this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
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For my masters thesis project I was told on day one with all the other students that we would not get to publish a paper on the research and that the research supported PhD students and professors research. And that we would , and I quote, "need to get over it".
However, I noticed multiple times that PhD publications had 3 supervisors listed. When only one was the actual one student's supervisor. The others weren't even in the same area at all.
They were all 3 on every PhD paper published from that department. Always.
Yet the masters students who did all the experiments were not allowed to be included on the publications.
It was a weird setup because the masters students ran the PhD students experiments.
We did all the grunt work !
I personally ran over 40 participants that did two sessions one week apart. And probably another 20-30 that never showed up for their 2nd session. (1 hr sessions).
It's like. Whatever. If they don't want to put our many names on the paper they could at least mention us in the acknowledgement. And it seemed unfair that we, who did the work were forbidden from being in the papers, but 2 other professors who had nothing to do with the projects were always added.
Idk. I thought it was sketchy AF. But I hear this sort of thing is common.
My first PhD supervisor tried to erase me in that process. I did not finish with this supervisor lmao. It's OK, I don't really want to be on the one they included me on anyway after I left.
I had to switch supervisors during my PhD. It's a very stressful ordeal. Just know, I know what it's like and I sympathize.
It's sad to see so many problematic people in academia.
I was genuinely surprised when I realized how it is.
Just goes to show high education or intellect can't fix a shitty petty insecure personality.
I always figured people went into academia because they wanted to find answers to the questions. And teach young minds to seek out answers too. That it would be this positive encouragement environment.
Which is what I found while attending community college for my associates and bachelor's at state. Though I did do a lot of those degrees online and night classes.
So I must have been shielded from the toxic aspects.
Extreme jobs attract extreme personalities. Being normal and cool gets you far in these spaces, fortunately. I had lots of people to vouch for me. :)
It's much more common than it should be, but that is still rather on the extreme end, not normal, and extremely unethical behaviour on their part. I'm sorry that happened to you.
I'm in a PhD program now at a different university. I definitely don't get a team of masters students to run all my experiments for me.
That sure would have been nice. But also I feel like, I should be doing the work. Nothing wrong with a little help from a volunteer assistant but that's different than being assigned 4 masters students to run all of your experiments.
My masters was in the UK. (I'm American). I don't know if that's a normal set up over there or was unusual for UK too.