(Monday Post Category: Getting You Into and Out of Graduate School; Sub-category: Advisor Drama)
Those of you who have cruised around The Professor Is In. site are already familiar with some of my personal story of graduate school and the tenure track. Those who haven’t–check out the page, Why Should You Trust Me?
I had a fairly rocky road into graduate school. I had won the prestigious, and completely portable, NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and had been recruited with a fabulously generous package of supplemental funding by Cornell. I was on the path to finish graduate school with a nest egg!
Then I traveled to a major national conference to have a personal meeting with my soon-to-be Cornell anthropology advisor….. and he behaved like a complete toad.
He was rude. He was dismissive. He sneered at my proposed topic (the one that had won the 6 years of full funding!)—an innovative (for the time–it was the late 80s) study of the impact of Japanese corporate culture on Southeast Asian workers in Japanese factories opening in countries like Thailand and Malaysia. He kept looking over my shoulder to find other, more important people to talk to.
I was stunned, shocked, dismayed, heartbroken. I didn’t understand what was going on. I cried. Slunk back to my hotel room. Raged to friends. A week or so later, recovering some of my equilibrium, I called up the department to complain. Come to find out, the department and the Graduate College at Cornell had happily recruited me as a NSF awardee— without first gaining the agreement of the one faculty member–the lone Japan anthropologist– who would have to be my primary advisor. Are you kidding me?
But never one to linger in uncertainty, I made a quick decision, said to myself, “to hell with you stupid Ivy Leagues, I never liked you anyway…” and I took myself to the University of Hawai’i, to work with a very well known anthropologist there.
Things worked out sort of ok with her… and then, not. It’s a story for another post. Suffice to say, for most of the years I worked with her, she was good enough.
But over the years I learned a lot about what makes advisors good, bad, excellent, and terrible. Not just from her, but from watching my friends in the program and their struggles with their advisors, and then coming to advise students myself, and watching my students’ experiences with me (!), and observing, and sometimes talking to, the students of my faculty colleagues in my various departments.
So, here it is: the Top 5 Traits of the Worst Advisors. If you are still considering graduate school—test for these before you commit yourself to an advisor or a program! If you are already in graduate school, and you recognize your advisor in this list—see if you can switch out. If not, work to protect yourself. And if you are in graduate school and your advisor has none of these traits—you’ve won the advisor lottery, appreciate your good fortune (and good judgment) and prepare to pay it forward with your own students later.
The Top 5 Traits of the Worst Advisors
5. Steals your work.
This doesn’t happen too often. But when it does, it means you have the very worst advisor. This is a toxic advisor, and you need to get out immediately. Talk to your department head, and the Graduate Dean.
4. Is schizophrenic, in the colloquial sense. Ie, crazy-making inconsistent.
This advisor insists on one path of action one week, and the next week, insists on its perfect opposite. One meeting they tear apart your diss chapter with, “too much poststructuralist feminist theory!!! It’s completely unnecessary to your argument!” You make the revisions, send in the new version, and the next meeting, she’s all like, “where’s your poststructuralist feminist theory??? How can you possibly write this chapter without it?”
Don’t shoot yourself in the head. Just follow up every meeting with a clear, short email that summarizes what she said. Then include that email when you submit the next set of revisions, and be ready to whip it out if you find the advisor contradicting it some time later.
3. Is abusive, negative and undermining.
This is sadly common. This is the advisor that can’t manage a positive comment. Avoid these advisors if you can, but it’s possible you can’t. If you’re already over-committed to one, surround yourself with other, positive, mentors. Remember that with all negative, undermining people, they are actually talking to and about themselves, and not anyone else.
Ironically, the best path with an advisor like this is to stand up for yourself. Bow and scrape and apologize and trust me, the abuse will intensify. I know this one from experience. Set firm boundaries and stand up for your ideas… and chances are, he’ll back off.
2. Is never around.
The more famous your advisor is, the more likely he is always jetting off to Amsterdam, South Africa, or Singapore for some high powered conference or symposium or keynote address. This is also a risk if you have an assistant professor advisor in about his 4th or 5th year in the department. Always away giving the next big talk.
Get self-sufficient fast, find mentors on campus who are more available, and schedule meetings with your advisor well in advance. This one, you can work around. Email, Google Docs, Skype…noone really needs to be anywhere these days.
1. Is nice, and friendly, and available.
And never gives you the fierce criticism and the tough pushback that forces you to confront your weaknesses, take risks, stop whining, cut the excuses, get over your fears, and make hard decisions about reputation, money, and jobs.
This advisor has been the downfall of countless graduate students. Too wussy to go after the big guns, these students circle around the nice associate professor ladies (and the occasional man) in the department, the ones who remember their birthdays and sometimes bring in homemade bread.
If you’ve never cried before, during, or after a meeting with your advisor, something is amiss.
Do not attach yourself to someone “nice.” Attach yourself to someone “intense.” They might not be all warm and fuzzy, but they’ll have you prepped to deal with the REAL assholes who are always circling out there, waiting to pounce.
Nice loses in academia. Nice always loses.
P.S. Bonus Worst Advisor: The Greybeard/Curmudgeon/Emeritus. Never, ever, ever have an emeritus as your advisor. They are old. They made their reputation in decades past. They may have been highly successful and powerful. But that was in the past. Now they are old. Their peers are old, their connections are old, their publications are old, and their theoretical foundations are old.
You, my reader, are about the future. The Emeritus is about the past. Do NOT be seduced by their corduroy patches, and their leisurely gait, and their home-brewed beer, and the endless, endless hours they have to spare for you. Stay clear, keep a wide berth.
Don’t ever forget this rule: If you advisor seems to have infinite amounts of time to talk to you…. s/he is a bad advisor.
I enjoy your take on academia immensely. As a fifth year PhD student, your blog has really got me thinking about what concrete steps I should be taking to secure my future work. Before reading your material I had some concepts of what to do, but your descriptions are great for helping me translate them to practical actions.
I’m wondering what you would advise for someone who finds themselves with one of these advisers and is relatively far along? My adviser falls into your P.S category. He hasn’t even published in my sub-discipline. Over the years I’ve cobbled together so many resources to get my research done, since he doesn’t have an active lab (I’m in the sciences). I was seduced not by his corduroy but by his funding. Coming in he had funding for a project that I used to get my masters research done. Then I wrote a grant with him and got funding for my dissertation work. Now that I’m approaching the end I find he doesn’t quite know how to edit my papers for my diss in a way that is up to date with the thinking in the field.
I tend to shop my diss out to another professor who is much more up to date on my topic (and incredibly generous with his time!). Frequently the edits I get from this prof and from my dissertation prof collide. It creates some drama llama moments!!
That’s a hard place to be. The egos are huge and the graybeard emeritus is often very jealous and easily threatened. Sounds like at least you’re well aware of the problem and have an effective intellectual ally. Remember that your diss doesn’t have to be perfect. Go with what your advisor demands to get done and out, and keep the insights you gain from your other prof in a separate file to the side, to be brought out for the book. Be super entrepeneurial and find even more current profs to engage with, both at your own and other institutions around the country. Get your name out at conferences. Separate yourself from your advisor in every respect except the most minimal, formal one. And be sure and cultivate 3 high powered letter writers for your job apps. You’ll need his letter, but plan to send out 4, with the other three being the really substantive ones.
Hi Karen, many thanks for this site. I am looking to start a PhD/DBA soon and this is helping me in my ground work.
I do have a more pressing issue however – my younger brother is in his fifth year as a PhD candidate at one of the Ivy League schools but has been told by his professor that he should set his sights on a masters instead instead of the PhD that he has worked hard for (and excelled in including all his courses). This is because he has has hit a wall in hos research where he is currently unable to marry two first parts of his three part research – the first two parts are harmonised and working but the third part is not. Part of his work is carrying on another PhD student’s work which was partially completed.
It is very annoying that after choosing this school over the five other Ivy league school offers he had, it would appear that all he will be getting is a master – which frankly will be a waste of his time and is likely to haunt him for the rest of his live.
Is there any recourse for him? His advisor is his department dean as well.
Any advise will be very welcome.
I’ve been reading your back posts for the last few hours, and have gotten lost in a tangled web of emotion: appreciation, sadness, a sense of being understood, anxiety, and more. But little has struck me as much as this sentence: “Nice loses in academia. Nice always loses.” Is this really so? And does it have to be? If reading this sentence makes me immediately want to ditch my Ph.D. program and run far, far away (even though I’m waist-deep in the dissertation), does that mean I shouldn’t be pursuing the academic path? Or, is there a way to use that insight to make your way into it, and then still find happiness in your little corner of it where, perhaps, you can make nice win? [or is that nothing more than wishful thinking?]
There are actually a lot of nice people in academia. But typically, they are not the people of influence. They may have succeeded in getting tenure, but there’s a good chance they won’t be the power brokers. And junior people/phds need to navigate the worlds of power brokers to get ahead in the current conditions of the academic job market. Beyond this, it is possible to retain your humanity and still be successful in academia. I knew some who did. But it’s the exception, and is not a thing that will happen automatically. It takes deliberate, careful, and conscious choices, at every step of the way, and a constant reevaluation of your responsibilities vis-a-vis those beneath you in the hierarchy.
Sigh. I feared that’s what you’d say–that those who retain their humanity are the exception. Still, thank you.
I listen to my friends who also went to graduate school and I listen wide mouthed to how their advisers scoured the job market for them.
My adviser never did jack shit for me. After graduating, she kicked me away to the dogs. I persevered, I kept publishing, all single author, for there was no one to collaborate with, making the most of the lousy postdoc opportunity at Podunk State that had come by my way.
If my adviser had her way, I would never even have got the job at Podunk State. She had hooked me up with a 1 year job in Europe and that was it! When I emailed people at Podunk State, they wrote back: what? You are still looking? Your adviser told us you weren’t!
Good thing I thought of contacting people at Podunk state independently!
Three years later, I did have a bunch of decent publications, all single author. But no one knew and no one cared: who reads a CV from Podunk State, after all. Forget famous collaborators, I had no collaborators.
I applied for TT jobs and they laughed me out. I applied for postdocs and they laughed at me. Meanwhile, my grad school colleagues who had CVs 1/3rd my length got TT jobs (or at least a second chance to postdoc). They had advisers who cared. I got zippo.
F*ck my adviser. And f*ck me for choosing her.
Dear Karen, I find your blog a great source of support and perspective for my own work as a graduate advisor. I wish you would write a follow-up post on the “nice advisor” problem, addressed to us nice advisors. I aspire to your level of effective bluntness, but I often find myself choking up and couching my criticisms in such “constructive” terms that my advisees can miss the underlying hard truths.
Many times I long to say, “This writing sample is boring and shallow, and nobody is going to give you a job/fellowship based on it.” But don’t want to be toxic or undermining, so instead I say, “Use active verbs to make your writing more vivid! Make sure each paragraph has a topic sentence and evidence to support a claim! Frame your argument and claims as a response to arguments and claims in the current literature – refer to scholars X and Y!” And my advisees think their work is basically okay, when it’s not.
What a wonderful and candid comment, nice lady advisor! I will certainly follow up, perhaps this week. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. I will even quote Tony Robbins (I know, shudder). But he said this thing on Oprah (I know!), that has been poking and niggling at me for weeks about what “nice” really does in the world, especially among women. Stay tuned.
Dear Karen,
I arrived at this discussion by clicking through the links from your “guest post: death of a soul” which in turn I had clicked to from reading the Terran Lane blog “on leaving academia.” now in late July 2012.
I thank you for sharing your stories and also for being so responsive to reader comments. What puzzles me, though, is that your statement here regarding “nice” advisors seems to me to just underline why you felt you had no community when you were in a position of power in academia. Your explanation above to grad students and jr fac about managing power, to me is especially disturbing as it sounds just like corporate thinking, which is exactly the kind of thinking that is currently undermining academia. Yes, advisors have to be trenchant critics, that’s “tough love,”so to speak, and any human interactions benefit from political savvy, but to put it into such ruthlessly hierarchical and one-dimensional terms is, I think, misleading and unfortunate.
Though I understand that the soul-killing atmosphere you found yourself in at UI was in many ways systemic, I also really want to ask you to think about what you could have done to change it — could you muse about that for people who are still committed within academic institutions? After all, as you say, you were a department head. Dept heads can set a tone and organize events and interconnections that foster community. In fact, they need to or it usually doesn’t happen at the dept level.
I am tenured at a R1 top public univ. When I first arrived 16 years ago we really did have a sense of community, but the dept grew, and certain people had interpersonal falling-outs (that’s just human), some of my closest colleague/friends went elsewhere, and now I feel very little of the kind of community most of us hope for except that which I constantly foster among my students, both grad and undergrad. I do what I can to keep it up (while trying to keep my family together too). Anyway, I find it contradictory and kind of sad that you are using corporate-style logic in some places on your site to advise people who are turning to you. I wonder if you’d consider re-thinking this.
Thanks!
I am not following what you mean by my ‘corporate style logic.’ If you mean my critique of ‘nice’ advisors, I would have to dispute that. True caring is dedicated to the whole person–that means, not just their writing that week, but their overall career prospects and financial well being. Mentoring at that level, in this economy, means being tough indeed. Not mean, but tough. No amount of cookies on their birthday—regardless of the community that might or might not build—replaces the tough love that helps them understand just how monumental the task is before them to secure the tenure track job, and also stay out of crushing debt and off of welfare. At least, that’s my perspective.
PS I typed that comment hastily on my iPhone, so if you do respond to it, I implore you to correct the several grammatical errors – I meant “us nice advisorS,” and the “they” in the last sentence of para. 1 refers to my students, not to my constructive terms!!
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I had adviser #2 (never around) in both incarnations: primary adviser was flaky AND newly in recovery from two decades of serious alcoholism AND had a huge new book out which won tons. Second reader was in her 4th year AND working on a book AND totally paranoid about not getting tenure. Suffice it to say I wrote my dissertation pretty much by myself (possible if you’re in the humanities as I am), got my PhD, and then wrote a wholly different manuscript for my first book. They weren’t much help w/the job market either. I vowed to be the adviser I never had: attentive, constructively critical, encouraging, and PRESENT. I don’t sugarcoat, but I pay close attention to my advisees’ work and try to zero in on exactly what the problem is. I suppose I’m “nice,” but it seems to have worked for me — I have a terrific job, I’m well-respected in my field, and I have loyal and hardworking students.
I’ad add one: The Deadwood Associate.* You know: The one who wrote the big book or had the big project five (or ten… or twenty…) years ago, got tenure, and then checked out. They may be the reason you chose that grad program, but if they’re not still active in research, RUN AWAY. Besides being poor role models, such advisors will not serve you well at all when you hit the job market.
*There are actually a number of subspecies of this one: the Deanlet, the Consultant, the Full-Time Parent, etc. My personal favorite is the Reservation Leaver. This is the one who takes the “intellectual freedom” part of tenure so seriously that they spend the rest of their careers half-heartedly pursuing crackpot projects that give the illusion of activity, but are never actually funded, published, etc.
I <3 this comment so much. The “Full Time Parent” ooh, ouch! I was that Assoc Prof! And, I was seriously distracted.
Nice always loses? No. I am nice, and I have a 2-2 job, a book coming out with a good press, and a tenure file with strong advance support. It may be that I will *ultimately* lose, whatever that means, but I have not so far. Neither have my nice colleagues. I understand that hyperbole is part of your schtick, but you should keep in mind that plenty of graduate students read your blog as truth. That means that when they read “nice always loses,” they take it as instruction: you must not be nice. This is cynical, because you are presenting a critique of professional culture in a way that perpetuates that which you don’t like about it. In fact, it is possible to be both nice and critical, and I actually think it pays off professionally to treat people well as you vigorously argue about ideas. Anyway, as an intellectual you should know better than to make “always” statements. What’s your evidence?
This was an early post, one of my first (possibly my very first–i have to check!) written when I had basically a nonexistent readership. I would not write “nice always loses” now because I’m much more aware of the degree to which people read this blog as “truth.” Indeed, I am somewhat more careful with nuance now, although yes, hyperbole remains part of my schtick, in blogging and in life, as my friends and family know all too well. I don’t believe in rewriting posts, though, so I’m going to let this stand. I think the fact that it has provoked this kind of response from you and other readers makes it a far more effective teaching tool than if I ‘censored’ my older voice. To return to the theme: i’ve seen far more women undone by “nice” than I’ve seen helped by it, so I say to young women starting out, if you have to err on one side, err on the side of not-nice.
Nice always loses? Like the above commenter, I hate this myth of academia more than anything, as it justifies the abusive behavior of all the other “worst advisors.” As someone who left academia for a career in editing commercial non-fiction, I can tell you it is possible to give smart, constructive criticism without being a jerk. It’s even possible to make major criticisms and require a rewrite without seeming like a jerk. And if you can be honest, yet not abusive, with people about their the flaws in their writing, they will be much more likely to improve than if you make them feel like the task is so enormous they will never be able to do it.
Good advice! Unfortunately for my advisees, I may be a bit too nice sometimes. The one thing I take exception to is your presumption that emeritus are outdated. My father is an emeritus at a top tier university. At the age of 70 he continues to do ground breaking research, reads top journals daily, and attends numerous national and international events. In a white male dominated field, he has repeatedly been honored for his support of women and nonwhite scholars. A young scholar would be missing out if he or she dismissed him as outdated.
Oh. Em. Gee. I wish I’d read this when I first started following you a couple weeks ago. As you know from out Twittere conversation, my current advisor… Well, let’s just say he “has a lot goin’ on.” (I ended up blogging my results; the post is from May 15, if anyone cares to peek.) But I’ll definitely be sizing up one of the prospects I have. I’m only in his class & taking on a half of one upcoming class period, so I’ll chalk his niceness up to lack of more intensive contact. Also: we’ll see what happens when I turn in my term paper.
Thanks, Karen!
I really enjoyed this post. The reason I’ve ventured to this sight are because I have a really bad advisor. I’m going into my 4th year in Biomedical research at Einstein Medical School. My advisor, whom I worked with as her technician for 3 years prior to becoming a student, I think is crazy. Everything I do is never good enough. She constanlty lets us know we don’t work enough. Meanwhile I’m in the lab literally running 50hrs a week. That’s all I can do right now, I have a baby at home and a part-time job on the weekends. We work like dogs in here. I never go to lunch, I just work. Now, this investigaotr is known to be not good to work for. However, I thought we were good until I became the student (her first I might add). I only came back to this woman because it was supposed to be the quickest way to a phd and its completely blown up in my face. I’m now at the point of quitting and just getting a job with my master’s. I’m 34 and cannot afford to be here for another 3+ years…it was not supposed to be that way and now I’m stuck. If was going to be this miserble I would have gone to another lab or another school all together……ugggh..aweful. She is know to be nuts…no boyfriend, no husband, no children, 50 years old, independently wealthy from an inheritence……classic workaholic….boy I picked a winner!!
So nice to see someone doing biomedical research. Doing a PhD in humanities is a lot different from doing one that requires experimental research in labs. The European system is also different from the American one. I started a PhD in biotech in a prestigious institute of tech in Europe this year. Less than a half year later, I’m leaving the lab. My ex-boss has some above-mentioned traits of a bad advisor. First, he’s never around and nobody knows why, perhaps too many conferences? Second, he is negative and always tries to motivate his students in a very demotivating way. Third, due to bad management, he’s also a bit schizophrenic due to the fact that he can’t keep track of what projects the students work on. To complete the list, I must add that in disciplines that require experimental research, your advisor must be financially strong, because running your experiments consumes money. The lab I’m leaving does receive sufficient funding, but the group leader hired way too many students and made everybody poor. Furthermore, in biological research, an incoming PhD must receive a certain degree of supervision within the first half year, a critical period. Of course the students must be able to have their own ideas, but that should come with insights from experience, not something you ask an entry-level PhD to do. In summary, for the lab I’m leaving, there is no money, no supervision and no projects, but you have to deliver results! This is in general a very bad deal for a new PhD. 5 months into my PhD, the boss thought I couldn’t deliver the result he wanted for a project that turned out to be much bigger than anyone anticipated. Then he forced me to resign, or fire me the hard way and ruining my reputation. The time point is crazy because in 5 months most American PhDs are still taking courses without having started any research. I didn’t enjoy working for him either, so leaving was a win-win solution for both of us. Luckily I have a 2nd author paper in SCIENCE from my master thesis to help me find another position, and hopefully a better lab.
For the “nice guys finish last” argument, I dont think it’s completely true. Nicety without competence is not ideal, but truly talented PIs must be able to afford being nice. I don’t ask them to remember my birthday, but at least they shouldn’t make your day a living hell. The supervisor of my master thesis is a nice and social person who enjoys playing cards during breaks with his students. Scientifically, he’s a very competent mentor and accomplished in terms of publishing. Such PIs must be a rare breed, but I know that they exist, since I worked with one.
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My adviser is a universally agreed nice guy. Ha I guess I already have a clue.
He is intelligent and diligent. He is available to students most of the time.
The problem is that he criticizes a student’s thinking with a blink. Most of his directions end up no where.
Should I leave or stand up for my idea?
Let me make the situation clearer.
My adviser has a different research interest from me. I joined his program because of his cooperation with another professor. My adviser was new in this area. But that professor left later.
So most of his time and energy is devoted to his research. But he is too nice to be absent from me. He is also too intelligent to believe that I can do my job. Therefore all my ideas end up in two directions.
The first direction is a pat on the back and encouragement. For the next half or a year, I keep working on simulation and meet with him on a weekly basis. Right after I collect my data and present to him with my analysis, I am told that it makes no sense and no need to go further after less than 1 minute looking at my report and listening to my reasoning.
The other direction is to deny my idea and ask me to go the other way. The problem is such work ends up the same way after I collect data and do analysis. Then he directs me to my original idea without knowing that he already denied it and why. It is another year’s working leading no where.
The following happened for real. One of his students submitted a paper to a peer-reviewed conference. The paper got accepted and would be presented. The night before the presentation, my adviser called this student and told him that there was a deadly fault in the paper because another student said so. My adviser and the student author had been working on the project for a year, meeting on a weekly basis. They went through the whole process together: ideas, simulation, data, analysis, paper writing, slides making. Right before the presentation, the adviser believed that it was wrong because another student told him that. Then the student author had to reason with him again. And the so-called deadly fault was not there.
Is this normal to a phd advisor? BTW, this student’s research also falls out of the adviser’s interest.
I had a bad advisor (for me, it seems like other people in my lab likes him). He has never been constructive about my research nor positive about me…. I was wondering if you had any advice about switching advisors? (especially in later years of the program). Hopefully you’ll see this, thanks prof!
It is doable but awkward and treacherous. But definitely try to do it before you’re in the final diss writing/defense stage—you want the new advisor to get on board in time to help direct the diss, and to know you well enough to write powerful letters. You should check with mentors you trust in your dept to ask what the political fallout might be. Generally it’s very touchy and feelings and egos are easily bruised…even if the guy doesn’t love you all that much as his advisee!
I am 5 years into a 6 year science Ph.D. program that shall remain anonymous
I think I may have an advisor that is in all 5 categories. If you are scratching your head to figure out how someone can be both 1 and 2+3, I should add that I think my advisor may have some kind of split personality disorder. Also, I should clarify that by “never around”, I actually mean she never mentors or advises or helps me in any way. I am fine working independently, but sometimes I really really need her to submit a letter of recommendation for a fellowship or to read a draft of a manuscript and she can’t be bothered to do so even if I remind her of the deadline daily.
By “steals my work”, I mean that over the past 5 years I have worked near her (“with” seems too strong….) she has taken away multiple projects I have started and given them to other students to complete. When they prove to be unable to pick up where I have left off, she has forced me to do this work for them, and then allows them to pass it off as their own. I have attempted to report her for academic misconduct, but the university was uninterested in helping me. This was one year ago. I have since then continued to do my own work (when I can) plus the work of two other students.
I have been to my department head twice about switching advisors. He says my advisor is so nice and likable, surely if I tell her how I feel she will turn things around. Speaking with her has resolved nothing and the department head won’t budge on allowing me to find a new lab.
Should I throw in the towel on my Ph.D 5 years in?
This is a terrible story. Just remember that grad school is short and a career is long, so if you can finish the phd and get a job, you’ll never really have to suffer from this advisor again. The question is how close you are to finishing and how possible it is for you to finish. If you can, I’d say you should. You’ll want to make sure the advisor can/will write you a strong rec letter for the job market and meanwhile cultivate a lot of better people both inside and outside the dept to be your supporters and letter writers for your career after Ph.D..
I truly wish I had found someone with this type of advice sooner. Unfortunately, I just finished my undergrad with a painfully terrible advisor. I went into undergrad with a super positive attitude believing that I’d win him over with my skills and talents. By the time I had caught on to the routine, it was to late. My credits were so specific to the school and my program that transferring was useless and would have necessitated 2 extra years of work. Unfortunately, now I’m far behind in finding positions and have no support from my former advisor.
I think my advice to someone with a bad advisor would be to change advisors or schools immediately without hesitation. I realize that in “real life” or the “real world” or however you want to describe it one has to deal with difficult people. This, however, is just to important. It isn’t your responsibility to come up with strategies or force someone, whose job it is to help you by the way, to actually do their job. Don’t wait for it to get better, get out.
Hello,
Here’s another type. I’m not sure where this one fits in.
I took 6 months off of academia between masters and thesis and so we agreed to work together unofficially for 6 months, because, in my country, the rules are now that we are to finish a thesis in 3 years, not so easy. so an unofficial headstart, is the new tactic.
In my field and school, it is common to do 50% practical work and 50% theoretical work. This advisor is rather high profile. She said she enjoyed reading my master’s thesis, was interested in working with me, but wanted me to do 90-100% theoretical work. When I asked three times over three months, her what she liked about my master’s thesis, she never answered, I had little indication of what she thought I should or shouldn’t do in terms of approach to thesis writing. She only wanted me to research subject that had a link to hers. I told her I was motivated by practical work, so she had me prepare to organize an exhibit around practical work i will have done. At very last minute she then switched it and asked me to basically organize a conference around her practical work with a prestigious foreign university (in a language that i speak far better than her), skipping my practical work and the related exhibit
Basically she was trying to use me as a free, unpaid research and administrative assistant without encouraging me to do any of my own entirely separate research work. I checked with more senior professors and they said her approach was entirely unethical and she will apparently get a speaking to.
I have researched whether purely theoretical thesis is advantageous in my field and it most definitely is not! I now have lost 3 months of time and research and momentum.
and i need to attempt to fine a new advisor. i have less momentum now after having been discouraged for 3 months.
Early on i did core research relative to my subject which is not unrelated to hers. i’m sure she will use whatever she wants of my subject for her own projects.
i have since gotten feedback from various sides that she is intensely ambitious and can thus be manipulative and is without a doubt calculating, not forthright. her fame comes first, for sure, well before integrity, for example.
Hello,
It is really nice to see someone that seeing profs as a human being rather than god and telling the possible mistakes that they are commonly doing. My prof. is schizophrenic, negative, really rude, and commonly want me to change the data a little bit. Generally, we are arguing and not speaking. He is like a god, just wants some work done and I do not want to do some stupid experiments without a reason or any explanation. But my prof. just does not tell me the details of “my” experiments. I have many problems with him however I passed my qualification exam and I am in my third years. I took anti-depression pills last year, not to cry every moment and left the wet lab for a couple of months to study my qualification exam. Now, I came back to wet lab and my prof. shoutings at me as always. I love science, I am really enthusiastic to any subjects of it, however I want to quit my phd due to my prof because I am not happy and every day he shouts at me for any possible or not possible reasons. I cannot change my advisor because he wont let me go and there is no prof. who would like to take him on. So I really need some advice
I might add another worst advisor, The Customer Service Prof(essional). This would be the advisor who talks a good game but utterly fails to deliver. They dazzle you with promises of collaborations, publications, timely completion, funding, conferences, that never quite seem to materialize. Departments do this too, maybe especially to competitive applicants, and I learned this the hard way with my masters. Now, as I’ve carefully evaluate PhD opportunities I have simply stopped my pursuit of those where I feel too much like someone is running a salesjob on me. Which brings me to another point: Potential and existing graduate students in my experience seem so socialized toward underconfidence and timidness being conditioned maybe through years of primary, secondary, and undergraduate education to pleasing others rather than developing a sense of their own worth or merits. That, and/or students are caught up on broad reputation metrics (e.g. size of name/rep in the field, rank of institution), rather than any idea of what works best for them. The idea they/we can also evaluate institutions, departments and advisors on a personal level sometimes seems lost on many us (long story there).
These are all excellent and valuable points.
Karen,
What’s your opinion on administrator-advisors (i.e. writes grants for the department, in charge of the hiring committee, serves as the negotiator between the department and the Dean of Humanities, etc.)? I figure there are both pros and cons to this; on the one hand, they’re often more established, visible, and active, as well as great at dealing with departmental politics and networking. On the other hand, they’re often extremely busy and may not have time for proper advising. Thoughts?
Hopefully this doesn’t get buried in the flurry of emails in your inbox. Thanks for your time!
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