. I was already contemplating leaving the program after spring semester, if not after fall semester.

Last week, my desire to leave the program was cemented when YKW struck again. This time, he informed me that I would be taking charge of not just one exam during the last week of classes - but also an optional final (which was not originally planned). This horribly unreasonable request pushed my already high stress levels over the edge, and I was forced to go to the lead TA again and ultimately to the grad committee chair, who would help me take more aggressive action against YKW by pushing teaching responsibilities back onto him and his senior grad students.

To protect my emotional and mental health, I have now reached a final decision to withdraw from classes for the remainder of fall semester, and I will not be returning to the Mechanical Engineering PhD program in the spring. It is entirely possible that I could have a great experience in another lab with a new advisor, but at this point, I feel I have exhausted my options at CU. In my case, a secondary driving factor in the decision to leave academia is another passion: triathlon. It is crazy to think that when I accepted my offer of admission in March, I had not yet competed in my first triathlon. I had no idea the role that triathlon would end up playing in my life - specifically how important it would become to me in such a short period of time - and I had no idea that the opportunity for a professional career would present itself after only my second-ever race. My priorities and career goals have shifted away from academia toward triathlon, and I am extremely excited about the potential to put more time into training, and to see where this sport takes me.

Furthermore, I know that I am not alone in all this - there are many other horror stories out there in academia, some even worse than mine. I also know that my experience is far from typical, as plenty of people have had entirely positive experiences as grad students. But it does reveal many of the very real problems that do exist in academia. In this way, I hope that my experience can shed light on what needs to be changed for academia to bring out the best in its students. I also hope that my experience will encourage other graduate students to speak up if they feel they are not being treated professionally, reasonably, or fairly.

Maybe someday, somewhere, I will go back and finish my PhD. But right now I am putting my doctoral studies in the rearview mirror and focusing on what is ahead: triathlon, along with a lot of housecleaning, a lot of laundry, a lot of home-cooked meals, and a lot of de-stressing - anything to get my life back into order. Today is December 1, 2017. A new day, a new month, and a new chapter in my life.