Here is my question: When I speak with potential committee members as I search out schools and programs, is it fair to ask what someone’s approach to advising is?

Absolutely! I am very impressed when potential trainees exploring the possibility of joining my lab ask me about this. And I make a deliberate point of explaining my mentoring approach very clearly. The last thing anyone wants is someone joining my lab whose mentoring expectations are not realistic given my style.

I missed this thread in transit, but just thought to say that I was the beneficiary of a pretty non-judgmental and light-handed advisorial approach, myself, which turned out to be right for me. But maybe not as a general rule.

Here is my question: When I speak with potential committee members as I search out schools and programs, is it fair to ask what someone’s approach to advising is?

A simple, get your act together and don’t let your buddies down speech could be pretty effective. People are motivated to do things for others that they might not do for themselves. I am thinking of this now, since its graduation week. When students succeed and complete their degrees, everyone has their “I’d like to thank the Academy” moment, where they thank their parents, siblings, friends, teachers, etc. As scholars, our success often rests on the help and faith other people have in us. I think its OK, and probably necessary to flip that around and tell the student, look, you are not here alone, and you owe it to the people who helped you get this far to straighten out, fly right and get the job done. You failure reflects badly on the people who helped you get here. So don’t make them look bad.

Now drop and give me twenty-five push ups on the spot, and fifteen pages by Thursday.

Hearing from faculty their nervousness about coming down hard is slightly more reassuring so I’m glad to read about this from the other side. But the problem is that if there are real problems, they’re going to have to be addressed at some point. That point cannot be years after initial concerns started to crop up. What’s much worse than hearing the criticism is hearing that an advisor had reservations early on but said nothing. (Here, I’m referring more to a PhD program, not a terminal degree program like Bittersweet’s talking about.) Finding out an advisor stayed silent erodes or eliminates trust in the advisor and also taints the past years of work, which may have been harder than they needed to be, if only conceptual problems or writing issues or whatever had been addressed early on.

IF you have been informed, informative, and honest with them all along, those moments will be foreseeable by both parties and much less painful than you imagine them. This is because you have made sure that the actual problems are the problems and see your mission as helping to solve them.

If you have been uninformed, uninformative, and less than honest all along, then you will likely never have that come to jesus moment(s) and will let your advisee/client twist in the wind until they wander away or get an unsatsifactory outcome they didn’t anticipate and are bitter and angry about it. This is because you have made the advisee/cliient the problem and see your mission as avoiding the problem until it goes away.

IME, anyway.

I’m on a dozen dissertation committees and they all seem to be a little different. But trying not to send contradictory signals can be harder when you’re working to match up with someone else. This isn’t even getting into the possibility that you have an honest disagreement with the director over the quality of the work. I’ve never said “I can’t sign this” as a committee member in an instance when the director pronounces it satisfactory–but it is my name on the page, so I have to take responsibility for my own evaluations. It can be tough.

The mentorship I experienced in my top-tier graduate program ran hot-cold and, as a result, was pretty dysfunctional. Basically, when things were going well the faculty seemed always ready to engage, but, when things started going south, most retreated. This is what I experienced and what I observed in my cohort. (To be absolutely clear, my difficulties/struggles were of my own making and I have great affection, gratitude and respect for each of my mentors as individuals and as scholars.) And, in my personal case, as one who began a superstar went awol and then barely squeaked to finish, it became especially weird when dealing with those who fancied themselves “supportive profs”…

What I realized when I began to mentor graduate students (many of whom suffer the typical strains of under-confidence and/or uneven preparedness) is that it was way too easy for me to not actually listen to a grad student who was struggling. My impulse was to diagnose, assess and correct — rather than actually listen. It was a bit hard to let go of the privilege of “having the answers” but, now, I try to mostly listen and offer a restatement of what I’ve heard before I do anything else. Then I ask what they might need/want in the way of support and, together, we strategize where they might find such support. At the same time, I offer my honest input on what I see to be the most practical concerns at stake.

It IS more gratifying to be the supportive prof, but — based on my experience on both sides — I can only be supportive if I stay humble and stay honest. And, as I learned most recently, sometimes being supportive means staying supportive when a really talented student chooses to bail right when they’re soooo close to being done. (This student’s relationship with all her other mentors has now curdled, while she and I remain in open communication about what’s she’s going to do next.)

So I vote for being the “Honest Prof” — in good times AND all those other kinds of times.