Azhir Mahmood  🚀 🤖 🧬 🧠 🪐

Easy change: Ask for a letter (or at least contact info) from someone the applicant has trained, even informally (e.g., postdoc with a new grad student), when hiring.

Bigger change: Move the "training environment" section from individual fellowships to any grant proposing to hire a trainee (e.g., an R01). It's crazy that students get scored on something outside their control on an NRSA, but a PI can just hire bodies to throw at a wall.

Agreed that asking about training environments should be balanced across individual fellowships and lab grants! I wonder how we can hold labs accountable for this and would love to figure out ways to assess training environments in research. I think it's tough but not impossible.

Some schools, like ours, asks for student feedback (undergrad and grad) at each stage of promotion. However it is hard to get honest feedback given power dynamics. It's not as simple as asking them, even former students are probably reluctant to speak out against a former PI

Agree it's much harder for lateral hires and tenure (where you might blow up your own job too). Defusing that kind of power would be a good thing to do too. Still, if it's really bad, somebody might speak up.

And you don't necessarily have to ask *only* the lab. Everywhere I've worked has had a few groups where good people and good ideas fall off the map and there's pretty strong consensus among the students about which ones those are.

I suspect it's really hard to get students to talk about specific details that would affect hiring/promotion decisions, even if they were at some remove from the lab. When the job market is tight, lips are even tighter.

Maybe...my experience was probably towards the extreme end and I was too quiet at the time. Now though.... Plus, it'd be nice to know for sure and even a well-designed survey/interview is pretty cheap.