Being a Ph.D. student is widely recognized as a grueling endeavor. The intellectual demands of doctoral research are immense, the financial uncertainty is a constant source of stress, and the isolation that often accompanies intensive study can be suffocating. Yet, despite these profound structural challenges, the phrase most commonly heard from graduate students isn’t about coursework, funding scarcity, or the pressure to publish. Instead, it is a statement laden with personal strain: “My adviser was awful.”
Kaveri Sheth, who recently finished her Ph.D. in linguistics and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, has witnessed this dynamic from both sides of the academic aisle. Over the past several years, she has mentored undergraduate and graduate students while navigating her own delicate transition from student to early-career researcher. As a scientist who studies children and how they acquire language—a process that often occurs through imitation—Sheth is acutely aware of how much human beings learn by watching others. She understands how easily people repeat what they have absorbed, even when they know better.
That, she argues, is the core problem with mentorship in modern academia: we inherit it. Without necessarily intending to, academic professionals risk passing down the very parts of their training that hurt them the most.
The Institutional Roots of Academic Hardship
Academia is uniquely structured around an apprenticeship model. Researchers are trained by advisers who were, in turn, trained by their own advisers, forming intellectual lineages that stretch back decades. Academic culture travels down these generational lines, and along with it come entrenched norms regarding overwork, emotional distance, harsh criticism, and blurred professional boundaries.
It is common to hear established advisers justify their severity with well-worn phrases like “That’s how I was trained,” or “It made me stronger.” The implicit message behind these refrains is that hardship in graduate school is not merely an unfortunate byproduct, but a necessary crucible for forging a successful scholar.
Yet, as Sheth and a growing chorus of academic reformers point out, survival is not the same as thriving.
During her time as a graduate student, Sheth experienced moments of profound doubt—not regarding the viability of her research, but concerning her own fundamental worth. Feedback from faculty members at times felt less like constructive guidance and more like a personal judgment. Like many doctoral candidates, she internalized these signals, operating under the assumption that if she was struggling, it was because she was inherently inadequate and unworthy of occupying a space in graduate school.
What makes this psychological trap especially insidious is that many advisers do not set out to inflict harm. On the contrary, faculty members are frequently overwhelmed, undersupported, and juggling impossible workloads involving teaching, grant writing, administrative duties, and their own research agendas. Yet, within the high-stakes environment of higher education, good intentions do not erase negative impacts.
The Human Toll on Doctoral Candidates
Universities are increasingly acknowledging what graduate students have known for years: rates of anxiety, depression, and burnout in doctoral programs have reached critical levels. Mentorship frequently serves as the deciding factor in whether these intense pressures feel manageable or crushing. An adviser has the unique capacity to either buffer a student against stress or exponentially amplify it.
When mentorship becomes unpredictable, overly critical, or outright neglectful, the consequences for students are severe. Doctoral candidates begin to hesitate before asking for help, delay sharing drafts of their work out of fear of retribution, and sometimes avoid meetings with their advisers altogether. This avoidance is rarely a sign of laziness; rather, it is a symptom of cognitive bandwidth being entirely consumed by anxiety.
Observers have watched brilliant young minds shrink under the weight of constant comparison, while others normalize mistreatment simply because they are told that “that’s just academia.”
Breaking these deep-seated cycles requires, above all, recognizing that they exist. It demands humility from established mentors and considerable courage from students who are financially and professionally dependent on those same mentors.
For mentors, the work begins by critically interrogating their own training. Faculty must ask themselves which feedback styles they actually found motivating and which ones left lasting scars. They must consider whether they mistakenly equate academic rigor with personal harshness, and whether they are genuinely transparent about their expectations or merely expect students to figure things out through trial and error.
Sheth found that one of the most transformative shifts she made as a mentor was deceptively simple: articulating expectations with absolute clarity. Instead of assuming that students intuitively knew how quickly she would respond to emails, she explicitly told them her availability. Instead of expecting them to decode the unspoken norms of academic publishing and authorship, she laid them out plainly. Clarity reduces anxiety, whereas ambiguity breeds it.
Another crucial shift involved reframing the nature of feedback. While critical feedback is an indispensable component of scientific and scholarly research, a vast gulf exists between critiquing a piece of work and critiquing the person who produced it. Comments characterizing an argument as underdeveloped are specific and actionable, inviting productive revision. Conversely, comments dismissing work as making no sense are deflating, inviting shame rather than scholarship.
Mentors must also confront the toxic culture of overwork. Academia routinely rewards constant availability, but modeling round-the-clock labor teaches students that taking time to rest is synonymous with failure. By deliberately avoiding nonurgent emails late at night, explicitly telling students that weekend responses are not expected, and taking appropriate time off to recharge, mentors can signal that human well-being matters. Small signals often carry profound weight in hierarchical relationships.
Agency and Support for Graduate Students
Students, meanwhile, are far from powerless, even though the rigid hierarchies of higher education can frequently make them feel that way. Naming one’s professional and personal needs is difficult when dealing with an adviser who controls funding and letters of recommendation, but establishing early boundaries can be transformative.
Asking proactive questions at the outset—such as inquiring what a successful first year looks like to an adviser, or how developed manuscript drafts should be before submission—can clarify expectations long before ambiguity hardens into chronic anxiety.
Furthermore, relying on a single adviser for all professional and emotional sustenance is a recipe for burnout. Seeking multiple mentors helps distribute the load. No single faculty member can meet every intellectual and emotional need a doctoral student possesses. Building a small, reliable network consisting of committee members, senior graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers can significantly reduce the pressure inherent in any single advisor-advisee relationship.
Above all, students must internalize the reality that struggling with advanced research does not equate to personal failure. Doctoral training is explicitly designed to stretch individuals to the outer limits of their capabilities. Feeling uncertain, overwhelmed, or intellectually inadequate at times is an occupational hazard of pushing human knowledge forward, not empirical evidence that one does not belong in the academy.
A Practice, Not a Force of Nature
The pervasive narrative that academia is inherently brutal has remarkable staying power because it absolves everyone involved of responsibility. If suffering is viewed as an inevitable law of nature, then no one needs to be held accountable for the damage inflicted along the way.
Yet, mentorship is not a force of nature; it is a human practice, and human practices are capable of change.
Dismantling harmful cycles does not demand perfection from faculty or students. It requires institutional reflection, radical transparency, and a conscious willingness to prioritize human beings over institutional prestige. It requires universities to reward exceptional mentorship with the same fervor they currently reserve for grant acquisition and publication metrics. It requires mentors to view students not merely as extensions of their curriculum vitae, but as developing scholars and whole human beings.
When researchers reflect on the students they have guided through the academic pipeline, the metrics that dominate performance reviews—such as citation counts and impact factors—fade into the background. What remains in memory are the human moments: the formulation of questions, the nervous anticipation before a conference presentation, and the genuine excitement of discovery. The true responsibility of mentorship is not to toughen scholars up through psychological attrition, but to actively support their intellectual and personal growth.
Academia will undoubtedly remain a demanding arena. Scientific and scholarly research is inherently difficult, research funding is fiercely competitive, and tenure-track academic jobs are scarce. But these intrinsic difficulties do not need to be compounded by preventable, institutional harm.
By being honest about the ways previous generations were hurt, and by mustering the collective courage not to pass that generational trauma down, the academic community has an opportunity to build something better. The future of higher education depends on fostering mentoring relationships grounded equally in rigorous inquiry and mutual respect, pairing high ambition with deep empathy, and ensuring that the next generation of scholars does not have to endure the silent suffering of their predecessors.
The culture of academia does not have to remain as it has always been, and the cycle can finally stop with those willing to change it.
