The sooner you finish, the better. Graduate school delays adulthood (see Reason 12) and the longer you devote to a degree, the longer you will be without a salary. And there are few things more discouraging than sinking years of your life into working toward a degree that you never finish (see Reason 11). Having an adviser who offers you maximum intellectual freedom while allowing you to work at your own pace is an advantage if you are exceptionally organized, disciplined, and focused. However, if you are not, that kind of generous leeway can be detrimental to your chances of finishing in a timely manner or finishing at all. People tend to be most productive when they have expectations to meet and a schedule to follow. Ironically, it is often the kindest advisers who are the most averse to imposing strict expectations on their students, leaving them to rely on their own far-too-often insufficient self-discipline.
Yes! So, so true. My advisor fits this type much more than the type described in reason 44. It seems great at first, but most of her students take about 11-12 years to graduate. The problem is she sees no problem with this outcome. She thinks it's great for producing scholars. Recent severe budget cuts have made even her finally realize that this model isn't tenable, but she hasn't really changed her mentoring style to match. Imagine 12 years of graduate school and then no job, or in place of job a temporary post-doc that's not much different from being in grad school.
ReplyDeleteCompletely agree. My husband had a "terrible" advisor who forced him to publish and finish the program in 5 years. I had a great, friendly, kind advisor and it took me 7 years to finish with no publications.
ReplyDeleteYes! I feel horrible complaining about this since it looks pretty nice to have moral support and friendly feedback from the other side of the fence (so I've heard), but frankly I am here to learn not only material but also how to manage the material and produce research. It takes a lot longer teaching that to yourself and it's never done so effectively as when somebody tells it to your face. I'm facing a rushed thesis definitely subpar to everything I had planned, and was encouraged to plan (then never held accountable for). Reality's a bitch...
ReplyDeleteI would rather still have the friendly advisor and then have tyrants on my committee. That way I didn't have panic attacks every time I saw the advisor, but still had the pressure to get things done on time because my committee kept the pressure on. That is the best of both worlds.
ReplyDeleteMy advisor was a laid-back person who gave me a lot of freedom, and I finished on time. It is very important that you work with someone who fits your personality. The tyrannical advisor is the one that teaches you much more, but, at the same time, we have learned so much already (the MA, the classes, the undergraduate years).
Delete@Anonymous 9:29
ReplyDeleteI had panic attacks every time I went to see my "nice" adviser, but that was more about my insecurities than hir personality, I guess...
@recent Ph.D.
ReplyDeleteMy adviser (for my MS) was more nice than not, but I was also terrified to see him. He (God bless his soul) was not a native English speaker so emails from him seemed utterly cryptic and foreboding. "Be in my office in one hour," etc. Or there was the one time he came up to me in the middle of a class and asked to see me about something urgent after class. After class, he proceeded to ask me if I knew of any good biographies of Robert E. Lee... (and he's a business prof).
Yes, my advisor is one of these. Whenever I tell him that I will have a draft of a chapter to him by the end of the month, for example, he says, "Oh, well, whenever you have something for me to look at, that's fine." He never follows up and asks me to see something. I am the type of person that needs deadlines in order to complete something, so flexible deadlines do not motivate me much. If I have more time to complete something, I will spend more time working on it. If I have set deadline, I will finish my project by then. When I try to impose my own deadlines upon myself, they just get pushed further and further back, until I feel incredibly guilty. When I do finally show my advisor what I have written, he rarely has any comments, except something like, "Well, you might want to add a comma at the top of page 4." I have a hard time believing that what I have written is that perfect. This compounds the problem--I know that when I finally show him what I have written, he will have very little to say about it. He is an incredibly nice person, he is very supportive and I am sure he will do whatever he can to help me land a job, but I cannot help but wish sometimes that he could be a bit stricter with deadlines and provide a bit more constructive feedback.
ReplyDeletestory of my life. i'm never going to graduate.
ReplyDeleteJust for the record: I had a stern, but not tyrannical, advisor. He was able to push me to work on my dissertation, and was helpful in writing it, too--but if I hadn't been working, he'd make me feel uncomfortable! I'm one of three people I'm aware of in advising, and each of us completed our degrees in less than five years.
ReplyDeleteBut I could see how having a tyrannical or soft advisor could really mess things up!
Just googled this blog and just wanted to add.... this is exactly my problem- my situation is pretty much exactly like Grad Student's comment above, but combined with a ridiculous amount of personal uncertainty about what the hell I'm doing- and frankly I wish I'd never started.
ReplyDeleteI'd add that in theory university structures can help make up for a nice/lax advisor, by requiring students to go through certain loops etc, but in my case (I'm in the UK) this hasn't really happened at all. I passed the last and so far only assessment stage, but I suspect that was because the university didn't want me leaving.
Also: my nice adviser turned into a tyrant when she read my COMPLETED dissertation and decided that I should have done a completely different project. The topic I chose was controversial, and she was scared about how it would be received. Could she have told me that four years earlier, when I began the project? Probably. But she was too "nice" to mention it.
ReplyDeleteI finally finished, but the toll this has taken on my mental health, marriage, finances, self-esteem, etc. has been huge. ugh.
It sounds as if your advisor doesn't really fit this mold. She sounds like she might be passive-aggressive, which is another problem altogether (actually, a worse one).
DeleteMy adviser is a "nice" person, but I think a whole other entry should be written under the specific heading, the peril of the lazy/disinterested advisor. In my four years in a top-3 humanities Phd program my advisor has shown nothing but minimal interest in my academic work, let alone professional development, and has even once approved work with serious flaws. The charitable interpretation I have of this was that he was reluctant to hurt my feelings, but I suspect that he may have done so in order to avoid creating further, unwanted work for himself.
ReplyDeletePartly this can be attributed to the fact that when I entered the program he was still an assistant professor, and so was subjected to the gruelling rigours of the tenure track at a private, prestigious R1. But since receiving tenure, his behaviour hasn't changed at all. And I'm not one who has had this experience working with him - my boyfriend is another of his advisees (yes, I know, the two-body problem). Our advisor told him confidently that an article he had written was not only good but superior to the regular run of submissions to a top journal, and guess what - it was roundly rejected. I realize that the guy is only human, but surely he might have anticipated at least one or two of the readers' global criticisms?
Ideally I would like to have a more engaged advisor, but unfortunately that would require transferring to another institution. Given that it's pretty clear that my advisor has little investment in my success, I doubt that he'll be too troubled if I leave (most likely he'll be relieved).
I'd also like to suggest another entry, or maybe just as an addendum to the competitiveness entry: intellectual insecurities and "trash talk," and how academic culture allows both to flourish. My advisor is also notable in this regard, even trash talking other graduate students to their peers.
The irony is that I am both terrified of my adviser, and he is "nice" enough to have given me more than enough rope to hang myself.
ReplyDeleteWhile he was somewhat tyrannical to his other students during the entirety of their tenure as students, at some fairly early point in mine I produced some extremely, extremely preliminary result. At that point I don't know exactly what happened: he either just decided he "liked" me and that I was "smart," or he lost interest in my project and focused on pushing his other grad students through their careers while leaving me to drown in self-blame and a sense of utter futility.
It appears that I'm finally getting out, with an 8 year Masters. Hopefully I will get a good Federal job, which luckily has open-ended applications going on this year. But I will definitely admonish future potential grad students to explore ALL their avenues VERY seriously before they finally decide to apply to grad school.
Anonymous at October 3, 2012 6:03 PM, I'd stress the BEFORE because some people apply to grad school because the job market is bad and they want to explore non-academic career opportunities
ReplyDeleteAgreed with Anonymous-March-10-2012: The nice-turned-tyrant superivor is hell on earth.
ReplyDeleteOnce ABD's (All But Dissertation) actually get close to finishing after working more years than they could possibly imagine, this can be a time when nice supervisors turn into demanding, unreasonable and petulant overseers. Does it finally dawn on them that they didn't give your work the attention it deserved? ... are they afraid of looking bad if you mess up at the defense? ... or perhaps they don't really have a good grasp of what you've been working on all this time.
It can take weeks and sometimes months to get feedback on draft chapters. The non-response to your increasingly pleading emails can be punishing. You think you are going to finish by the end of the current term? Think again. The nice-turned-tyrant supervisor will make you take longer to finish than you can possibly imagine. Add another term (or two) to your completion plan. You will go further into debt to stay in the game. Hopefully you have a supportive network of friends & family - you're going to need it.
At least with a tyrant you will either quit earlier or succeed earlier. That's better than waiting years to discover you still have much further to go and there's a nasty end-game yet to be played.
I'm a little puzzled by this notion that it should be the responsibility of graduate advisers to harangue their students to be productive and to get things in on time. Grad students are adults, and frankly, if they don't have that kind of self-motivation, they should really be doing something else with their time (which I suppose makes me a nicely tyrannical adviser!).
ReplyDeleteIt's terrifically helpful to me, 20 years later, to see someone suggesting a different advisor might have helped me make it. I dropped out and have always felt bad about it. Thanks for suggesting there may have been other contributing factors besides my own failings. You might be able to describe me as well-organized and discipined NOW, but it's been a long and arduous road to acquire those skills, which I certainly did NOT have in abundance at that point in my life.
ReplyDeleteMy advisor is nice, or should I say lazy/disinterested in my work. At least that's what I think his attitude is. I understand his role as an advisor is to advise, not telling me what I should do to finish my dissertation. But he should be more responsive in replying to my emails, and provide more constructive suggestions.
ReplyDeleteI don't agree with the whole "graduate students are adults, and they should have the self-motivation to finish their work" crap, frankly, we all have self-motivation to finish our dissertation work, after all no one pointed a gun at us when we were filling out the graduate school application.
The point of attending graduate school instead of working on our own is the access to resources, such as, your research advisor. The advisor should be helping you towards finishing your dissertation since the day he/she agrees to be your research advisor.
Exactly what I'm experiencing now, though I'm undergraduate :( I know she's kind and kinda laid back, and then since I'm a procrastinating person and don't wanna have a strict advisor, I chose her. Turns out that's totally wrong :( She does always give me advice and direction, but I never thought that she would really never give me a push or even a warning, like, "You better don't do this because blablabla", not at all... when I realized the topic I've chosen is very hard and hasn't been brought by many, it has been too late T__T Deadline is in front of my eye, and she never give me deadline or anything, I don't know if that's because whether she believes me, or worst, just gives up on me T_T And she almost never replied email... Goodness now I'm so depressed :'(
ReplyDeleteReally, if you're a deadliner or procrastinating person, NEVER CHOOSE this kind of advisor. Maybe you'll be under pressure for choosing a strict one, but if you're laid back yourself, just never choose this kind of advisor!
hi! I'm in 8th year of my PhD... a research proposal was approved five years before and I did my work according to RP without consulting my supervisor (because he never commented on my work)... after completion of my thesis when i presented work on his table, he was astonished that i completed my work. in fact, he decided that my thesis writing time was started now... he is now reviewing my thesis at the speed of one page per month... meanwhile... it is psychologically torturing for me.
ReplyDeleteI'm just finishing up my M.A., and was incredibly fortunate to have a great advisor who was both supportive and organized. He allowed me a decent amount of flexibility, but not to the point that I was floundering. His feedback was consistently insightful and delivered in a timely manner. My office mate, meanwhile, is not as lucky. Her advisor is not only disorganized and somewhat unpleasant to deal with, but also takes forever to read. She apparently sent him a good chunk of her master's thesis just about 3 weeks ago (per a timeline that they developed) and she has not heard a peep from him about it. Same goes for the other 2 people he is advising.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if this has been put on here as an official reason, but tenure is awful. This prof wouldn't tolerate a G.A. taking this long to respond to student writing, but when he just doesn't answer emails or help his advisees, it's fine.
3/22 11:48 Anon back with more reports of the awful adviser. He has basically screwed over my office mate so much that she may have to complete her project over the summer. This prof's other 2 advisees had to work with other faculty members to get their projects in on time.
ReplyDeleteApparently, he even went so far as to arbitrarily waive the requirement of writing a proposal during the fall semester and told his students, "Just tell me about your ideas and I'll give you the ok." It's a shame that he gets paid obscene amounts of money as a tenured professor despite such alarming displays of incompetence and disregard for his students. What makes it even more annoying is that he only teaches 1 graduate level course per year (as opposed to others who teach them every semester) and only teaches a rotation of 2 or 3 other low level classes--meaning he essentially exempts himself from dealing with the sort of large scale senior English projects that other professors in our department regularly encounter.