One of the most critical things that you must do within your first year is to establish who your graduate advisor will be. Depending on who you end up with, this could make or break your whole graduate experience and determines whether you’ll be able to successfully complete your dissertation or struggle to maintain your position within graduate school. Although there is a lot of advice established online, I will do my best to break it down into three main topics that you should consider when finding an advisor:
- Mentor-Mentee Relationship
- Financial/Lab Status of Mentor
- Group Environment
First off, it is crucial for you to establish a good relationship with your potential mentor. There are many different ways an advisor will “mentor” you – whether it’s through micromanaging your daily activity and experiments or whether they are hands-off. Certain individuals prefer their advisors to mentor them every step of the way and provide guidance on a daily basis, whereas some prefer to meet once a week or even (don’t do this!) once a month. Decide what you want to make sure that your style will fit with your potential advisor.
In addition to the number of interactions, consider the quality of the interactions themselves? Do you fear meeting your mentor? A supportive mentor will do their best to make sure you don’t feel scared or inadequate. Does your mentor provide helpful responses? Are they receptive to your suggestions? A relationship is a two-way street so it is critical that you’re able to talk on an even playing field. This is especially critical since the one who should know your own project best should be you! If your potential mentor doesn’t listen to your plans or suggestions then it’ll be a very rough road ahead for the both of you.
Even if you find a potential mentor who would fit perfectly with your needs and personality, is he/she able to take you in? Do they have enough funding to support you throughout your stay in graduate career? If they’re lacking funding, then you may not have the supplies to proceed with your thesis smoothly. Do they demand you to be a Teaching Assistant (TA)? If so, how often do they want you to TA? The financial situation of your advisor is critical to your productivity. If they demand you to TA too often, then this will distract you away from your own thesis and could extend your graduate career. Make sure that they’re truly able to support you during your graduate career since it is a critical determinant for whether you will have a smooth or rough graduate life.
Lastly, how are the other members that are under your potential advisor? These people are going to be your main circle of friends and support. You will see them more often than your advisor and potentially more than your friends outside of school. If you’re spending this much time with them, you better be able to strike a good relationship with them! Especially with the senior members of the group. They could help provide a shortcut to successfully integrating yourself into your research project by providing do’s and don’ts.
Please keep in mind all three topics when choosing your graduate advisor. Be proactive in figuring out how the group dynamic and mentor relationship will proceed. Only by doing so will you able to save yourself some frustration and have a smoother graduate career!
Darby Vickers says
August 18, 2017 at 1:37 amKen did a nice job putting this together! Two other related items that might be useful. First, Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day has a chapter on choosing an advisor and well as providing a guide to what you should do if you have trouble with your advisor. Second, one of the ways to help you sort out what you want from an advisor or a mentor is to become a mentor yourself and learn what the process is like form the other side. I learned a lot about what I wanted from a mentor from the Mentoring Excellence Program at UCI which provides training for mentors.
Atrouli Chatterjee says
August 15, 2017 at 5:02 pmWhen you first meet or talk to a PI, they are trying to figure out your personality just as you are trying to figure them out. So your interactions are often very different from what they will be like once you (if you decide to) join their lab. One way that you can figure all (or at least some) of this out is by talking to their current students. What is the best part about their experience so far? What qualms do they have?
Another factor in deciding your lab is your lab mates. These are the people that you will spend most of your time with, so make sure that you get along with them and the lab environment that is established. While some of that will change as people graduate, the dynamic will probably stay very much the same. Do you think you could be happy around them? Can you interact freely around them?
And finally, reach out to current students that either rotated in your lab of interest or knows the professor as they can give you some outside perspective of the lab. And once you’ve interacted with all these groups of people and with the PI directly, think about everything Ken wrote, talk to even more people, and then jump in!
(It’s not as scary as it sounds, and always know that you have an option, whether it be to change labs or change your program, so make the best choice that you can at that moment, and don’t be afraid to talk to lots of people and ask questions!)
Laia says
September 5, 2017 at 12:05 amBest advice, really, you can find out everything you want to know about a lab and about an advisor just by talking to current lab members, don’t be shy!