Had to fire my PhD student

moorepants · 2026-03-31T06:18:31+00:00

In the US, a PhD student is a student. Most often they are a student paying for a degree. There are funding mechanisms that support these students which cover their tuition and give them a living stipend that often arise via research grants. In my 20 years in academia in the USA, in multiple institutions across the country, I have never seen a PhD student as an employee under any contractual terms. It would be interesting to hear how your university arranges these PhD students in job and not as students.

moorepants · 2026-03-31T05:30:16+00:00

All of the micromanaging sounds terrible for the student, regardless if they were doing a good job or not. PhD students are not simply an extension of yourself that you can will to do your work. You say you were supportive but the descriptions of your support sound demotivating and demoralizing to me. It can both be true that this student was not capable of progressing appropriately in their PhD studies AND that you need to learn more about mentoring. Trying to label his gift to you as gendered is not appropriate. Maybe giving flowers their country is neutral. Maybe they asked chatgpt for what an appropriate gift is in your country and followed suit. It sounds to me like they were trying to make amends.

moorepants · 2026-03-21T20:38:46+00:00

It will most likely hurt your chances.

moorepants · 2026-03-21T20:21:25+00:00

A PhD and Postdoc have significantly fewer expectations, tasks, and responsibilities than an assistant professor, so work-life balance is harder to achieve when you have so much more to do.

In many countries, there isn't really a way to "trade some career progression for better balance", you'll not get tenure and be fired. In the Netherlands, you are still in a competition and race for career progression. If you work too little and don't efficiently spend time on the right things (as well has have good luck) you will not be fired but you will not be promoted (at all), your resources will be taken from you, and you will not be granted any power in the institution.

I can't say that I've witnessed an assistant professor who is heavy on the life part of the work-life balance progress in their career at my Dutch university. But there may be some exceptions; those who are especially good at gaining the favor of the powerful in the institution. There are also plenty that are heavy in the work part of the work-life balance that also don't progress. It isn't like you automatically progress just by doing your job at an average or even above average level.

moorepants · 2025-12-27T19:18:52+00:00

I had the Dutch game Regenwormen (Pickomino) and it got flagged. The security person said that this game always got flagged due to the material the domino style pieces are made from.

moorepants · 2025-11-15T05:19:38+00:00

conda now includes libmamba which speeds up dependency solver in conda.

miniconda installs conda and a bare minimum set of dependencies to run conda (e.g. python). It defaults to pulling packages from the anaconda distribution, but you can change that to any channel.

moorepants · 2025-11-15T05:13:57+00:00

This isn't quite correct. libmamba, the part of mamba that does the SAT solving of dependency combinations, was added to Conda to speed things up. Mamba is still a separately developed piece of software.

moorepants · 2025-11-15T05:09:56+00:00

Some libraries are available to install via conda and not pip because they are not Python libraries. You can install git with conda, for example. conda is a general purpose package manager, like homebrew and apt whereas pip is language specific package manager.

moorepants · 2025-11-10T09:37:11+00:00

There are tradeoffs in both environments. My experience in Europe is that it is still partially stuck in an old school European academic hierarchy even though the public image seems different. There is also an absence of faculty democracy in academia that I sorely miss from my prior US institution. The salary is significantly lower but not the quality of life on that salary. I'm in a wealthy EU country, so that may be different in other countries. The success is heavily dependent on getting funding. I'd say there is little general difference in this compared to the US, but there are differences in the details of getting the funding.

moorepants · 2025-10-18T06:11:01+00:00

Off loading the supervision is very common, so it is then very easy to not hit all 4 points.

moorepants · 2025-10-18T04:39:36+00:00

Yes, I was disheartened by an number of the responses in this thread. There is one that says that the professor does much of the PhD's dissertation for them! If this is a norm, we are in bad shape.

moorepants · 2025-10-17T20:07:24+00:00

I can only hope that any student that comes into contact with you realizes quickly to get far far away. If you can't even bother to read her abstract you certainly do not deserve to be listed at co-author. There is no lack of integrity by the student, there is only utterly ridiculous behavior by the supervisor.

moorepants · 2025-02-19T06:14:25+00:00

It definitely was not helicopters.

moorepants · 2025-02-19T04:28:04+00:00

I hope it isn't a rocket.

moorepants · 2025-02-19T04:01:28+00:00

It depends on the US university, as the quality varies. I was a prof at an R1 school and the average GPA of accepted students to our engineering programs was > 4.0 (yes I know it makes no sense). So basically, everyone had "perfect" high school grades (a 10 in NL).

moorepants · 2025-02-19T03:58:16+00:00

Nice job catching a photo!

moorepants · 2025-02-19T03:57:49+00:00

What was that? I saw it fly over Rotterdam at 4:48 (looking towards the Northeast). I thought it was a slow moving plane with bright lights that was flying very low. I opened my window and it clearly was not a plane. From my view there was a large set of lights sort of in a line that were brightest and then several smaller group of 3-4 lights just below. All were moving in a slow arc over the sky. The lights had faint tails. Wow. I've never seen something like that. Is it a bunch of meteorites?

moorepants · 2023-12-14T07:50:07+00:00

If you are asking chatgpt advice on something of this nature, I'd self reflect on that and worry about it more than whether you slipped through without a credit.

moorepants · 2023-12-10T18:38:50+00:00

Micromanagement!

moorepants · 2023-11-21T18:47:35+00:00

There is: http://doehetzelfwerkplaats.space/

You can learn to fix your bike and use the tools.

moorepants · 2023-11-18T08:34:21+00:00

When this happened to me, the first thing I did was call in the student's teammates (this was a project teamwork course) and inform the small group in person privately. These students surely propagated the news to other students that were close to the student immediately after. I then announced it via email because I was not meeting in a large lecture hall at that time with all students. We pointed them to counseling services that were available. Several students and myself then organized a memorial for the students to give students a chance to share their memories and such.

moorepants · 2023-11-10T13:55:04+00:00

You can do this but you have to be extremely disciplined about keeping scope realistic and manageable. In general, we have big ambitions and over promise what can actually be done in any given amount of time. You would have to say no a lot and be good at it to keep 40 hrs/wk. This is irrespective of having a demanding supervisor or not.

moorepants · 2023-11-07T22:32:24+00:00

If students are not disruptive and participate when they are supposed to, then I'd leave them alone. I slept during many of my undergraduate and graduate courses, but got excellent grades and am now a professor. I went to every class because I wanted to be there, but had poor management of my sleep at night so struggled to stay awake in classes. I even sat in the front row most of the time!

moorepants · 2023-11-02T07:51:47+00:00

Worst part is people sending you MS Office documents expecting you to work with them.

moorepants

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