r/AskAcademia

Hi all. I am a 2nd-year STEM-adjacent PhD student. I had a brutal meeting with my advisor today and I am trying to figure out how to salvage things.

He told me he's been unhappy with my progress for months, and said I need to think about (1) whether I actually want to do a PhD, and (2) whether I want to do one in his lab. He also said it feels like my workflow is "working the 24 hours before our meetings start"-- which, if I am being honest, isn't entirely wrong recently. The plan he laid out: keep working on my current project over the summer, target a conference submission in the fall, and reevaluate then.

I don't intend to take this lightly, but I am really worried this is sort of the beginning of a managed exit, i.e. no matter what I do, the writing is on the walls. For those who've recovered from conversations like this-- what changed?

Thanks in advance.

While I recognize there are truly abusive advisors, there are so many posts here by graduate students who are upset that their advisors judge them on the quality of their work without taking other factors into account. The reality is that your advisor is there to advise you on the scientific aspects of your work not to help you navigate life more broadly. We are simply not trained to provide you with mental health support or to help you navigate your non-academic issues. Similarly, if you are being paid to work on a grant than your lack of progress has a direct impact on your advisor and their career as well.

My team (multiple coauthors, I am the PI) are undergoing extremely unpleasant and concerning review process at an Q1 Elsevier journal. First round reviewer reports were explicitly AI generated. In the following round, it is more of the hallucinated nonsense. For one review, AI residue includes literal copy pasted promps in original language (Asian language), which the editor forwarded to us w/o any oversight.

We complained to editor, but they are arrogant and ignorant, dowplayed it and now burdens us with a third round of revision requests.

Has anyone experienced similar AI review or editorial-oversight failures with Elsevier? Specificaly - obvious non-EU AI evidence in reviews?

IMHO this is blatant violation of the GDPR and Elsevier's own Privacy Policy. AI use by non-EU reviewers is especially illegal, and they had to trigger formal data protection incident investigation instead of ignoring or downplaying it. With this in mind, I am seriously considering filing official GDPR complaint.

I saw previous reports of the same in this sub. Maybe there would be enough evidence to actually escalate into group complaint / class action?

We are EU residents and we are fairly confident that there are reasonable legal grounds to escalate this. Somebody has to do something otherwise they will just continue with such malplactices.