On the one hand, I want to warn students not to come to my program. On the other hand, I don't want to be "that one," and I also don't want to tarnish the reputation of the specific people I worked with (who I mostly like).
More specifically:
I want to warn students about lack of funding, administration being uncaring towards students, certain PhD requirements being a lot more onerous than they say they are, general departmental atmosphere and culture among the grad students, general culture of the school, poor location, etc etc.
Also my school is the only top school in my field that has a "rotation system" for picking advisors, and that is generally framed as a benefit, and a reason to choose the school. But I don't think students really realize how much rotations suck until after they've come here.
Answer
Imagine, as a thought experiment, making your points in an argumentative text—a paper*— that should pass peer review by your department (assuming intellectual honesty on their part) — so that you have to be careful that what you write is objective. You have to separate facts, beliefs, anecdotical evidence, etc. Then you have something you can pitch to people (in an informal context) while being professional and objective when describing facts, so it subsumes lots of other advice. (EDIT: lots of other things would be relevant to getting a paper accepted, but I only care about being careful with your opinion).
Moreover, framing things this way might help you expose them to anybody else — from people on this forum, to your advisor, to people who might change things at your school. Many of them will be excellent at arguing their point this way, you have to be better than them to win.
While this is a top school, it has several disadvantages in comparison to other top schools:
- funding is inferior to other schools.
- in my experience, dealing with the administration was frustrating [evidence]
- while other schools allow you to pick your advisor, here you get it assigned through a rotation system. While it has the advantage of ..., it prevents you from picking the advisor with which you'd work best (something that you probably want to read about if you didn't already).
- ...
The above isn't very convincing or accurate. Also, I don't have citations appropriate for your field. But hopefully you get the drift.
Also, as others said, if you can, give your opinion in an informal context (as recommended by others). The event should include moments for honest opinions.
*I suspect some would debate to which extent a paper is an argumentative text, because this depends somewhat on the scientific community — at the very least, the importance of some results is not just a fact, but something that (in this information overload era) you need to argue for, if you want to get attention of your readers. In case you haven't been taught this already, somebody might be failing you more than you think.
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