Paul Kasemsap

พรพิพัฒน์ เกษมทรัพย์

 Paul Kasemsap

~wondering how plants turn air+water+dirt into food!

1 May 2022 -

Rate My Lab! - A yelp-like platform to grade your advisor?

You probably have used crowd sourcing feedback platforms for services like Yelp, Google Review, Booking.com, TravelAdvisor, or Apple review. Graduate students are required to complete the Student Progress Assessment every year, but none of the questions does focus on well-being of students… When conflicts arise, one may resort to the third party mediator. Would it be more helpful to cultivate healthy lab culture by learning from success of your peer labs before it’s too late?

I’ve heard a number of ‘horror stories’ about experience in grad school from my colleagues/friends in different school all over the world. One evening conversation about this led to “PI.com”. What if we have a channel to share feedback more readily? After some quick searches. There is a platform available, but seems pretty low traffic? - https://www.science.org/content/article/crowdsourcing-goes-academic-platforms-reviewing-advisers and https://www.gradpi.com/. My grad school also offers some resources to help navigate through conflicts, but this is not always readily available else where.

The key question that we raised during our grad/postdoc happy hours: what would be the best next step should we get the ‘stories’ and learn about each individual experience? In my opinion, it came down to positive encouragement and social pressure. One might argue that enforcement and incentives could be effective as well, but by coincidence I just read a book on the topic, with a case study on electricity usage– it turns out learning what our neighbors do (and how we do compare to them) could lower our energy usage drastically, even more effective than any rules or restrictions!

I chatted about this with my advisor. I am lucky; I told my PI (principle investigator) that working with him is like winning a lottery! Having a supportive mentor made my grad school experience just simply amazing! But, not everyone is as lucky as me. Is there any solution out there? What can we do about it?

So, I propose:

RateMyLab!

Grad studies offers an Exit survey students could complete after wrapping up the degree. As we learn from Course evaluation survey, the end-of-term feedback is often too late to implement. There is, however, no on-going platform dedicated directly to assess and share feedback for the lab and the Principle Investigators - from the perspectives of mentees!

Here, we invite you to help share your lab cultures to help your mentors help you better! We’re not aiming to retaliate; there is already a whistle blower platform for that. Rather, we hope to use positive encouragement and establish social/community norms to reward healthy culture. Instead of pinpointing specific labs, or PIs, we will pool all the data and share with the community which practices are most valued and appreciated by the mentees.

Next time when you come across any great lab culture, you could say, “hey, they all do this, let’s do it in our lab too!”

To be added: Connect with other folks to see how we can implement this survey. Talk to my grad program. Seek advice on what actions/questions should we add into the survey/recommendations.
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I have a folder in my phone where I noted down all my (unfinished) ideas. I find talking about/bouncing my ideas off with others help me understand the problem better. So, I’ll defy my hesitancy to share only just polished version of thoughts, and rather share the ‘ongoing’ thoughts, as an invitation for whoever comes across my posts, to share what you think with me! Please reach out via any channel of your choice – see the left panel :)

category: thoughts 
tag: socialscience  gradschool  relationship  thoughtsinprogress  draft 

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