From my experience, graduate school is about studying hard, learning how to do research, and last but not least, managing your relationship with your advisor. While managing a relationship with an advisor pertains mostly to PhD students, even master’s students might have an advisor. Here are a few tips to handle this complicated but wonderful relationship you are bound to for the next 2-5 years.
1. Be Communicative
Many of us come from a culture where professors can be mean and best be avoided. From, my experience, it is not the same here, particularly with your advisor. Advisors cannot read your mind, nor is it their duty to tell you what you should or should not do – so be proactive. Start with understanding your duties as a graduate student: When are you supposed to be at the lab? How important is it that you are there? When are you meetings? How important is it that you don’t miss the meetings? All these are relevant questions, as each advisor might give you different answers.
Second, discuss your interests with your advisors. They have a wealth of knowledge, resources, and connections? What are your goals? How long do you want to be in the program? When do you want to advance? When do you NOT want to advance? Can you do an internship on the summers? How about funding? Does your advisor feel secure in getting it or should you be moving to find your own funding?
2. Be Proactive
This is true for advisors and when working with managers: bring solutions, not problems. You may not always know what to do, but coming to them empty-handed and asking what you should do is not the right way to go. Let’s say your advisor tells you to use an approach X for your experiment. You start the experiment and realize that there are 3 variants: X1, X2, and X3, and they might affect your results significantly. Do not go to your advisor and ask, what should I do? Instead, research X1, X2, and X3. What are the pros and cons? Why do people use or one over the other? How do you feel about them? Bring a summarized report (oral or written) to your advisor, and have him/her choose. Be sure to identify what is your opinion. This is what they want you to learn in grad school – how to make the right decisions. And that will only happen if you try.
3. Be Reasonable
Know what to expect from your advisor. If you feel exhausted, plan a vacation. If you feel you haven’t worked enough this quarter, push yourself to deliver extra work next quarter. Graduate school is long and you will need to balance work/life constantly. Learn what are your limitations and what are your advisors requirements, and find a reasonable middle-ground.
4. Micro-manage vs. Macro-manage
I believe this is the most crucial aspect of the advisor relationship: is your advisor a micro-manager? And you, do you like to be micro-managed? Personally, I cannot stand micro-management. If I am being questioned constantly about what I am doing by someone, I might as well let this person do it. Some students feel that they work better if someone is looking closely over their shoulders and nudging them forward. These students may feel abandoned by an advisor that provides minimal feedback and is not frequently present.
A relationships between a student and an advisor is a highly personal matter, but one that causes a lot distress in a graduate student’s career. Know yourself and know your advisor. If you feel there is a mismatch between expectations or style of orientation, address it with your advisor or a graduate counselor and possibly, consider changing advisors sooner rather than later.