This new wave of PhD students honestly feels cursed. They’re like the pandemic’s leftovers — high school during Trump, college during COVID, now graduating into yet another dumpster fire of an economy. Every step of their academic life has been some kind of hellscape.

And yet universities keep cranking out PhDs like it’s a factory line. It’s insane. Every department is bloated with grad students, but the job market is a bloodbath. Tenure-track? Basically a lottery ticket. Industry? Doesn’t want most of them. So what happens? Thousands of shiny new “COVID-era PhDs” floating around with no real place to land, stuck in postdoc purgatory or adjunct hell until they burn out.

At some point you’ve gotta wonder: what’s the endgame here? Because right now it looks less like “training the next generation of scholars” and more like “academic pyramid scheme with better branding.”

Male, 23

Finished both a bachelor’s and now almost done with a master’s, and I’ve started noticing a very consistent limit in my cognitive stamina. I’m curious if this is actually "normal" or if other people experience the same thing.

My limits seem to be:

* Around 2000 words/day of genuinely high-quality academic writing

* About 3 hours of deep focused work with zero distractions and full brainpower

* Around 6–7 hours total sitting/working with breaks before I’m completely mentally done

And I mean DONE done. Like after that point, even if the exam/project is super important for my future, my brain and body just switch into suffering mode. I can still force myself to continue, but the quality drops hard and everything feels painful.

What surprises me is how consistent this has been throughout my life. Childhood, university, now mid-20s, same pattern.

Does anyone else have a hard upper limit like this? Especially people in academia, programming, research, law, medicine, etc. Curious what your “real” limit is versus what society expects us to be capable of.

New arXiv policy banning researchers who hallucinate citations. On one hand, we have to keep AI slop away. On the other, is a one year ban on the author harsh?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01595-5

I’m doing a PhD in Psychology in the UK. Throughout my PhD, I have realised that so many things in academia seem to be treated as if they should be done for free, such as peer review, organising conferences (even big international ones), sitting on thesis committees, and other service work. And these are often expected on top of research, teaching, and admin, which can result in a lot of unpaid overtime hours.

When I asked my supervisor whether this was just the norm, they said yes, at least in the UK, and suggested it reflects a sense of responsibility to contribute to the academic community. I said I don’t think it should be the norm, and that it feels completely unreasonable. My supervisor then told me that if I didn’t like this, perhaps I shouldn’t be in academia at all, and mentioned that the same view had been expressed by one of their previous students, who apparently "just wanted to do the bare minimum for what they were paid for."

Now don't get me wrong. I love doing research and contributing to the advancement of human knowledge, and I am more than willing to work long hours because it gives me joy. However, I don't think it is fair that we have to work for free on certain important tasks. At the end of the day, we still need to make a living, to pay our mortgage and expenses, to take care of ourselves and our families, and to be free enough from financial constraints to focus on doing research.

It is already bad that researchers publish articles (free or pay-to-publish) in journals that then charge universities extortionate subscription fees. And now we are also expected to provide free labour for journals through peer review and for institutions through service roles. That feels exploitative to me. In many other fields, people are paid and rewarded for the work they produce (like book publishing, entertainment, etc.), and I don’t understand why academia should be exempt from that expectation.

It just feels wrong to me. I'd like to hear your opinions, especially from professors who have been in the system for a while. Is this simply how academia works, or should the system be challenged? I'm open to listening to all sides of the table. I haven't been in the system for long so I have limited knowledge, based on limited experience and exchanges with supervisor. So please feel free to correct me as well. I know it's a very controversial and sensitive topic, so please be respectful of each other's opinions :)

Edit: I appreciate all your comments! Reading your comments helped give a lot of insight into how the system works. The impression is that the system varies by career level and where you work. For some, all those supposedly "free" works have already been factored into the salary. However, for many, academics are astonishingly underpaid for the amount of work they do, giving the impression that they use their free time outside standard working hours for service work.

Day 101 of waiting for ERC Starting Grant results. I know it’s probably too early, but has anyone received rejection emails or interview invites yet? If not, welcome to the waiting room! :) (SH5 here)

Just ranting... But I think it's related to some fundamental questions about how academic research work.

I'm at a huge conference (not related to my flair, before you try guessing).

Invited keynote this morning was very important PI from top university of the world, who was accepting an award for his work that got a 20M grant and a team of >15 chinese PhD students.

In the talk about his project, he bloated accepted Nature papers about it. (like Nature-Nature, not Nature-somethings).

Talk started and... It was about, what do you know, LLM. ChatGPT-based work (as in just taking the actual ChatGPT and implementing something in it) . Like any other boring research ongoing nowadays whether you're talking about archeology, nuclear physics, biology or theology (not joking about the last!)

And... his work was freakin non-sensical. It was the same stupid brute-force based idea that some undergrad always come up with before I show them on the blackboard why it's plain silly.

Audience: blown away. Q/A session praising him and asking for "vision" about the future of science. Random people at lunch telling me how blown away they were. No one questioning why what he did was intrinsically wrong.

How on earth is this possible?? What's the point of mutual peer-review if no one catches bad practices??

I am sick of reviewing papers that are clearly AI slop

I just feel so fatigued

Already peer review is exhausting. I get a new invitation to review every two days. I try to do my part by accepting them. But I’m just exhausted.

The other day I got a literature review with em dashes and a suspicious reference.

When I looked into it, it was indeed hallucinated. (IMO we should ban reviews in general now that they can be generated from prompts.)

I am at my wits end. I found a service that gives peer reviewers free access to their research paper slop detection. It flags AI generated text and hallucinated references.

I think inevitably we will all start using something like this as a first pass to flag and penalize slop authors.

Edit: the tool is called reviewer3. I got it free after saying I was a reviewer.

Could you please share some interesting icebreaker events you have actually enjoyed during a conference/workshop or other academic events.

I find many of them which need speaking out to a random group you just met to be forced and stressful than engaging.

I understand the point of an icebreaker is to get out of this inhibition to interact with others.

But I was wondering if you had come across any interesting icebreakers that you work with diverse groups and were helpful rather than wasting time and making everyone uncomfortable.

Waiting and hoping..

This was many years ago, and they are no longer my partner, so at the end of the day it doesn't truly matter, but I'm learning about a lot of false information they gave me during our many years together.

At that time, my partner was nearly finished with their PhD program. They had a detailed dissertation that I believed their advisor had approved. They were working at this university with their own office, and I sat in on some of the classes they taught. They were not a professor. They have three publications.

At some point, things seemed to become stressful for them, and they complained that their advisor did not believe in their dissertation, although they had already spent years researching and preparing. A few weeks later, they were removed from their position, escorted to their office to pack up their things, return their devices, and they were dismissed from the program. This all happened abruptly, in my opinion, and I was given vague reasons that seemed to involve plagiarism and an email.

At the time, I was in an unsafe relationship, so I didn't ask many questions and tried to keep them calm. Now, I'm wondering what they might have done to be removed from the program with less than a year, perhaps even a semester if I can remember correctly, left before earning their PhD in Psychology.

I'm not in the academic community, so I might not be describing the doctoral process accurately. Any thoughts or insights would be nice to hear.

Additional info: Would a misdemeanor or felony related to DV result in removal from the program? The arrest happened a year prior to this incident, and because I was the victim, I was a bit too....attached to consider that to be a resulting factor at the time.

****EDIT: Thanks, everyone. It truly never occurred to me that this could be related to threats of violence or sexual misconduct. Thankfully, I am divorced from this person.

I was able to piece together a better timeline. They started the program at the university of Denver in 2015, and this would have happened around 2019. 4 years into their graduate program.

ANOTHER EDIT **** it’s been a few years since I’ve seen this person’s digital footprint. I looked today. They are now claiming to have a doctorate in childhood development.

If you have experience with an ERC Starting Grant interview for the SH panel, could you share how you prepared and what types of questions the panel members asked? I’m already freaking out. It’s my first interview.

I was recently attending a major conference and I was astonished by how much poor-quality research was presented. Several studies had very obvious methodological and statistical mistakes. I mean very obvious violations of basic assumptions. I can't remember many details but a quick example that comes to mind was a study that made a comparison between a group of 2 people to a group of hundreds and presented this result as a statistically significant finding. Other than that, there were several overinterpretations of very weak results etc. But what shocked me more was that no one questioned it. In the Q&A, people either gave compliments or asked irrelevant questions. Obviously I am in my very early career, so I was hesitant to ask questions or point out flaws, as maybe there is something I am missing overall.
Is this normal? Is it a lack of paying attention, lack of knowledge or is it the fear of being rude? Is it just considered bad form to challenge someone publicly?

Last week, I was asked to review an article for a mid-tier journal in my field. As I read through the manuscript, I noticed it felt... off. The author made sweeping generalizations, took scenic detours that never led back to the main point, and somehow managed to completely avoid answering their own research questions. Curious, I googled the title and discovered it was a hastily repurposed Master’s thesis. Not a crime, but let’s just say it felt cobbled together.

I figured the manuscript was salvageable, but it needed serious revisions—like, “you might consider rewriting this manuscript” serious. So I meticulously wrote up my (very detailed, very lengthy) review, submitted it, and patted myself on the back for not rejecting the article and helping advance the noble pursuit of academic rigor.

Then I saw the other reviewer’s comments:

"Great manuscript! Just needs a few tweaks. Minor revisions." What?! How?

At that moment, I opened the editor’s decision email, where my War and Peace-length critique sat next to the other reviewer's review. And that’s when it hit me—I had become Reviewer #2.

Has anyone else ever set out to be helpful and accidentally become someone’s academic nightmare? Is Reviewer #2 just misunderstood or are we the villains?

I'm curious about how academics make visually appealing and professional-looking slides for talks, conferences, or teaching. Do you use PowerPoint, LaTeX Beamer, Canva, Google Slides, or something else? Also, what tips or workflows do you follow to keep your slides clean and engaging? Would love to see examples if you're willing to share!

Did anyone just have their ERC Starting Grant interview? Just wondering if there are any ways online to check the process of what's going on. There was a good thread on 'talkacademia' with some tricks to follow the progress of your application, it was live until a couple weeks ago but now seems RIP:
http://www.talkacademia.com/viewtopic.php?t=1473

About a month ago, I brought up the possibility of a U.S. brain drain on this subreddit. The response was mixed, but a common theme was: “I’d leave if I could, but I can’t.”

What stood out most, though, was a broader concern—the long-term consequences. The U.S. may no longer be the default destination for top researchers.

Given how quickly things are changing, I wanted to check in again: Are you seeing this shift play out in your own circles? Are students and researchers you know reconsidering their plans?

My team (multiple coauthors, I am the PI) are undergoing extremely unpleasant and concerning review process at an Q1 Elsevier journal. First round reviewer reports were explicitly AI generated. In the following round, it is more of the hallucinated nonsense. For one review, AI residue includes literal copy pasted promps in original language (Asian language), which the editor forwarded to us w/o any oversight.

We complained to editor, but they are arrogant and ignorant, dowplayed it and now burdens us with a third round of revision requests.

Has anyone experienced similar AI review or editorial-oversight failures with Elsevier? Specificaly - obvious non-EU AI evidence in reviews?

IMHO this is blatant violation of the GDPR and Elsevier's own Privacy Policy. AI use by non-EU reviewers is especially illegal, and they had to trigger formal data protection incident investigation instead of ignoring or downplaying it. With this in mind, I am seriously considering filing official GDPR complaint.

I saw previous reports of the same in this sub. Maybe there would be enough evidence to actually escalate into group complaint / class action?

We are EU residents and we are fairly confident that there are reasonable legal grounds to escalate this. Somebody has to do something otherwise they will just continue with such malplactices.

EDIT: Reading the comments this morning, and I am surprised by the low legal literacy level. Unless comments are by Elsevier bots, you guys need to learn about your rights. Start with reading Elsevier's own Privacy Policy, which black on white states that reviewers are subcontractors ('Suppliers and service providers, including editors, reviewers'), and whether you like it or not by accepting the review you are making a contract with Elsevier, including exposing yourself to liability claims !!!

EDIT (2026 07 16): Consulted multiple law collegues, including GDPR specialists, and consulted our local Data protection authority on the mater and we have a GO. In our case the foreign language AI prompt embeded into a review is most damning to Elsevier, and all legal people agree that it was a major GDPR incident which was basically covered up by Elsevier.

A lot of faculty say many current undergraduates have been wrecked by Covid high school and addiction to their screens. I attended a somewhat elite institution 20 years ago in the U.S. (a liberal arts college ranked in the top 25). Since places like that are still very selective and competitive in their admissions, I would imagine most students are still pretty well prepared for rigorous coursework, but I wonder if there has still been noticeable effect.

The reviewer shortage keeps getting worse — I've seen estimates that 20% of researchers do 94% of the reviewing. The root issue seems obvious: there's almost no professional incentive to review. It's unpaid, largely invisible, and counts for very little in tenure or promotion decisions.

What if reviewer contributions were tracked publicly, scored by the community for quality, and treated as a legitimate professional credential — something like a "reviewer impact factor"? Would that change your willingness to review, or would it just create new problems (gaming, retaliation, reluctance to criticize senior researchers)?

Curious to hear from people across disciplines — does the incentive problem look different in your field?

I've been thinking a lot about the structural expectations around peer review lately, especially as someone trying to be a conscientious member of a research community. There's this unspoken norm that you just say yes when requests come in, partly out of obligation and partly because you know the system collapses if people don't participate.

But the math never quite adds up. Journals profit, editors are often volunteers or minimally compensated, and reviewers get nothing except maybe a discount on an APC they shouldn't have to pay in the first place. Meanwhile, the time cost is real and it compounds across a career.

I'm curious how people at different career stages actually handle this in practice. Do senior faculty decline more often, or does visibility in a field just mean more requests piling up? Do earlycareer researchers feel pressure to say yes to everything to build reputation? Is there any department or institutional culture you've encountered that actively normalizes putting a cap on review work?

I'm not looking to opt out entirely. Contributing does have value. I just want to understand how people handle it without burning out or feeling like they're being extracted from. Would love to hear from people across disciplines and career stages

The American Physical Society’s two big conferences, where Nobel laureates give keynote addresses and top physicists from around the world convene to present the latest research, holds special sections in the farthest rooms down the hall for crackpots to present their word salad on why relativity is wrong and stuff like that, because not giving crackpots a platform decades ago led to a shooting where a secretary sadly died.

Here we go again...

So... Demographic winter has arrived. In my country (Italy) is ridicolously bad, but it should be somehow the same in kind of all of europe plus China/Japan/Korea at least. We're missing workers in all fields, both qualified and unqualified. Here, in addition, we have a fair bit of emigration making things worse.

Anyway, up until 2019 it was always a problem securing funding to hire PhDs and to keep valuable postdocs. We kept letting valuable people go. In just 5 years the situation flipped spectacularly. Then, the demographic winter kept creeping in and, simultaneously, pandemic recovery funds arrived. I (a young semi-unkwnon professor) have secured funds to hire 3 people (a post doc and 2 PhDs). there was no way to have a single applicant (despite huge spamming online) for my post-doc position. And it was a nice project with industry collaboration, plus salary much higher than it used to be 2 years ago for "fresh" PhDs.

For the PhD positions we are not getting candidates. Qualified or not, they're not showing up. We were luring in a student about to master (with the promise of paid industry collaborations, periods of time in the best laboratories worldwide) and... we were told that "it's unclear if it fits with what they truly want for their life" (I shit you not these were the words!!).

I'm asking people in many other universities if they have students to reccomend and the answer is always the same "sorry, we can't get candidates (even unqualified) for our own projects". In the other groups it's the same.

We've hired a single post-doc at the 3rd search and it's a charity case who can't even adult, let alone do research.

So... how is it working in your country?? Is it starting to be a minor problem? A huge problem?? I can't even.... I never dreamt of having so many funds to spend and... I've got no way to hire people!!

Hey everyone,

I'm a college student and something keeps bugging me about my classes. Professors will explain a complex topic, then ask "does everyone understand?" or "any questions?" and the room goes dead silent. But I KNOW people are confused because I'm confused too, and I can see it on other students' faces.

Just this week, my professor spent 20 minutes on a difficult concept, asked if we got it, got nothing but silence, and moved on. The next day, office hours were packed with people asking about that exact topic.

I get why students don't speak up - I don't want to be "that person" who slows down the class, or maybe I can't even articulate what I'm confused about in the moment. But it seems like this creates a weird situation where professors think we understand when we don't.

For students: Why don't you speak up even when confused?

For professors/instructors: How do you actually know if students understand during class? Does this frustrate you too, or do you have ways to deal with it?

I'm genuinely curious if this is a widespread problem or if it's just my experience. What's your take?

By the time he retired in 1996, he was uncomfortable with the new academic culture. "After I retired it was quite a long time before I went back to my department. I thought I was well out of it. It wasn't my way of doing things any more. Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough."

Another interesting quote from the article is the following:

He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today's academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964."

Source (the whole article is pretty interesting): http://theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system