Have been a PhD student here for several years, so I have seen plenty of the dark-side as well:
- Exploitative behavior by many professors in various departments. Departments often turn a blind-eye and students often don't complain due to fear of retaliation (and some professors actively do retaliate).
- Very difficult to maintain work/life balance, very easy to burn-out. Most students don't speak out for fear of being judged.
- Very high graduate student tuition disrupts funding and causes student-advisor tension (e.g. PhD students often cost twice as much as Postdocs)
- Very complicated handling of funding by the institute (e.g. Fellowships don't cover astronomic tuition costs, and departments have to do a lot of scrambling to get the remaining tuition, again causing friction between the professor, student, fellowship institute and the department)
- Extremely high rates for work-related mental and physical health problems throughout the institute, MIT medical is pretty inept in addressing many of these issues in a timely and professional manner (e.g. was once told by a MIT medical doctor to finish my paper before taking time off due to physical pain).
- A lot of politics and bureaucracy. ( e.g. since there are many successful students at MIT, departmental elimination rounds for fellowships can be very competitive and political).
- Archaic systems live alongside cutting-edge infrastructure (e.g. The indecipherable Websis/MITPAY payment system is guaranteed to frustrate you every time you need to pay anything).
- Very heavy (and sometimes exploitative) TAship loads, which deter students from signing up for TAship to improve their teaching skills.
