Having worked in academia for over 20 years, you realise how the system works. The top ‘Professor’ of a group is the big dog with the network and the contacts. They employ a team of aspirational researchers / academics who do the real work, but the top dog is the PI on every grant application- their name carries weight when it comes to reviews of the application.
The exact same system gets replicated below them, by their Assistant Professors, who use recently graduated PhD students and PhD students to do the same for them.
It’s one big pyramid scheme where the people who actually discover / find results themselves are often sidelined because they have a master who takes the credit for it all. They get the promotion / bonus / international recognition and the researcher who might well have been the catalyst to the actual result through their own intuition / curiosity gets shafted.
One of the Profs I worked with had this happen to him. Completely shafted for a Nobel Prize by his supervisor
It’s a shame, but eventually that PhD student will end up doing the and thing to his PhD students as he climbs the ladder.
