I worked in three different admin roles - Staff Assistant/Coordinator/Specialist Harvard University Employee Review

A PhD is always very advisor/PI dependent, but I had a great experience with room to learn, grow, and explore interesting research questions. As with any PhD program you’ll work pretty hard for relatively lower pay and perhaps less directly applicable industry career trajectory at the end, but if you find good people to tackle the journey with and get to work on interesting problems I personally think the journey is worthwhile!

Less of a program wide cohort in my particular engineering field. Some funding challenges with the govt last year but seem mostly back now, apart from the recent administration issues funding wasn’t generally a challenge

You work with experts from every field possible in science from Mechanobiology to Metallurgy and working as a ML intern along with scientists from different fields gave me a lot of exposure and how to work in a research department.

One challenge encountered was maintaining a clear focus on training objectives, as the evolving parameters required continuous reassessment of the model's learning priorities. Additionally, the absence of established ground truth for the domain presented a limitation in validating and guiding the approach effectively.