What Is RateMySupervisor?
It's 2 AM in a Boston-area lab. The hum of the -80°C freezer is my only companion. I'm staring at code that won't run, on a project whose direction shifted for the third time this semester, all for a PI whose idea of mentorship is a weekly email that reads, "Progress?"
My stipend barely covers rent, and the thought of my looming quals is a physical weight. I remember the glossy brochure and the enthusiastic campus tour. Nobody mentioned this part. Nobody warned me that choosing a PhD advisor is the most consequential decision of your early academic career — more than the university ranking, more than the city. It shapes your mental health, your publication record, and your options when you finally leave.
That's where RateMySupervisor comes in. It's a grassroots attempt to inject transparency into a system that runs on information asymmetry. The advisor who hoards authorship, the lab with a 100% attrition rate before defense, the PI who treats RAs as cheap labor — for too long, this lived in hushed whispers between students in hallways. We're putting it somewhere searchable.
Why the Information Gap Is So Damaging
The advisor-student relationship is one of the most lopsided in professional life. The PI knows everything: their own management style, their funding runway, their expectations for evenings and weekends. You know almost nothing. You get a 30-minute Zoom call where everyone is performing. A 2018 study in Nature Biotechnology found that PhD students are more than six times more likely to experience depression and anxiety than the general population — and the advisor relationship was one of the strongest predictors of that outcome. The stakes are not abstract.
Your advisor controls your stipend, your letters of recommendation, and functionally your timeline. Calling it a "mentorship mismatch" undersells it. You need real data before you commit five or six years of your life.
What You'll Find on the Site
Forget five-star simplicity. The dimensions that matter for a multi-year research relationship are specific:
- Mentorship style: Hands-on vs. hands-off? Are they accessible between meetings or effectively a ghost?
- Funding stability: Does the lab consistently support RAs, or are students scrambling for TAships each semester — which matters enormously for F-1 visa holders.
- Work expectations: Is 9-to-5 the norm, or is weekend work an unstated condition of staying in good standing?
- Publication and authorship: Are students actually first authors on their own work, or does the PI's name always appear first?
- Career support: Do they actively network for your placement, or does the relationship quietly end after you defend?
A friend in a top engineering program chose a PI based solely on citation count. The PI was well-known for sink-or-swim mentorship — she spent 18 months building a setup with zero guidance, then was told it was the wrong approach. She mastered out. A few reviews on the site would have shown the pattern: "brilliant but absent." Context changes everything.
How to Read the Reviews
A single scathing review can be an outlier. A pattern across eight reviews spanning a decade is a data point. A few things to watch for:
- Patterns, not anecdotes: If multiple reviews mention "micromanaging" or "changes direction constantly," that's a lab trait, not a bad week.
- Context: A complaint about low stipend in a rural college town reads differently than the same complaint in a city where your take-home barely covers rent.
- No reviews: Could mean a new hire. Could mean a tenured figure whose students are too cautious to write publicly. Worth investigating either way.
Use It Alongside Your Other Research
The site doesn't replace talking to current students — it makes those conversations more useful. When you already know from reviews that a PI has a reputation for changing research directions, you can ask directly: "How has the project focus evolved over the last two years?" You're no longer fishing blind.
| Standard advice | With review data |
|---|---|
| "Read their papers." | Do their students publish regularly? Are they first authors? |
| "Talk to current students." | Cross-reference their polite answers with anonymous reviews from people who've already left. |
| "It's a top department." | Department rank doesn't predict individual mentorship. A star at a top-5 school can still be a miserable advisor. |
The practical steps: research potential advisors before you pay the application fee, not after. Once you're in a lab, contribute a review. It takes ten minutes, and it's the most useful thing you can do for the student who is where you were two years ago.