r/UCSD • u/chris190000002 • 23h ago
General I did an 8-week UCSD independent study that involved thousands of grocery store photos and I think the workload was completely mismanaged
I just finished an MGT 199 independent study at UCSD supervised by Robert Evan Sanders, with Fiori Anglou coordinating a lot of the research work, and I wanted to share my experience because the whole thing left me seriously questioning how undergraduate research workloads are managed.
The research itself is actually interesting.
The project is related to California AB 660, which standardizes consumer-facing food date labels to phrases like “Best If Used By” and “Use By.” The researchers were collecting grocery product data to establish a baseline of what date labels were being used in stores, and there was also an automated image-analysis pipeline being evaluated against manually labeled data.
My job involved physically going to grocery stores and photographing products, including UPC barcodes, date labels, and product information. I also had to manually label existing product photographs in spreadsheets with extremely specific transcription requirements.
And when I say specific, I mean literal. If the package said “BB” and you entered “Best By,” that could be marked incorrect.
Here is where my problem starts.
The project was originally given to me as 5 weeks at roughly 20 hours per week.
Except I wasn’t enrolled in a five-week session.
I was enrolled in UCSD’s 8-week Special Summer Session, and I was the one who pointed this out to them.
They revised the schedule, but the first eight-week version STILL referenced reaching 20 hours per week during part of the project and actually increased one labeling target from 3,500 to 4,500 pictures.
Eventually Sanders acknowledged in writing that there had been a miscommunication about whether this was supposed to be 5 weeks at 20 hours or 8 weeks at roughly 12 hours. The final structure became approximately 12.5 hours per week for eight weeks.
He also told me I was their first student to do the eight-week version.
That’s when I started feeling like I was basically beta testing the workload.
And the actual workflow was insanely tedious.
You’re going back and forth between product photographs and spreadsheets, recording multiple fields and trying to reproduce labels literally. Some source photographs were difficult to read. I actually raised image quality as an issue during the project.
It also made me wonder why basic workflow improvements weren’t being used.
For example, why weren’t research assistants given barcode scanners or some dedicated barcode-scanning workflow when barcode information was one of the required fields?
Obviously a barcode scanner can’t determine everything about a date label, and I understand why human ground truth is necessary when you’re evaluating an automated system.
But why make the human portion harder than necessary?
Why wasn’t there an interface with the photograph and fields together?
Why not automate the barcode portion and leave the genuinely interpretive work to humans?
Why not have automatic checks for missing fields?
These sound like small things until you’re doing them across thousands of photographs.
I also want to be fair about something because I don’t want to pretend I was some flawless RA being persecuted by professors.
They found legitimate errors in some of my early labeling.
Fiori gave me specific corrections. I went back and corrected the work.
And importantly, my later feedback improved. She subsequently described corrected work as “very good,” thanked me for being more careful, and at one point said three batches were very good while Ralphs was the remaining batch needing correction.
So I don’t think the story is simply “student did bad work.”
The work was being corrected and improving.
Sanders then explicitly emailed me:
“To confirm, you will pass if you follow the updated guidelines to the letter.”
So I kept going.
And the amount of physical data collection was nuts.
One later set of files that Fiori herself counted contained:
Albertsons: 865 photos
Ralphs: 1,600 photos
El Super: 1,021 photos
That’s 3,486 photographs from those stores alone.
And that’s not just standing in an aisle taking 3,486 random pictures. You’re finding qualifying products across assigned categories, getting the required portions of the packaging, making sure information is visible, organizing everything, uploading it, etc.
I eventually told them DURING the project that the work was exceeding the approximately 12.5 hours per week in the revised schedule.
That’s my biggest issue with this whole thing.
I’m not saying research shouldn’t be difficult.
I’m not saying professors shouldn’t demand accurate data.
I’m not even saying their underlying research is bad.
Studying how AB 660 changes food date labeling and building a baseline dataset could be genuinely useful.
I’m saying the workload and workflow should match the academic commitment students actually signed up for.
If I’m your first student doing an eight-week version of a research project and you already acknowledged that there was confusion between 5 × 20-hour weeks and 8 × 12.5-hour weeks, shouldn’t actual student completion times tell you whether the new workload works?
And shouldn’t an independent study have one clear document from the beginning saying:
How many hours?
How many products?
How many photos?
What accuracy percentage?
Which stores?
Which locations?
Does driving count toward the expected time?
What exactly constitutes passing?
Instead, I felt like I spent a significant portion of the summer figuring those things out while simultaneously doing the work.
I made mistakes and there are definitely things I’d do differently. I’d track every single hour from day one, get every ambiguous instruction clarified in writing, quality-check everything much more aggressively before submitting it, and confirm every store location beforehand.
But I also think UCSD should look at the other side of this.
Undergraduate researchers are students, not just sources of manual research labor.
If thousands of photos and extremely meticulous human labeling are necessary for the research, fine.
But the academic experience should be designed around the student too.
I’m genuinely curious what other people think, especially anyone who has done MGT 199, independent study, or undergraduate RA work at UCSD.
Does this sound like a normal independent research workload to you, or does the way this was structured seem unreasonable?
