Azhir Mahmood  🚀 🤖 🧬 🧠 🪐

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.

I suspect that what students are willing to say to other students in private vs in a formal interview setting (even with promises of anonymity) is very different so experiences may not generalize well.

I invite everyone who I make an offer of a PhD to, to talk to my current or former students in confidence. It's written on my webpage that this is part of the application process. It's a small step but if enough faculty did this students would be suspicious of those that didn't

In fact I do that before making offers and only make offers if the group agrees with me that a person is a good fit.