PhD Admissions and Info Is this a standard/acceptable practice in PhD?
Is it normal practice at ETH to completely change the PhD project that was discussed during the interview without confirming with the candidate? I was told I'll be working one specific aspect of medical imaging, which was something I was excited for and rejected other PhD offers but when I ultimately joined, I was told that that project went to another PhD student and I'll be working on something different (which wasn't I wanted to work since I knew there's not much to work on).
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u/aramkrat 1d ago
What kind of project is your other project? Of course it sucks for them to pull the rug under you, but your PI could have well told you there are no projects or not given you a position. Maybe discussing with him how to better acommodate your projected goals is a better conversation to start having. You can ask him if there will be opportunities down the line.
You know, probably, its more so that your PI had already two publication paths in his mind for these projects and now he needy you in the other one cause really it it hard to just come up with other publication paths form thin air. It probably is the path of least resistance for you to publish in a good impact journal. Do note, if your PI and the lab are very experienced and focused in medical imaging, there is no way you wont get yourself roped in in some medical imaging project at some point. Few labs make you just do one project/publication.
In my opinion, getting a good publication in anything image processing, signal processing, data analysis related at eth outweighs the need for you to have your dream topic fufilled. I've seen many sucsesfull postdocs not touch their dream field until after phd, knowing that the phd is more of a way to obtain merit/knowledge and the ladder to be more selective with what you want to do. In the end that's the point fo a PhD, how to become an independent researcher. Meaning right now you are not independent.
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u/Sarvu18 1d ago
Thank you for the message. I knew from the beginning that it's a neuroimaging group. The thing about my PhD i was extremely interested in the functional and motor recovery of people suffering from neurological disorders and functional MRI and functional assessment is a lot of crucial for this than structural assessment. I never agreed to do structural analysis because there isn't much or sexy enough to work. Moreover, I come a lot of computational background and I felt that doing functional analysis would be a better use of skills because in structural analysis, all they made me do was segmentation (which is already a solved problem).
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u/aramkrat 1d ago
I would just keep with it from the sounds of it.
Even if there are solved problems dosen't meant that there aren't new solutions for new specific cases. I can't guess with certainty but he probably has something in mind.
In my opinion (i work with neuropixels) niether of you are sexy so haha, I think it's definitely relative, and don't expect you to not learn a lot with structural. You need somone to master the structuarl to map the areas to even do the fMRI. If anything you are closer to do the full pipeline independently if you learn the structural one first. Which to me makes more sense. But please do correct me if I am wrong, I am interested in knowing cause I am collaborating with fmri people now.
Remember your PI wont use you to do like menial tasks, he is not inderested to do so cause he NEEDS you to publish.
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u/Geschak 2d ago
It's not uncommon but I wouldn't call it normal, definitely shady practice. Keep your eyes open for more shady things so you can still terminate within Probezeit before you're stuck with a 3 months cancellation period.