The University of Wisconsin - Madison

The funding is very inadequate. You may be contacted and told that you can be accepted if you're able to provide your own funding. Otherwise, you get rejected.

Then, if you decide to go or somehow are able to get some funding, you'll find it difficult to be involved in research.

Some faculty are not able to teach at all; they would know the material very well, but are just unable to effectively communicate it. They are also not patient with students' questions and don't provide enough solutions to homework problems or study sessions to help students understand everything. I've always been an A student throughout my undergraduate schooling. And even though I kept getting mostly As and ABs I struggled much more in this department!

Back to research: if you're here for the PhD program, then you'll likely hate it by the time you leave. There's very little mentoring happening. You'll have to keep bugging your research advisor for meeting time and send reminders before every single meeting otherwise they don't show up.

You'll also get very little to no guidance about how to get started on your thesis topic and how to choose a manageable thesis subject that would allow you to finish in time without feeling like you're split between 3-5 slightly different topics that don't get you anywhere.

You'll have to figure out how to publish papers on your own and review your own work pretty much on your own as well.

Even if you are ok working individually, you'll still want feedback about how you're progressing and if your results are worth publishing or presenting in defense exam. Unfortunately, you will get very little to no help/feedback with any of this in this department!

Furthermore, if you complain or fail to do the job well enough (on your own) they're very quick to scold you and even threaten to dismiss you. They will NOT work with you to figure out how to help you move forward and be a successful student and professional.