If your adviser is an asshole, you probably won't graduate and your grad school experience will suck. Don't.
If you want to get a Ph.D. and do research, pick your adviser very carefully. It is the most important decision of your research career. Grad school isn't like school, it's an apprenticeship.
Pick your adviser (the person you are apprenticed to) on two factors: the success of their past students and how compatible you are personally with them. Their field should be peripherally related to yours, it doesn't have to be very close (1).
I had a great experience in grad school. I also had two great advisers.
(1) My advisers study scattering theory and complex variables. My Ph.D. was in computational physics. It wasn't a serious problem.
That's a bit like saying that you should pick your parents wisely. (Or perhaps, that you should pick your wife carefully -- but you only get three dates to decide!) It's wonderful advice...in retrospect.
The problem is, you can't judge anything useful about your adviser in the time that you have to do it. For those who don't know, at a good school, you'll get a "rotation" (a quarter/semester "working" in your prospective adviser's group), after which you'll have to decide their suitability as a mentor for years of challenging work. If you're lucky, you make a good decision, and grad school is happy. If you're lucky.
That said...there are plenty of other ways to go wrong. Your adviser is a big part of the success formula, but not the only part. Not by a long shot.
I'm happy that you had a good experience with your adviser, but I know enough miserable grad students to know that it isn't the norm. Personally, this guy's essay hit way too close to home....
My adviser: all students got academic jobs (some multiple offers) and finished in 5 years (5 years from B.S. to Ph.D. is normal for math). The most recent student, with whom I had overlap, said he rocked.
Okay, great! I feel confident in recommending your advice: If you want an academic job and can find an adviser like this, go to grad school. Otherwise, do not go.
Of course, if everyone followed this advice I think you might be able to fit all the world's grad students in a high school classroom, because your adviser was freakishly good.
How does the funding work in the math department? Lots of the theorists I knew seemed to be TAs almost until the day they graduated -- and in their field, unlike the experimental sciences, salary seemed to be a major fraction of the expense of keeping a grad student. In the experimental wing, where it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to keep (e.g.) a genetics student stocked with reagents, the whole problem of adviser choice has an additional, frustrating degree of freedom: If your adviser doesn't have money to hire you, it doesn't matter that she's the greatest person in the world.
It might be possible to find someone who scores highly on the flush-with-cash axis, the graduates-students-on-time axis, the good-reputation-in-field axis, the track-record-of-successful-students axis and the provides-useful-research-advice axis... but such folks have their pick of grad student talent, and once they're done the other students have to pick among the remaining advisers, balancing the various factors and hoping to get lucky. Or, of course, they can quit, which is probably a better idea, though it is hard to make yourself do it once you've gone that far.
One overwhelmingly useful thing is to have independent funding. I had a fellowship and I cannot overstate how helpful it was -- I was able to shop for advisers in situations where my fellow students felt trapped by financial realities. If you find yourself headed for grad school, apply for every fellowship you can.
"Specifically, I tell them that it is best if they know before they even apply who they want to work with and in what capacity."
I append this with the advice that one should never go to a place where their prospective advisor is the only person they can imagine working with.
Primarily because:
"Know the pluses and minuses of their advisor. The best grad students I have seen have read at least some of the research of all of the tenured professors in the department, and they know who is strong and who is weak. They will also have a feel for the politics. These folks are rare, but they are usually the future big time academics."
Is often something that will only come out in time. You can try to figure these things out, and get a good idea, but there are subtle nuances to people that only comes by knowing them.
"This might be true in schools or departments with very weak research programs. Even then, an advisor advocating for a specific applicant, even if it is a rare occurrence, would most likely be accommodated."
My PhD department worked on the "No specific advisor when admitted, lots of coursework" model, and characterizing it as having a "very weak research program" would make you look like an idiot.
> Many grad students are pretty much completely at the mercy of their advisor and university.
If your advisor is sympathetic, there's nothing that prevents you from continuing to work on your thesis. If you still have coursework, then you're probably out of luck, but if you're ABD, then you might be just fine. But that would require a sympathetic advisor.
+1 : my grad school experience was not like this. I'm sorry you went through this. For me grad school was the best time ever. Pursuing science while being protected and guided by a world expert, and doing so without grown-up responsibilities like getting grants, doing admin, etc. It was so. much. fun.
I agree very strongly with your second sentence (and your last sentence). Do you see those as being meaningfully different from an advisor guiding an already-driven grad student?
Unsolicited advice for any potential PhD students choosing between schools/advisors: you should try very hard to talk to current PhD students, preferably in person or at least over the phone or video call (at any rate, not in writing). Try to talk to as many as possible.
Good advisors will probably have a few students who will speak up for them, and great advisors almost certainly will. In contrast, bad advisors will probably have a few students who give middling recommendations, cryptic comments, or outright warnings. Good departments typically have meet-the-current-students-without-faculty-present events to facilitate exactly this discussion. If the potential advisor does not happily put you in contact with current or recent students, that alone is a red flag.
This is not foolproof. Even a great advisor may have one bitter student, and a generally terrible advisor might still have some good student relationships. But having a bad advisor will make grad school so much harder. This is a situation where doing a bit of due diligence can have a huge impact.
I was lucky; I had a great advisor, and I was always happy to talk to potential students, since I wanted my advisor to have more good students. Talk to students!
I have to say, that my graduate degree was salvaged because I took the advice of a grad student, a postdoc, and an assistant professor (and totally blew off my advisors/committee). So, not all advice is bad.
Yeah, this is great advice for undergraduates considering graduate applications. I lucked out with my supervisor in terms of his advising style (rather hands-off, which suited me), but I could have easily gotten stuck with a bad match. I picked the school, rather than the advisor, which I now realize wasn't the best way to go. [Edit: I will say that picking a school where there were multiple faculty to choose from in the topical area was a good decision, because that provides options.]
Probably the hardest lesson from grad school was learning that my adviser wasn't always right. Learning to push back against what he said made me a much better scientist.
Find a good advisor. I've known many people who hated grad school but when they switched an advisor they liked, their world went from hell to a great graduate experience. Its all about your advisor.
If your goal is grad school, try to get into a research lab as an undergrad. Meet a professor in office hours and ask them: most professors want students because it’s free help, and if they say no you can ask another professor. Working in a lab you can also get a paid position or course credit.
If your goal is industry, try to get internships in your field. Most colleges have co-ops where the internship lasts a semester and sometimes the college helps you. You can also get summer internships on your own. Personal projects are also good for getting a first internship.
Whatever you do, definitely join clubs and make sure to have a social life / relax sometimes.
There is useful information about advisers. Perhaps not as much as is desirable, but certainly enough to avoid making bad choices. Very important: what happened to their old students?
My adviser: all students got academic jobs (some multiple offers) and finished in 5 years (5 years from B.S. to Ph.D. is normal for math). The most recent student, with whom I had overlap, said he rocked.
Another adviser I considered: fastest student took 6 years. One student took 9.5 years, and told everyone "pick a different adviser". Several never graduated. I scratched him off my list.
As for the "three dates", it's not optimal, but you can eliminate some bad choices. If the guy forgets to show up for "date #2"? He'll probably do that a lot. He probably doesn't care. One guy (perfectly decent fellow) was very formal, which doesn't really work for me. Several women students mentioned to me they want someone encouraging. The point of the meetings is to judge whether your personalities are compatible.
There is information out there, but lots of people don't actively seek it out. Then they become miserable grad students. One guy in my year ignored the advice of "9.5 years", and went on to become a miserable grad student (and now a happy actuary with an M.S.).
I had a fantastic adviser, which might have been luck. I had an adviser who didn't suck, which was the result of good choices.
Sounds like a bad advisor. One question though, did you get a sense of this from current students before accepting the offer?
I’m not suggesting the situation is your fault for not knowing. But part of my advice to potential grad students is to talk to several current students of the advisor you’re considering. Reasonable advisors will not be offended by this, and if done in an informal off-the-record way (e.g. in person), I think most grad students will be honest about a bad advisor. Or at least impart some feeling for how their experience has been. For example, I personally know of cases where current students explicitly warned against working with an advisor during the admitted phd student visit day.
Not trying to argue that you should have avoided the situation, but I am curious about cases where the talk-to-current-students advice breaks down.
Hard disagree. I made every possible mistake that can be made related to being too idealistic about grad school; for example, I believed:
- My advisor and collaborators have my best interests at heart
- My primary role in graduate school is to develop novel, useful, reproducible ideas
- Grants, fellowships, and stipends are generous donations freely given in order to enable the above
- Quality is more important than quantity
These kinds of sentiments caused more damage to my career than any other mistakes I have made (fortunately, I survived...so far). When someone gives you money, they definitely expect something in return, even if that something is not always clearly stated, and that something is almost always related to the donor's own career advancement.
There are PIs who absolutely prey on this kind of idealism. They can find certain kinds of idealistic students, use them up, and discard them. Graduate students should be told from day one that they need to look out for their own interests, because no one else will. I'm sure there are exceptions, but they are just that.
The best that can be reasonably hoped for from an advisor-advisee relationship is a clear understanding that it is a mutually beneficial transaction with bidirectional expectations. It makes me uncomfortable that the OP document obscures this fact.
The part that hit home for me was his description of the Prof's frustration with the speed at which he was implementing the enhancement to Klee and the fact that most grad students are not as smart as their advisors.
Most grad students are exhilarated to work with a brilliant researcher but it can crushing when one learns his or her own limitations.
Like the author says, probably 1 in 100 are the equal of their advisor and capable of becoming a professor at a comparable university.
If your adviser is an asshole, you probably won't graduate and your grad school experience will suck. Don't.
If you want to get a Ph.D. and do research, pick your adviser very carefully. It is the most important decision of your research career. Grad school isn't like school, it's an apprenticeship.
Pick your adviser (the person you are apprenticed to) on two factors: the success of their past students and how compatible you are personally with them. Their field should be peripherally related to yours, it doesn't have to be very close (1).
I had a great experience in grad school. I also had two great advisers.
(1) My advisers study scattering theory and complex variables. My Ph.D. was in computational physics. It wasn't a serious problem.
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