Navigating the choppy sea that is your relationship with your advisor

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Sometimes real, always legendary, is the advisor who seems to pump out Ph.D.’s like little baby bunnies. I have talked to students who’ve had the pleasure to work with an advisor like this, but like a child born into royalty, they cannot fully appreciate their good fortune having had no other situation for comparison. However the drawbacks of full throttle advisors can be as high as the price of princedom, or so I’ve heard. But let’s consider the options:

Here are a few advisoral rubrics I have heard about and/or participated in:

1. At the beginning of the semester, advisor and student meet to discuss the game plan. By the end of the meeting, the advisor has directed the student towards an avenue of research/writing that she will accomplish over the course of the semester. The student, having a clear idea of the doable and approved plan, goes forth and accomplishes things. At the end of the semester, advisor and student meet again and the advisor makes suggestions about revisions as well as help about future work. The beginning of the next semester starts this cycle over again until the dissertation is complete.

The upside: The system works.
The downside: The system is dependent upon an advisor who is capable of steering a student towards a researchable path in one meeting, and perhaps is therefore dependent upon a certain type of research. (e.g. large scale quantitative analysis)

2. An advisor with a large scope of work assigns students to different areas of her research. The advisor acts as overseer, and because she has a vested interest in the work, being that it is her work too, papers get written in a timely fashion.

The upside: The system works much of the time.
The downside: An advisor who has many different projects tends to backburner one or the other at any given time for the sake of sanity and deadline pressures. Consequently, if your study is the one getting back-burnered—you’re out of luck! Also, there is a very high risk of lack of student satisfaction with the topic assigned to her.

3. A student is tasked with choosing and formalizing a researchable idea. The advisor acts as a sounding board during this process. But, since choosing and formalizing a researchable, innovative, interesting, and motivating idea is perhaps the most daunting prospect in a young yet not getting any younger student’s life, the scope of time required to choose and formalize is enormous. Because of the time needed and the lack of self-interest to the advisor, this period, before word one is even a gleam in the eye of the A.B.D.er, can be enormous and frustrating.

The upside: The student has control over her topic, and can learn what’s really required in generating researchable ideas.

The downside: The Hamlet effect.

In my observational experience, rubrics 1 and 2 have the quickest rates of graduation. Could it be possible to create an advisoral experience with your current advisor that mimics either one of these strategies in the event that your path is closer to number 3? Or are there as many different advisor/advisee dynamics as there are ways to re-name cognition?

Here’s A.B.D. girl’s suggestions on dealing with a rubric 3 advisor situation for you to read, comment on, add to, edit, forget, chant to, cook with, or tape inside your trapper keeper.

1. Be clear about exactly what you want from your advisor and state your need in the email where you suggest a meeting.
2. Save your meetings for broad scale questions; leave smaller details to other friends or professors. My general theory about editing is that it roughly breaks down to issues of TOPIC/THESIS, STRUCTURE, DETAILS. I think one of the reasons rubric 1 works so well is that it hinges on the idea that you meet with your advisor to talk about topic/thesis related points and then you meet again much later to talk about structure. It doesn’t attempt to combine functional editing features.
3. If you’re having trouble conveying your topic/thesis and you’re hoping to have a meeting where your advisor helps you mold your rudimentary thoughts into a doable proposal, have a firm grip on the following questions: what are you interested in? what nags at you about that topic? what would you propose to do if the constraints of time and space were not at play? If you have solid answers to those questions, your advisor should be able to guide you. If your answers to those questions unhinge you, for instance if they suggest that you are better suited for a different department altogether, (I have experience in this and experience in NOT heading the call), my unsolicited suggestion would be to take some time, meditate on your desire and on what you really want to do. Sounds trite? Perhaps, but had I done this, I might have ‘saved’ myself several years of frustrating merry-go-rounding. Learn from me, fellow A.B.D.er!!!!
4. Leave your meeting with a specific action plan. And don’t be fooled by something that sounds like an action plan but is actually a nebulous invitation to go to the library and read some more stuff.

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Filed under advisor trouble, dissertation, editing