How much fun is MIT as a graduate student?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Massachusetts Institute of Technology
121

<p>I too am interested in hearing the argument for why programs should not provide information. Academia is a system that inherently relies on the principle of full information disclosure and transparency. When you publish a discovery in an academic journal, you don't just publish the result. You also provide information on the exact steps you used to obtain the result, whose prior work upon which you built, so that everybody can easily reproduce and verify your methodology and draw their own conclusion as to the validity of your result.</p>

<p>Yet it seems to me that certain people don't seem to believe in that principle when it comes to disclosing information about the career outcomes of former graduates. From what I have seen, the argument goes as follows:</p>

<p>1) The schools do not have to provide any information whatsoever about the career success (or lack thereof) of their former graduates. Rather, it is up to the prospective students to discover this information for themselves.
2) Nevertheless, if those prospective students then make poor choices because of incomplete information, then that's their problem, and the schools are under no obligation to help them develop other career skills.</p>

<p>I find it shocking that somebody would seriously argue against both information transparency and alternative career support. Like I said before, a poor career outcome for a particular school hurts everybody, including the school. If a former student of MIT (or any other school) ends up having to work at McDonald's due to poor ex-ante information and/or lack of marketable skills, then the school's reputation will suffer. Better to have simply not admitted this student at all. Once you admit somebody and he decides to come, perhaps because of poor information about the career outcomes of former students, he's now your responsibility because he is going to carry forth the brand name of your school forever.</p>

122

<p>
[quote]
Sure, the program doesn't have the obligation to do this. But they should do it. That's the point.

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<p>Perhaps there is a misunderstanding about the meaning of 'should' here. What I am trying to say is that universities need not be required to provide this information, if they have higher priorities (such as helping their students do research). On the other hand, I don't see any problem with them providing this information, provided that they have the resources, and all concerned parties have consented to having their information published.</p>

<p>
[quote]
And how can you reasonably expect those parties to do that? They don't know the names of the former graduates. They don't (yet) have an established network of current and former students of the program via which they can contact people. The program has all of these things.

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</p>

<p>The doctoral recipients of a university are a matter of public record. Anyone can contact a university and get this. Moreover, their dissertation is considered a university publication, so it is available from the university library or archives, perhaps for a small fee. From this, anyone who wishes to know more information is free to conduct their own searches.</p>

<p>Now some universities provide extra information. When I applied to graduate school, I contacted all of the departments I was interested in and asked for their yearly graduate information packet, which contained a list of professors, their research interests, and various other things. Some of the students elected to provide some personal information about themselves, including indicating a willingness to be contacted by prospective students. I'm all for this, and I even agreed to talk to prospective students myself, after I had been in my graduate program for a year. But no one was obligated to do this. Many people chose not to participate because they were too busy, or didn't want to. This should not be a problem.</p>

<p>
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I find it absolutely shocking that you place zero responsibility on the shoulders of the program. None. According to your stance, it is entirely up to the individuals to do everything, and the programs should do nothing to help them, and if the individuals make poorly informed decisions, it is entirely their fault with the programs bearing no responsibility whatsoever.

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<p>In the absence of any information that is not lawfully required to be published by the university, it is the prospective students' responsibility to gather the information. On the other hand, those students need not feel obliged to apply to those programs that don't provide the information they're looking for.</p>

<p>
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It's nice that you think this, but maybe give some sort of reasoning why you're arguing against schools providing such information?

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</p>

<p>I'm not against schools providing such information. I hope I've made that clear.</p>

123

<p>
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The doctoral recipients of a university are a matter of public record. Anyone can contact a university and get this

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</p>

<p>False. They are not a matter of public record. </p>

<p>Now, I think what you are referring to is that institutions (i.e. employers) may check to see whether a particular person in fact graduated from a particular school. But that's hardly what we are talking about here. Such an institution has to supply an actual name of a person by which the school will then provide a yes/no answer. But what if you don't even know the name? That's precisely the problem faced by prospective students - they don't know who the former graduates are. </p>

<p>
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But no one was obligated to do this. Many people chose not to participate because they were too busy, or didn't want to. This should not be a problem.

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</p>

<p>I am not asking for obligations from anybody. Given the information search tools available nowadays, it is not hard for programs to find many of their former graduates through Facebook, LinkedIn, and other networking sites. After all, the programs have the crucial information starting point - the list of names of the former students. Like I said, if somebody chooses to publicly post their information on these social networking sites, then they they have already effectively consented to reveal that information to the public. {Which gets back to what I said before: if you really don't want your school or anybody else to know what you're doing, don't publish that information on the Internet. } But if you don't even have that list of names, you can't even start to search. </p>

<p>The argument for schools not providing information and then leaving decisions to the individual themselves who then have to live with the results with no responsibility accruing to the schools is a direct application of libertarianism. But that means that it suffers from the basic problem of libertarianism, which is that it inherently relies on complete information being easily available to all parties. When certain parties have access to less information than others do, then those parties are likely to make suboptimal decisions. That would be like having to choose to marry a woman before you've even dated her. The dating phase is an information gathering process to determine whether she is a marriageable match for you. When you're denied this information, you're probably going to make a suboptimal decision. </p>

<p>
[quote]
In the absence of any information that is not lawfully required to be published by the university, it is the prospective students' responsibility to gather the information. On the other hand, those students need not feel obliged to apply to those programs that don't provide the information they're looking for.

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</p>

<p>Nobody is talking about legal requirements. Obviously nobody is legally obligated to do anything.</p>

<p>What we are talking about is what schools should do, what they are legally obligated to do. Heck, the programs could blatantly lie to all of their applicants, as there is no law that prevents them from doing that. But I think we can all agree that they should not. What they should do is provide as much information as possible in order to produce the best matches possible. That helps the students, also helps the schools. No school should want a bunch of malcontents who feel that they were lied to or were otherwise deliberately not provided with the full story before they chose to come. It's bad for the students and bad for the school. </p>

<p>
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I'm not against schools providing such information. I hope I've made that clear.

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<p>You now have, and I don't think there is anything left to dispute. Nobody has ever argued that the schools should be legally required to do anything. The question is what they should do. I still have yet to hear anybody explicate the argument as to why schools shouldn't do what I have proposed, if there are in fact people who believe that they should not. If there are no such people here, then there is nothing to dispute.</p>

124

<p>When I was looking at grad schools, most departments provided statistics about what happened to their graduates on their website. Departments with favorable statistics tended to brag about them, knowing that touting every postdoc position recent graduates got is a form of recruitment. </p>

<p>Barring that, finding out what people did after the program, how long it took to graduate, did people often flunk quals, and whether the students were happy were the questions I was told to ask from every single source of graduate school search advice I had gotten.</p>

125

<p>Commencement exercises are a matter of public record. The commencement program which contains the names of the recipients of the degrees awarded is distributed at the ceremony. If there are insufficient copies made, it's still possible to know who the degree recipients are by taking notes or recording the ceremony.</p>

<p>Speaking specifically of MIT here, commencement is held in Kilian Court, which is outdoors. The public is invited to attend, although everyone is not guaranteed a seat. (I imagine that under some extreme conditions, such as hurricanes, the graduations might need to be held indoors, but the proceedings would still be a matter of public record.)</p>

<p>Also, as I wrote earlier, the doctoral dissertations are available at university libraries and/or archives, possibly for a fee. So although it might not be possible to make the request "give me all of the PhD recipients from department D during year Y", it is still possible to obtain that information from the published dissertations.</p>

126

<p>
[quote]
You now have, and I don't think there is anything left to dispute. Nobody has ever argued that the schools should be legally required to do anything. The question is what they should do. I still have yet to hear anybody explicate the argument as to why schools shouldn't do what I have proposed, if there are in fact people who believe that they should not. If there are no such people here, then there is nothing to dispute.

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<p>Yeah, very much agreed from my end as well. Generally I am more interested in the philosophy of running schools + graduate programs than in the legal precedents behind all that takes place. I'm glad this has been clarified -- this is why I decided directly to pose the question as to where the disagreement really lay.</p>

127

<p>
[quote]
Commencement exercises are a matter of public record. The commencement program which contains the names of the recipients of the degrees awarded is distributed at the ceremony. If there are insufficient copies made, it's still possible to know who the degree recipients are by taking notes or recording the ceremony.</p>

<p>Speaking specifically of MIT here, commencement is held in Kilian Court, which is outdoors. The public is invited to attend, although everyone is not guaranteed a seat. (I imagine that under some extreme conditions, such as hurricanes, the graduations might need to be held indoors, but the proceedings would still be a matter of public record.)

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</p>

<p>Uh, no. Commencement exercises list the names of the students who actually choose to attend commencement. Many do not, as it is not required. I knew plenty who didn't and were therefore not listed on the commencement program. {After all, it would be rather boring and embarrassing for the emcee to be reading off a bunch of names of people and have nobody actually walk across the stage to collect diplomas.}</p>

<p>Having said that, let's explore your point further. Do you honestly expect people to attend the commencements of all of the graduate schools that they might choose to apply to, just to record the names of the graduates? And not just for one year's commencement ceremonies, but for the ceremonies*several years*? To use a specific example, in a few years, mathboy98 is probably going to be applying to some of the top math PhD programs in the world, which include places like Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, Chicago, Yale, etc. Since he obviously doesn't know which ones he will even get into, much less which one he will actually choose to attend, you're saying that he needs to track all of them, right? In other words, for each of the next few years, he will need to somehow obtain the commencement programs of all of these schools, and may even have to fly around the country just to take notes at them. Really? Come on, I think we can all agree that that's not reasonable. It would be far far more efficient for the programs to simply provide that information out of hand. </p>

<p>
[quote]
Also, as I wrote earlier, the doctoral dissertations are available at university libraries and/or archives, possibly for a fee. So although it might not be possible to make the request "give me all of the PhD recipients from department D during year Y", it is still possible to obtain that information from the published dissertations.

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<p>It is possible only if you already know the list of names. Again, what if you don't? Then you don't even know where to start looking. </p>

<p>But the real question is why are you demanding that students be their own private detectives, when the programs already have all of the information and could easily disseminate it? As I said before, who has greater access to information about the graduates of a particular program: a prospective student, or the administrators of the program itself? That is not a close call. </p>

<p>Hence, yagottabelieve, I find it most interesting indeed that you demand so much from the prospective students, but you demand nothing all from the programs themselves, despite the advantaged position that the programs occupy. And when things go awry, you place the entire onus of responsibility on the students, and none at all on the programs. In other words, programs are not responsible for providing pertinent alumni information to prospective students and are also not responsible if those prospective students make poor choices. The one-way bias is manifest. If you're just shilling for the programs, then, come right out and just say so. At least then everybody would know where you stand.</p>

128

<p>Wow, I didn't realize this was still going. Can I ask point blank, yagottabelieve, what is your point in mentioning that there exist means to get hold of the information that a prospective Ph.D. student would want? The list of schools Sakky gives is definitely included in my list of schools to consider, and I'd very much like to know more about what their graduates are doing. I thought you agreed that you'd like them to provide information if possible.</p>

<p>Are you really suggesting that this information is so easily accessible? Can you give it to me right now? Because if so, I'm all "ears" -- I'd love to have that kind of information about Ph.D. programs. I think Sakky gave me, earlier in this thread, some sort of list from Columbia, and hey, I even recognized someone who taught a course I took from there, a fresh postdoc. How nice would it be to be able to trace others in a similar way!</p>

129

<p>Mathboy98, I think yagottabelieve has recommended that you personally fly to the commencements of each of the schools in which you are interested, sneak into the ceremonies (and since you probably won't have a ticket, you'll have to stand) and record the names of every PhD graduate of the relevant program that you hear announced. I would really love to see how one could do that for Harvard, as they usually cordon off the entire Yard with official security for those ceremonies to prevent anybody who doesn't have a ticket from even entering the area, although perhaps you could design some sort of eavesdropping/bugging device. You also better hope that the commencement ceremonies for two of your target schools don't happen to be run on the same date, although I suppose yagottabelieve might then recommend hiring multiple people to take notes for you. Furthermore, in order to obtain an acceptable sample size, you would have to do this every year for multiple years. </p>

<p>Of course that all begs the obvious question that if all of this information is supposedly so public anyway, then why don't all the programs just provide that information straight away? After all, the programs already have the list of the names of the graduates as part of their records. They also probably know where many of those graduates ended up. They certainly don't have to sneak into commencement ceremonies for which they were never invited. So what's the harm in just posting this information? What do they have to lose?</p>

130

<p>I honestly don't understand yagottabelieve's point in the last post, I guess -- I would certainly hope that it's not what is suggested above, though :) -- will have to wait and see.</p>

131

<p>
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Commencement exercises list the names of the students who actually choose to attend commencement. Many do not, as it is not required.

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<p>Details. Semantics. Enough people participate in graduation ceremonies that you can get a representative list.</p>

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Really? Come on, I think we can all agree that that's not reasonable. It would be far far more efficient for the programs to simply provide that information out of hand.

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<p>If the programs provide it, fine. If not, mathboy98 (or anyone else) needs to do the legwork, if they want the information.</p>

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It is possible only if you already know the list of names. Again, what if you don't? Then you don't even know where to start looking.

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<p>One might start by placing a call to the archive or library of the university in question and ask for a list of all the recent published dissertations from a given department.</p>

<p>I recently went to the MIT archive web site and got a list of recent patents issued in some areas of EECS I was interested in. The menus were straightforward. I found what I was looking for. The same can be done for dissertations.</p>

<p>Perhaps there are some unversities that don't have archive web sites. In this case, just place a call to the archive and ask for a list of recent dissertations and their authors. It may cost you a little bit of money, but it is still available.</p>

<p>
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If you're just shilling for the programs, then, come right out and just say so. At least then everybody would know where you stand.

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</p>

<p>If you find my motives so distrustful, why are you arguing with me?</p>

132

<p>
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The list of schools Sakky gives is definitely included in my list of schools to consider, and I'd very much like to know more about what their graduates are doing. I thought you agreed that you'd like them to provide information if possible.

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</p>

<p>I do agree.</p>

<p>
[quote]
Are you really suggesting that this information is so easily accessible? Can you give it to me right now? Because if so, I'm all "ears" -- I'd love to have that kind of information about Ph.D. programs. I think Sakky gave me, earlier in this thread, some sort of list from Columbia, and hey, I even recognized someone who taught a course I took from there, a fresh postdoc. How nice would it be to be able to trace others in a similar way!

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<p>I said the information was a matter of public record. This is not the same as "easily accessible". It may indeed be difficult, in some cases, to access the information. This is reasonable grounds for people not to apply to those universities.</p>

<p>Now as to your personal situation, you could very well start at the web pages of the graduate departments you're interested in, and see what information is there. If they don't have what you want, then try the university libraries or archives, and ask them for a list of recent dissertations published by the departments you are interested in.</p>

<p>I'll give some examples:</p>

<p>CSAIL</a> Publications</p>

<p>[url=<a href="http://nms.csail.mit.edu/people/%5DNetworks"&gt;http://nms.csail.mit.edu/people/]Networks&lt;/a> and Mobile Systems People<a href="This%20would%20be%20useful%20to%20someone%20interested%20in%20doing%20research%20in%20the%20MIT's%20Networks%20and%20Mobile%20Systems%20Group.">/url</a></p>

<p>In general, people who are interested in a particular research group from a particular university ought to be following the research activities of that group before applying, in my opinion.</p>

133

<p>
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If the programs provide it, fine. If not, mathboy98 (or anyone else) needs to do the legwork, if they want the information.

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</p>

<p>Or the other option, which you continually and conspicuously refuse to endorse: the programs should provide the information. Why play games if the information is, as you said, a matter of public record anyway? </p>

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If you find my motives so distrustful, why are you arguing with me?

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</p>

<p>Because, like I said, you continue to place the entire onus on the student, with none whatsoever on the programs themselves, despite acknowledging the fact that the programs have easy access to the information.</p>

<p>
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This is reasonable grounds for people not to apply to those universities.</p>

<p>Now as to your personal situation, you could very well start at the web pages of the graduate departments you're interested in, and see what information is there. If they don't have what you want, then try the university libraries or archives, and ask them for a list of recent dissertations published by the departments you are interested in.

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</p>

<p>Again, why exactly should they have to do this, if the departments can easily do it for them? I find it most intriguing indeed that you demand that the students do everything and that the programs do nothing.</p>

134

<p>Furthermore, this entire discussion regarding 'dissertations' is clearly omitting the largest lacuna of all: those who don't even manage to write dissertations at all (and hence, don't finish). I would argue that these people represent the most crucial information of all, because one can extrapolate the chances that you will successfully finish. Does it really matter if 5 people graduate from a program and land top academic jobs if 50 don't even manage to finish at all? More importantly, one should ascertain what sorts of jobs these people get. If those 50 still get good jobs anyway, then the program may still be a reasonable choice despite the high attrition rate.</p>

135

<p>
[quote]
One might start by placing a call to the archive or library of the university in question and ask for a list of all the recent published dissertations from a given department.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>
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then try the university libraries or archives, and ask them for a list of recent dissertations published by the departments you are interested in.

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</p>

<p>And the response that many schools will provide is that they will not release such information, and that you have to provide a specific name. But of course if you already knew the name, then you wouldn't be needing those dissertations in the first place. </p>

<p>That gets to the basic bootstrap problem. The program has the list of names of the graduates. So why not just list them? Or at least just list the job outcomes of its graduates while leaving the names anonymous. Why does the student have to do everything and the program do nothing?</p>

136

<p>
[quote]

Now as to your personal situation, you could very well start at the web pages of the graduate departments you're interested in, and see what information is there. If they don't have what you want, then try the university libraries or archives, and ask them for a list of recent dissertations published by the departments you are interested in.

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</p>

<p>I would like, as a matter of interest as a mathematician, to see what kinds of research students at a certain school are doing. It certainly helps to have peers who're working in at least similar fields to my own, for healthy reinforcement. Nevertheless, I do also want to know quite explicitly what graduates are doing. They may have not finished their dissertations, they may have finished the dissertations but not be researching anymore, or they may have landed academic jobs. I mean, the sad state of affairs is that while I'm sure top programs churn out some great graduates, I have no way of learning (well, until you enlighten me perhaps) what these guys are doing. </p>

<p>The websites generally don't seem to help. I've cleaned quite a few websites out, to be honest, and found very little in the way of such information. And I'm certainly curious. It's one of the primary reasons I would even post in such a thread -- genuine interest in learning what graduate students are up to + what happens after they graduate.</p>

137

<p>Mathboy98, like I said, I'm sure yagottabelieve would say that it is then your job to seek out the dissertations of all of the graduates of the programs in which you are interested in. I find that a most interesting notion if you don't actually know the names of the authors, but let's say that you somehow are able to do that for some of them. You then probably supplement that list by obtaining the commencement listings of the programs, or by even sneaking into some of those commencements sans ticket and record the list of names. Again, this would be a yearly ritual for you so that you can gather a multi-year compilation of graduates. Then - to deal with those students who never even graduated at all - you would probably start by contacting the list of graduates and then pumping them for names of all of their former colleagues, including the ones that never graduated. </p>

<p>But you should note that the key is that you should be the one to have to do all of the legwork. The programs themselves shouldn't have to provide any of this information, despite the fact that they have easy access to it. Furthermore, in the event of a bad match - if you end up choosing a program that turns out not to be right for you and whose students end up in bad jobs that you did not know about - you bear all of the responsibility and the programs bear none. The fault is entirely yours. That is, if you subscribe to yagottabelieve's philosophy. </p>

<p>Now, to be fair, yagottabelieve did say that he was 'not against' those programs providing that information. But that's like saying that I am 'not against' you giving a handicapped person your seat on the bus. In reality, not only am I 'not against' you giving your seat up, I would say that you should do that. Similarly, as a student, you are 'information-handicapped' about the programs you are interested in. The programs have that information, so why shouldn't they provide it? Especially if, as yagottabelieve has asserted, the information can supposedly be accessed anyway? Why not then just save everybody time and pain?</p>

138

<p>Hi everyone,
i am writing to have some information about the PhD programs at MIT. Is there anybody that is doing the PhD at MIT?
Thank u
gg</p>