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Good Grad: Advice for Advisors
How to Be a Good Graduate Student
by Marie desJardins
In order to be a good advisor, you have to relate to your graduate
students as individuals, not just as anonymous research assistants or
tickets to tenure and co-authored publications. Work with all of your
graduate students, not just those whom you feel most comfortable with,
or who are interested in the problems you're most excited about. Try
to get to know your students personally and professionally. Help them
to identify their strengths and weaknesses, to build on the former,
and to work on overcoming the latter. Give them honest evaluations of
their work and performance: don't just assume that they know how
they're doing and what you think of them.
Read this paper and others like it with an eye towards discovering
which aspects of the graduate experience your students may be having
trouble with, or may not realize the importance of. Try to see the
experience from their perspective, which will be different for each
student, because each student has a different background and different
talents and goals.
The roles of an advisor include:
- Guiding students' research: helping them to select a topic,
write a research proposal, perform the research, evaluate it
critically, and write the dissertation.
- Getting them involved in the wider research community: introducing
them to colleagues, collaborating on research projects with
them, funding conference travel, encouraging them to publish
papers, nominating them for awards and prizes.
- Finding financial support: providing research assistantships
or helping them to find fellowships, and finding summer positions.
- Finding a position after graduation: helping them to find and
apply for postdoctoral positions, faculty positions, and/or jobs
in industry; supporting their applications with strong recommendations;
and helping them to make contacts.
Although guiding your students' research is normally viewed as the
central task of an advisor, the other roles are also critical to their
long-term success. The section on networking contains advice for
students on networking. You can help them in this process by funding
and encouraging travel to conferences and paper publication, and by
introducing them and talking about their research to colleagues.
Especially for a new advisor, setting the right tone for student
interactions is a difficult task. Different students respond best to
different approaches -- and, of course, different advisors have
different personal styles. Some of the tradeoffs that have to be made
in each advisor-student relationship are:
- Amount of direction: self-directed/hands-off vs. ``spoon-feeding''
topics and research projects.
- Personal interactions and psychological support: do they want
advice on career, family, and the like? Are you willing and able
to give it, or to find someone else to advise them?
- Amount and type of criticism: general directions vs. specific
suggestions for improvement.
- Frequency of interaction: daily vs. once a semester.
It helps to establish regular meeting times and to discuss
expectations (both yours and your students') about what can and should
be accomplished during these meetings. Encourage them to develop
relationships with other faculty members, students, and colleagues, to
get a different perspective and to get feedback you may not be able to
give.
To improve the atmosphere of your interactions:
- Meet over lunch or coffee to make interactions more relaxed
and less stressful.
- Strive to maintain an open, honest relationship. Respect
your students as colleagues.
- Tell them if you think they're asking for too much or too
little time or guidance.
Advisors should be aware of both long-term and short-term needs. What
should the student's goals over the next few years be? Help your
student identify ways that the two of you -- as a team -- can meet
these goals. Advise the student on the criteria for a successful
qualifying exam, thesis proposal, and dissertation. Help prepare the
student for a future research career.
In the short term, a good advisor will work with students to set
priorities and to find a balance between doing research, reading,
writing, satisfying TA and RA duties, publishing, and coursework.
Although advisors may not be able to give advice on all administrative
aspects of graduate school, they should at least know the appropriate
people to refer students to for assistance with degree requirements,
funding, and so on.
When you meet with your students, pay attention to them. Try to help
them to identify their interests, concerns, and goals, not just how
can they meet what *you* see as good interests, concerns, and goals.
Know what they're working on, and what you discussed last time. Take
notes during meetings and review them if you have to.
Give them productive feedback, not just a noncommittal ``ok, sure'' or
a destructive ``why on earth do you want to do that?'' Remember that
your students are still learning. If you tell them that a problem
they're interested in has already been explored by Professor X, make
sure you follow up with a reference that they have access to, and a
discussion as to whether the problem remains a worthwhile area to work
on, or whether there are new open issues raised by Professor X's work,
at the next meeting.
When reviewing a student's paper or proposal, write comments on the
paper itself: verbal comments aren't as useful. Give the feedback
promptly, or it won't be much help. See the section on feedback for
suggestions about giving useful comments. Don't just wait until they
hand you something to read: insist on written drafts of proposals,
papers, etc. Help them develop their rough ideas into publishable
papers. Give them specific, concrete suggestions for what to do next,
especially if they seem to be floundering or making little progress.
Advisor-student relationships can break down if the advisor is setting
goals that are too high or too low, or if the advisor is exploiting
the student to meet the advisor's needs, not the student's. In my
opinion, it is never appropriate to develop an intimate relationship
with one of your own students. If this should happen, you should not
continue to advise them (whether the relationship continues or not).
Encourage your students to choose a topic that you're *both*
interested in and that you're knowledgeable about (or very interested
in learning more about). Make sure that they have the appropriate
background to understand the problem, and that the methodology and
solution they identify are appropriate and realistic. Give them
pointers to useful references and help them find them (this can be a
mysterious, difficult process for graduate students). Make sure
they're aware of other researchers and labs who are doing similar
work, and if possible, arrange for them to visit these labs or meet
the researchers at seminars or conferences.
Women faculty often feel obligated to mentor every woman student in
the department, attend every committee meeting, and get involved in
every debate, whether they want to or not. While you can't solve all
of the problems in the world, you can at least make a difference by
giving other women (and men, for that matter) the sense that you do
care, and that you think women's issues are important, even if you
don't have time (or the inclination) to get involved with every
problem.
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