About OpenAdvisor

OpenAdvisor is a community-run platform for anonymous reviews of graduate school advisors and research mentors. It exists because the choice of advisor is the single biggest determinant of a graduate student's career — yet the information available about a professor before joining their lab is almost always curated by the professor themselves.

• Anonymous: Reviewers post under pseudonyms; we hash IPs with a salt for abuse detection only and do not store email addresses.
• Community-run: A civilian project, not affiliated with or endorsed by any university.
• Pre-moderated: Every review is reviewed by a moderator before publication. We will reject reviews that name third parties or make factual accusations of misconduct.
• Structured: Each review carries six 1–5 ratings — overall, mentoring, research guidance, funding, work–life balance, and career support — alongside free-form pros / cons / detailed text.
• Open source: OpenAdvisor is derived from openreview-web and is itself licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.

What OpenAdvisor is not

• Not an official channel of any university.
• Not a place for factual accusations of misconduct — those belong with the university's ombuds office.
• Not a platform for outing students or naming third parties.

Read the Community Guidelines before you post, or jump straight to the directory.