I had covered this briefly in an earlier post but I feel it demands more justice. So here I come with a complete article dedicated to this topic. Apart from tenure and non-tenure considerations, there are several other factors to be considered.
Beginning a graduate degree or a postdoc may well be the most important choice of your career, and at the time, you may feel that you lack the understanding to make the right choices as I do. So, before you settle on a particular professor to be your advisor, it is important to seek out all of the necessary data that you need to make a properly informed decision. Students and postdocs should approach this important decision in the same way that an investor evaluates a potential business risk. Why? The choice of advisor directly dictates the career possibilities that open to you as a graduate student or postdoctoral fellow.
Making the Big Decision
The most important criterion in selecting an advisor is the degree to which their students are sought after by other academics and people in industry. Most graduate students and postdocs have a narrow window of opportunity to succeed in landing an academic or industrial position. Understanding what doors might be open to you when joining a given advisor’s group can be very reassuring, and a good way of guessing that is by investigating the career outcomes of past alumni from that group. For example, an advisor who has many fruitful contacts in industry will likely help students or former postdocs find industrial positions in the companies the advisor has links with. Advisors who do cutting-edge research in hot fields, have been awarded prizes, have published extensively, and sit on editorial boards of journals are more likely to spawn the next generation of faculty. At the same time, it might not always be prudent to decide on such a senior professor as other considerations go into the decision as well.
When shopping around for an advisor, the idea is to fit the type of advisor and stages of their career development with the personality type and goals of the prospective student or postdoctoral fellow. The latter requires that the prospective students do some soul searching by asking if they are independent, if they are followers or leaders, if they have active or passive personalities, and so on.
In the next sections, the author outlines the advantages and disadvantages for three main groups of faculty advisor: young, mid-career, and senior faculty members. The information author provides was acquired and assembled over the years through personal experience, anecdotal evidence, conversations with my peers, and a collection of more formal sources. The author asks us to tally the advantages and disadvantages with the prospective advisor and check for inconsistencies. Next step should be to check for the reasons for the same and then making sound decisions.
Young Faculty Advisors: Young advisors are those with the job title Assistant Professor. They are typically close in age to graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.
Advantages
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Enthusiastic and energetic, and tend to be more conscientious about their progress in research and teaching. Self-assessment is high on their agenda.
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Still have strong links to their past Ph.D. and postdoctoral advisors. This is advantageous for their students to establish their first circle of professional connections, and for their personal mentoring as they learn to lecture and write grant proposals.
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Tend to be Web savvy. They generally have good personal home pages that advertise their research and group members.
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Are usually more active and pro-active in recruiting graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.
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More “hands-on” in setting up their laboratory. They often work alongside their students at the bench to accelerate their research efforts.
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May be more sympathetic to demographics of current student populations, especially minority and women students.
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More in tune with career issues of the day.
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Eager to broaden their circle of professional contacts at conferences and to advertise the research achievements of their students.
Disadvantages
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Under enormous pressure to get their research off the ground. The demand to secure tenure, publish, and win research grants is great. They may transfer their stresses to their students.
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Are generally inexperienced lecturers. They require mentoring from a past advisor or a senior faculty member within the department. Moreover, they are often under pressure to prepare new courses in areas related to their areas of expertise.
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May not be able to afford postdoctoral fellows due to funding constraints.
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Tend to overshoot expectations and abilities of beginning graduate students. They may assign a high-risk research problem that may jeopardize the career of a graduate student.
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Are usually inexperienced at writing grant proposals.
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Research projects may be too closely related to their own graduate and postdoctoral work. Innovation may be narrowly limited at this point of their career.
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May view the teaching of “service” courses as an impediment to getting their research off the ground.
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May try to impress others, particularly senior faculty in their department, in an effort to gain respect. This may manifest itself in unusual or unexplainable behavior.
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Tend to be overachievers and may suffer early burnout.
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Short track record of research. They are not yet recognized for their scientific achievements and have amassed few awards. In addition, they have no track record of successful alumni from their research group.
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Less experienced in picking “good” students; are more concerned with getting enough bodies in the lab to get their research off the ground.
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Tend to underestimate the time and effort required in setting up a laboratory, particularly the basic requirements.
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May be bestowed with prestigious awards that are not consistent with their research track record. These may be politically motivated or may be given in the hopes that the anticipated “rising star” does not leave the department. This can cause undue stress on both the performances of the advisor and his/her students.
Mid-Career Faculty Advisors: Mid-career advisors are those who have secured tenure and achieved some level of recognition in their department for their research and teaching. Their job titles are Associate Professor or Professor.
Advantages
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Are at the peak of research performance: They generally have strong publication and awards track records.
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Achieved recognition in their department.
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Typically have a healthy research group with strong funding.
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Are usually given awards that encourage research at the expense of teaching duties. Examples of such awards in Canada include the Canada Research Chair (CRC) Awards and the Killam Fellowships.
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Have strong circles of contacts in academia and industry that their students and postdocs can tap in to.
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Tend to take on greater decision-making responsibilities in their departments; they may be channelled into administrative roles.
Disadvantages
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Are often away networking at conferences. This may have adverse consequences for student-advisor relationships with respect to mentoring. Students may have to meet advisor by appointment! Most practical mentoring may come from fellow graduate students and postdocs.
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May be on sabbatical leaves away from group. This may pose difficulties on a student if they were hoping to be mentored directly by their advisor.
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May dominate research ideas and projects as part of their drive to maintain a successful track record of research. This may impact the freedom of students and postdocs to pursue their own research questions. Students and postdocs may just be “pairs of hands” in the lab and never learn how to do research themselves.
Senior Faculty Advisors: This group is usually composed of seasoned advisors who have achieved national and international recognition for their research. Their job titles are Professor, University Professor, or Emeritus Professor.
Advantages
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Have a long track record of research.
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Have amassed significant awards of recognition.
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Likely to have a substantial track record of alumni from their research group.
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Have strong connections with other senior colleagues in their department and with their counterparts nationally and internationally.
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Experienced lecturers and seasoned speakers.
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Tend to have more experience at suggesting research projects to students and postdocs.
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Have a strong track record of publications in peer-reviewed journals and have established research collaborators through joint authorship of their research papers.
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Have usually established personal connections with industry and academic partners that can greatly benefit their students and postdocs.
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Have a greater and more stable funding capacity and are more experienced grant proposal writers.
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Feel less pressure overall, since tenure has already been achieved.
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May be more experienced at picking “good” students.
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May have taken on decision-making roles in their department such as sitting on committees, holding chairmanships, and taking on appointments in professional societies. They may be people of influence in their department.
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May be on editorial boards of peer-reviewed journals.
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Make a good choice as mentors as they have experience to impart to their students.
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Experienced at making connections at conferences.
Disadvantages
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May be close to retirement, in the “swan song” of their career.
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Enthusiasm to teach or to do research may have waned over the years. They may be less likely to adopt new teaching strategies.
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Out of touch with lab equipment and the general day-to-day running of their own laboratories; less “hands on”; more likely to not know how their own equipment operates.
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May exhibit stubborn or arrogant behavior as a byproduct of their job security through tenure.
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Less likely to go out of their way to advertise their group or research. They tend to be passive in their approach and let their publication and awards track records speak for themselves.
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May be “laissez-faire” in mentoring their students and postdocs. Frequent absences may lead them to appoint postdocs as mentors for graduate students and potentially jeopardize the student-advisor relationship.
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May be out of touch with demographic issues facing younger faculty and students. They may seem detached and aloof.
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May not have adequate group management skills particularly in cases of conflict resolution. This can be exacerbated by long absences from the lab and preoccupation with a myriad of other activities and the expectation that group management problems should sort themselves out eventually without their involvement.
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May be out of touch with career issues of the day.
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Tend to be less computer literate and Web savvy. They may not appreciate the benefits and advantages of the Internet.
Designing a Plan of Action
The points discussed in this article are meant as a guide, and depending on who you are as student or postdoc, some of the items given as disadvantages may actually be advantages for you (and vice versa). What is important is that the points will help to sharpen your thinking, to assess risks, and to allow you to come up with pointed and direct questions to ask potential advisor candidates.
Be aware also of the primary goals of every academic: (1) to be recognized for their contributions to a field of study (this is a self-serving goal); and (2) to propagate and perpetuate those contributions to the next generation of scientists (this is a nobler non-self-serving goal). What better way to accomplish these goals than by directly influencing the lives of their own students? It is the second goal that affirms the importance of a researcher’s work and ideas and guarantees that they will continue to influence a field well into the future.
Ultimately, the responsibility for your career success rests with you. But a well-chosen advisor can greatly facilitate the process.
There are a few questions which you can all keep in mind when you come up with the task of selecting an advisor.
Research on advising suggests that students who ask a lot of questions and take many criteria into account when selecting a potential advisor, are more likely to be satisfied with their advisor. Most students think about an advisor’s area of expertise and research when picking an advisor. Many students advise also considering the advisor’s personality, working style, advising style and work environment they create in their lab or work group (which is not relevant in all disciplines).
These questions cover a wide range of the kinds of things you may want to discuss with a potential advisor. These are also questions to ask of other students who have worked with that faculty member. Some questions may be more applicable to some fields than to others.
1. What is the process and criteria used for matching advisor and student?
2. Do students often have multiple mentors?
3. Is the advisor’s personality appealing and compatible with your own?
4. What kind of person do you expect your advisor to be (remember, perfection is very rare!)?
5. What kind of relationship do you image that you will have?
6. How many advisees does the person have? How many students finish? How quickly?
7. Is the time to degree for students of that advisor shorter or longer than the norms of the department? (One lab from which students never seemed to graduate was called “The Roach Motel,” because “students checked in and they didn’t check out.”) How many students does the advisor have? What stage of the process are they all in? How does this compare with other faculty members student load? How many students of that advisor do not complete their degree, or transfer? Why?
8. What are their former advisees doing? Is the advisor proud? Does s/he still serve as a mentor to some?
9. What is the person’s reputation as an advisor?
Research interests
The most important criterion in selecting is advisor is finding someone who shares an intellectual interest and field of research with you.
10. What is the person’s line of research and their reputation as a scholar? At what stage of their career are they?
11. How does and will the advisor’s research relate to the student’s research? How does a student pick dissertation project(s)?
In some disciplines a student’s research is very directly connected to the advisor’s research, in others the connection is less direct. Understand the norms of the discipline before you begin talking to faculty. Within the normal range in the field, you still need to understand how much autonomy of project definition and direction is expected of you and available to you.
Some things to learn: How do students select a research project? How much input does the advisor have and want? Is there a research group? What is the range of dissertation topics typically pursued? How quickly do students select a dissertation research project? To what extent does the final dissertation really resemble that in the proposal? Who determines when the student has done sufficient work to complete the dissertation?
Advising style
Advising style is a very personal thing and varies from person to person. Some advisors are very thoughtful and deliberate about their advising, and spend a lot of time attending to their advisees.
12. What is the advisor’s work style? What does s/he expect the work style of students to be? Is it compatible with your own?
An advising style can be a difficult thing to ascertain and define. Think about the kinds of behaviors you expect from your advisor, these can be a useful way to define an advising style. You need to know, when you ask an advisor or faculty member for help, what kind of response is helpful to you? Different students expect, want and need different amounts and kinds of feedback. Likewise, different faculty members approach advising doctoral students on research related problems with different degrees of hands-on/hands-off feedback. Here are two examples: (1) If you asked a faculty member for help on a particular research puzzle, would you want them to: Send you to books/articles that can help, offer to give direct feedback on the text or data, tell you what the next step is, offer general strategies and encouragement?(2) When writing articles, research papers or dissertation proposals and text, faculty members might give feedback. How many drafts of each kind of work does an advisor read? What kind and level of detail of feedback to you receive? How quickly can you expect the text to be returned to you?
13. When talking to other students, you can ask what kinds of students thrive best with this person?
14. What is the advisor’s communication style? What is the frequency and quality of interactions?
Recognizing that there are norms by discipline, you can determine how often the advisor meets with students about their work. Is it daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly? Are meetings set upon the student’s request, when the advisor requests, or are they regularly scheduled?
15. How much time does the advisor spend with students on their work?
16. What are the competing demands on the advisor’s time? How frequently is the advisor out of town?
17. What is her/his philosophy of advising?
Many advisors are able to articulate such a philosophy, although many have not yet done so. For example, how does the advisor foster increasing independence in students? How does the advisor resolve conflicts?
Work environment
In many fields there is an active lab or work group in which the advisor and several graduate students (as well as post doctoral fellows and undergraduate students) work together on common research. If you will be spending a lot of time in a lab or in the field in the company of other students and researchers it is important to consider the work environment.
18. Does the work environment and culture of the lab or research group suit you?
19. How closely do students of that advisor work together? How does the advisor facilitate collaboration?
20. What are the work expectations? Are students able to strike a balance between work/school and personal life?
21. What are typical student work patterns in the department? Do students typically work most nights and weekends?
22. What opportunities for professional development exist? How supportive is the advisor of students’ efforts to gain professional breadth?
What other kinds of sponsorship does the advisor provide? Do students co-author papers with the advisor? Does such co-authorship imply joint intellectual work or is the advisor added by courtesy? Do students attend professional conferences? Who pays for these trips? What kinds of help does the advisor provide in finding jobs or post-doc positions?
23. How are students funded for research and travel?
24. much funding and financial support can you expect from your advisor? For what does the advisor financially support students: conferences, supplies, books, research expenses, tuition, summers?
I feel the above questions should be useful and would be put to right use. I acknowledge the work done by the original authors. Please try and use the original articles for a better perspective.
Source: http://www.sciencemag.org/ , http://www.phd-survey.org/
