I had a similar experience as a CS researcher at Yale. It was by far the most toxic environment university environment I've ever worked in. I really felt sorry for the poor students who weren't getting paid (or getting paid very little) to deal with the bullshit.
yeah... I kinda consider my undergrad + the year thereafter a "lost half decade of mind fucking unhappiness from social toxicity".
I can say with a straight face that based on the level of work I'm doing now (and was doing in high school), science slowed down some teensy but nonzero fraction for the planet because of how unhappy undergrad was for me.
eg: things i'm up to currently include:
• helping make the engineering techniques / tricks that come up in HPC grade numerical computation easier to learn and use! (I've had a lot of success making the ideas more pedagogically accessible, which is really really cool)
• contributing to at least one open source compiler thats pretty well known
• other interesting things for fun and profit which while wonderful and positive, I won't go into on this thread because mental health is a serious matter worth focusing on discussing properly :)
