IFOM Reviews

all fake and misleading, gossip, hypocrite people and environment, manipulative management

The PhD program doesn't offer training or lessons. You need a good basis or some actual experience in the field of your group before you start or you will find it very difficult. You are left very much alone to navigate your way though experiments and projects with little guidance or feedback. A group leader seems to give out pseudo projects to give you something to do but in reality it is a project of little importance to the leader. This attitude is very isolating and demoralising. In the initial stages of a PhD I think some training and supervision is needed to design a simple but effective project for the purpose of developing subsequent independence in research. There is great emphasis on publication and more attention is given to key post-docs who have the experience and initiative to provide the results to satisfy the group leader. I know many people who followed the PhD program and never published, around 60% of the students. You may get your name tagged on the end of someone else's paper but as you have not been given the guidance needed in this early stage of your career to learn and mature through a project it is unlikely you will publish anything you have done. I would advise anyone thinking of going to this campus to choose the smaller research groups but be very aware of their publication record. Smaller groups, which would be ideal for a PhD student as they are close-knit and the leader cares about the person, have often become the target of the campus board and have disappeared overnight with the group members being distributed in other groups if lucky. Opportunities to participate in Meetings was also limited. I never got an opportunity, it was never offered and when I asked I was told it had to be a meeting related to my project. At the time I had 3/4 lines of experiments with negative results and no project. I argued that a meeting in general would be of value but it was rejected. I went to a very small meeting in UK and paid for it myself just to be able to see what a Meeting entailed. It was a enlightening experience and was annoyed this kind of opportunity was not readily available.