Through Their Own Eyes: The Implications of COVID-19 for PhD Students
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract COVID-19 is expected to radically alter higher education in the United States and to further limit the availability of tenure-track academic positions. How has the pandemic and its associated fallout affected doctoral students’ career aspirations and priorities? We investigate this question by comparing responses to a PhD career survey prior to and following significant developments in the pandemic. We find little evidence that the pandemic caused substantial shifts in PhD students’ aspirations and priorities. However, some differences emerge when considering later dates in our survey period, particularly among more senior students who express a greater interest in some non-academic careers and job characteristics. Contrary to expectation, we also find evidence that the pandemic improved some students’ perceptions of their academic departments. In our conclusion, we speculate whether steps taken by the comparatively well-resourced institution that we study helped to mitigate some of the more negative consequences of the pandemic.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it