Oh where, oh where has my advisor gone?

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Oh where, oh where has my advisor gone?
Oh where, oh where can he be?
With his vacant office and his absent emails,
Oh where, oh where can he be?

What’s your first response to rejection? Blaming yourself? Lashing out with anger? Reactionary hopelessness? Most likely you’ve had ample opportunity to hone how you cope with unreturned phone calls and emails in your dealings with your advisor.
Day 1: Having just sent a fresh copy of a draft of something to your advisor, you relax for a bit thinking the editorial ball is now in his court
Day 3: No acknowledgment of email yet. Perhaps it was a web-related slip up. Re-send email with attachment of draft of something
Day 4: Still no acknowledgement of email. No need to over think this. Re-send email with attachment of something and something embedded directly in the text of the email.
Day 7: It’s been a week. @#*&
Day 10: Although it’s not your style, you decide to leave a message on his voice mail.
Day 11: Receive short email back with apologies due to extreme busyness on his part.
Since there is no estimated time of end of said extreme busyness, and no proposed meeting, you begin to get a bit peeved.
Day 12: You send a polite yet firm email stating your desire to meet and talk about the something you sent.
Day 13: You receive an email back asking if the following week is ok, and if you could please re-send your something, he seems to have misplaced it due to aforementioned extreme busyness.

Thus four weeks later you have a tentative meeting scheduled with your advisor and have made no new progress on the something you sent. Although not tested by A.B.D. girl herself, I wonder if anyone has managed a non-hostile yet aggressive tactic that has worked with ‘the advisor who ignores you problem’? Really there are two problems associated with this condition:

A) You have an advisor who is ignoring you.
B) You are not getting any new work done during the rebuffed period because of a ‘what’s the point?” philosophy.

What always kept me from getting any new work done during these down periods were the times when nearly all work I had done was scrapped after a particularly merciless meeting. Sensibly, my thinking was to minimize unnecessary work, so my plan was always to see my advisor at as short intervals as possible. However, I’ve found that not only does this minimize unnecessary work, but it minimizes all work, and so delays forward movement.

I have developed a purely theoretical notion. If an A.B.D.er continued to work on her something during advisor down times, the something being worked on might take more shape, be more solid, make more sense to the A.B.D.er, and therefore be more able to withstand the criticism of a previously awol advisor. The theory behind my theoretical notion is that one’s advisor is largely just (pardon the expression) talking out of his ass during a meeting. Let me explain. He probably read over the something you sent once and made a few hurried notes all the while being more consumed by his own projects. During the meeting, he asks you questions to orient himself to your paper. Because he is your advisor, these questions guide your discussion and are volleyed back and forth between you as if they are necessarily relevant when they may in fact be tangential or down right unrelated to your topic. You leave the meeting feeling like you’re trying to put together a completely different puzzle than the one you intended. In other words, your advisor’s comments may not only be unhelpful but may actually be getting in your way.

I realize this is a hard nut to crack. First of all, how could I be right? Your advisor is one of the key players in the pass/don’t pass dichotomy that are the orals. Wouldn’t he be the one to tell you what a good idea is? My answer to that: Maybe not. I have no doubt that your advisor is capable of writing thought provoking papers and has a dynamic speaking style. I also have no reservations in believing that your advisor is able to spot sub-adequate work when he sees it, and to call it out as such. What I am questioning is his ability to help guide an A.B.D.er from 1,000 jigsaw pieces on the table to one completed puzzle. It is my belief that there may be many advisors who would be best suited looking at something that is finished, solid work, and then offering a few comments here and there.

I mean, remember when you used to write papers? All be yourself? And then get a grade? And usually, not to call you a teacher’s pet, but those grades were in the A range? Although I have rolled my eyes at this next statement when it has been said outright to me and even when it has been implied, but, ‘what’s the big deal about the dissertation?’ Subtext: You don’t really need an advisor. You could write a dissertation on your own, and moreover, you could more easily write a dissertation on your own.

Have I crossed a line from passionate theoretician to out-of-her-gourd fundamentalist? Who would put this idea to the test? Perhaps there is a middle ground. Maybe one brave A.B.D.er might try lessening her advisor dependence while increasing her forward movement and let us know how she fares.

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Filed under advisor trouble, autonomy, dissertation