Faculty Responsibilities Towards New Graduate Students: Fill & Download for Free

It’s important to understand that the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, is unique. It’s not officially affiliated with Princeton University. It’s an independent institution. It’s not a college or university, although it has faculty. They don’t teach (formally). They don’t offer classes. They don’t have students working toward degrees (some have a few exceptional graduate students visit for a semester or a year. Some of them are appointed for life (as Einstein was), while some are there for a shorter period.While there, faculty have no responsibilities or expectations; they can just get on with their work. No one would make it in if they didn’t already have a thorough research program and the commitment to follow through without someone auditing their work. For someone whose goal is research, it’s ideal. I’m sure it’s not perfect, and it’s not my sort of thing, but it eliminates many of the time-consuming part of being a professor.I don’t know that Einstein was in New Jersey as much as he was at IAS. It also has the advantage of allowing collaboration among the most brilliant of minds in just a handful of fields, and I say that while considering my colleagues brilliant. This is a different sort of brilliance. The permanent faculty are beyond merely luminaries in their fields (or are supposed to be).

I love this question. Having been on both sides of this fence over the years, I will offer two perspectives, the graduate student’s and the faculty adviser’s view of these “failed marriages.”First, the graduate student. There are several reasons why a graduate student will end up becoming disenchanted with their relationship with the adviser.Reason #1: A perception that the faculty adviser is not interested in helping the student develop their skills. Put another way, a doctoral student should feel that their adviser is treating the relationship as a transactional one with the goal of benefiting both parties. Look, every graduate student starts out with a very limited skill set and is in “learning” mode. Early in the relationship, it is perfectly appropriate that faculty assign low-level (boring) work, like helping grade papers, organize labs, or perform secondary-source library research. However, two or three years later, remaining stuck in this low-level relationship is unacceptable. “I will do the grunt work early in my academic career, Dr. Ego, but at some point I get tired of your perception that I’m still just your grunt.” My career depends on demonstrating the ability to do research (I need some publications on my CV to attract job offers). There is no excuse for my faculty adviser to not know this and keep me under his thumb in thankless work.In my doctoral program, many faculty “got” this point and many did not. I had fellow doctoral students getting published as co-authors with their advisers in top journals because the faculty were willing to teach them how to do research. After two years with my first adviser, my big assignment was being handed a 500+ page manuscript and being told, “This goes to the publisher next week. They were going to charge me $1,500 against royalties for me to do the indexing so I want you to do it. I need author and subject indexes.” Aargh!! Not much “development” going on there.Reason #2: The faculty adviser just has a toxic attitude toward doctoral students. Whether through sexual harassment, an impossibly massive ego, lack of social skills, overwhelming narcissism, or interpersonal ineptitude, there are certain faculty who are just lousy advisers. When starting out as a doctoral student, I am naturally diffident around you and somewhat in awe - “Wow, you’ve written three books!” I can be treated rudely and assume that is just part of the deal. Over time, though, I realize that this is not a normal or healthy state of affairs. I can continue to knuckle under (which several of my colleagues did, out of fear or the perception of sunk costs, “Well, I’ve come this far already”) or I can start looking around for other advisers. This is a much more dangerous approach. Unless your new adviser is as influential as the old one and can protect you, you may have made an enemy who is actively motivated to wreck your career (remember, I said these people can be borderline pathological).We had a senior professor to whom I and three other doctoral students were assigned as RAs (Research Assistants). While Sam (not his real name) was prolific, he also had a tremendous ego that required constant stroking. We each would schedule about 30 minutes of his time every week or so for what we referred to among ourselves as “Buff Sam Sessions.” The sole purpose was to walk in, sit down, and tell him how much we enjoyed his latest paper, presentation, doctoral lecture, etc. You could see him swelling up like a sponge filling with water. It never lasted, of course. A day later and the same old behaviors started reasserting themselves. I finally made the break from him after a little over two years. About a year later, when I asked him to write me a letter of recommendation as I began my job hunt, he refused. I was dead to him.Reason #3: Non-responsiveness from an over-extended professor. “Look, I know you have eight doctoral students you are advising, a book contract, three classes to teach, and two research collaborations, but when the only way I can get 10 minutes of your precious time is to (literally) camp out in front of your office door at 11:45, waiting for you to leave to go to lunch, just so I can walk beside you and bring you up to speed on my research project, we have a problem!” Believe it or not, I don’t want to make being a doctoral student my life’s work. I want to progress and move on. In order to do that, I need you to be willing to spend time with me. If you can’t, just do me the courtesy of telling me so I can seek out other advisers. This situation happens a lot more than people think. I understand that many times, the professor needs a break from constant doctoral students, but if that is the case, at least have the compassion to be honest with me. Don’t string me along while I wait vainly for months to get your comments on a draft of my dissertation proposal.Now, from the adviser’s side of the coin, let me offer a different view on the causes of a break-up.Reason #1: The graduate student over-promises and under-delivers. I cannot stress this point enough: as an adviser, one of the real sins on the part of the grad student was failing to see projects through or not being accountable. If I assigned a project to a student, even if it was the kind of low-level stuff I mentioned above (e.g., looking up references for a paper or collecting articles), I expected it to get done within the time frame I needed it. I wasn’t interested in excuses or delays. You quickly learn which of the doctoral students are dependable. Believe me, the faculty talk among themselves and a good part of that conversation is about the doctoral students - who is “good”, who is “lazy”, who are the super-stars, etc. Get the wrong reputation and it will follow you.Reason #2: Inflated opinions of themselves and their perspectives. No faculty member likes to be lectured to by their doctoral student or (worse) have the student offer tactless or unbidden critiques of the professor’s work and yet, some students really think they have this right. They do not, unless the relationship with the professor has progressed to that level of mutual trust. Please understand, I am not saying that faculty want obsequious, fawning graduate students (well, some of the more ego-bound faculty actually do, as a matter of fact), but we do want them to recognize that this relationship really only works if the roles are understood. And believe me, there are a thousand ways (fair or foul) that faculty can retaliate if pushed.Let me give an example. One doctoral student in finance was known as both very bright and very arrogant. He made no secret of his disdain for several of the junior professors in his area and their work (not smart). He sat his comprehensive exams along with three other doctoral students in finance. Now, remember that for comps, the faculty jointly make up the exam. The other three students got four questions and were given eight hours to answer them. This obnoxious student was given eight questions and four hours to answer them. What a surprise - he failed. Comps are only taken twice a year at my university so in essence, he sat in the penalty box for six months before being allowed to retake his exams. Whether you consider that fair or foul, it happened.Reason #3: Constantly shopping or looking to “better deal” their adviser. Some students are very opportunistic and will drop one adviser like a hot rock if they feel that they can score a better deal with another faculty member. We had a few of these students who ended up working with three or four different advisers during their graduate careers, as they were looking either for better ways to shine or (much worse) the easiest advisers who would demand little of them and allow them to slide through with a mediocre dissertation. No one is going to begrudge you the decision to change from one adviser to another during your career. There may be many valid reasons to do so: 1) your research interests change in ways the first adviser is not qualified or interested in supporting, 2) your first adviser takes a job at another university and leaves you high and dry, 3) your relationship with your first adviser doesn’t jell over time and you lose the ability to work together. The point is, students who get the reputation for constantly looking to upgrade to “shinier” faculty members ultimately are not trusted. The gossip can also follow them professionally, once they leave their grad school behind them.I have been one of those doctoral students whose relationship with their original adviser broke. I have also been on the other side of the fence and worked with doctoral students - many very good and some not so good. Looking back on my doctoral student years, if I am honest, I was guilty at different times of being a malcontent, of chaffing at the slowness of the development process - feeling like I wasn’t moving along toward the dissertation fast enough. On the other hand, once I clicked with my new adviser, everything changed. Progress was immediate, we ended up co-authoring nearly a score of journal articles over our relationship, and I felt like he was really helping me develop. The graduate student/faculty adviser relationship is a unique one and can be the source of an immensely satisfying experience or a dreadful one. Getting it right (on both sides of the fence) makes all the difference.

AcademiaWe tend to associate academia with images of leisurely professors looking out windows contemplating the world in pursuit of the truth. It is a lie. In real life, they're most likely considering jumping out that window to find out what life is out there away from this hell hole. Just kidding ;) Only ~2% of PhD graduates eventually become permanent faculty,[1] and that’s if they are extremely lucky or brilliant or have the clout of the right people, often the combination of all three.Even if they join the professoriate, it’s still an extremely risky and competitive career with more drudgery than you think and there’s no such thing as ‘permanent’ any more. In Australia, “while it's true that salaries for scientists in Australia are higher than in other developed nations, they are low compared to other professions requiring a similar degree of training, such as medicine, veterinary science, dentistry and law. At the mid-career point, a graduate in one of these other professions may be earning two or three times that of the research scientist.”[2]Under the excuse of “doing what you love” and “living the life of the mind”, academia is actually a very exploitative and brutal business[3] [4] . In the past, after your PhD and one or two postdocs, you would become a permanent employee in your early 30s. The success rate for grant funding was 80-90% in the 1970s.Nowadays, after your PhD, you will toil away working 60–80 hours/week for at least 10 years, hopping from one school to the next to secure short term contracts. And it never really gets better. You write about 6–10 grant proposals every year to get funding for your research and the success rate is about 10%. [5] Your projects might be very hard and expensive with no guaranteed success. You might have to do the experiments for many years before getting any results. It becomes increasingly difficult to get grants and keep your position when you have nothing to show, often through no fault of yours. But the papers need to be churned out because that’s the entire goal of academia. So you park your ambitious scientific ideas and stick to safe ones in a niche you've created for yourself and churn out boring, obscure papers no one really cares about. Peter Higgs, the Nobel Prize winner for the famous Higgs boson, said that if he entered the market today, he would not make it because he barely ever published.Then the slow and frustrating process of publishing papers. Your reviewers might be unkind or worse, reject your paper to eventually scoop your ideas. In that time, you still have to teach, mark exam papers, supervise new students and do many other trivial admin tasks. Say goodbye to having a life. Or finding the cure for cancer. Read this article and the comments to have some idea what harsh reality is like for tenure track faculty members: The Real Life of a Tenure Track Faculty Person (A Guest Post). Without the papers, no grant funding, you go bankrupt and close shop. [6]At the end of 10 years and a few postdocs possibly over several continents, if you are lucky, you become a permanent staff but the treadmill continues, ready to throw you off at any time. Otherwise, you grow jaded and jump ship, being way over qualified and having few concrete skills for anything else but university. I have not met many young academics who aren’t constantly stressed and demoralised by the lack of job security and severe pressure.My previous colleague said that in his time working in neurobiology at Harvard, he worked on average 80 hours/week and 100 near grant application times.He barely explored the place because he was too exhausted all the time. He didn’t meet a single researcher who wasn’t depressed or stressed. With 20 years of experiences and qualifications, he now works as a lab technician on 6 month contracts, at a salary equivalent to an engineering graduate. He doesn't want to become a PI (principal investigator) because he still wants to do real science, not management. But the system doesn't reward such people, you move up or out. There doesn't seem to be the option to just have a stable job with mediocre pay, the uncertainty is always just around the corner. If he loses the job, I seriously don’t know what else he could do.Another friend is shackled with about $200k debt, she couldn't finish her PhD at Oxford after 3 years because her supervisor lost the funding. She eventually got a PhD elsewhere and is now working on roughly a $40k salary for a public research institution in the US (a shockingly and unacceptably low pay in Australian terms) after 12 years of higher education, hoping her debts will be written off in 10 years. Having kids is unthinkable for her. She's at least lucky to have a husband follow her around. The chronic instability and uncertainty, not to mention poverty, can break up many otherwise healthy relationships. No wonder depression, cynicism and anxiety is rife among graduate students and postdocs.[7] [8]In America, 2/3 of academics work as adjunct staff with no health or employee benefits or professional development, extremely long hours at poverty level wages. A 2014 survey found that the median income for adjuncts is only $22,041 a year, whereas for full-time faculty it is $47,500. Many live on food stamps and juggle several jobs to make ends meet. How do you expect them to be public intellectuals that speak truth to power if they don't know where the next meal will come from? The casualisation of work and stagnating wages are not unique to academia, but academia is less honest about the plight of its workforce. It uses the excuse/pride/prestige of “doing what you love”/flexible work/serving humanity to justify just plain exploitation.Some are too embarrassed to admit it, exactly because people outside of the profession have a hard time believing this. The mental toll can be immense because a lot of these people are passionate and idealistic about their career choice, they have gone through early life being that smart kid that was praised by teachers, parents, and peers and seemed destined for success in a respectable career. Being a scientist/researcher isn't just a job, it's an ideal, a childhood dream, an identity. It can cause great shame to give it up, because you seem to essentially give up who you are or who everyone thinks you should be, you question yourself if maybe you don't love it enough. For some, their self-worth is built on the pride in their intellect, that smug feeling they get when people gape “wow, you must be so smart to have a PhD” at party introductions. Some scoff at the idea of “the real world”, as if no one with a brain existed outside of academe. Schools have successfully inculcated in the minds of young, naïve students the notion that they're uniquely capable of providing meaningful work. Here's a brutally honest comment from one of the links:The interesting thing about academia, at least in the social sciences and humanities, is that we work toward humanizing systems… at the same time our own labor system is dehumanizing. Interestingly, we seem to be even more apt than other sectors I’ve engaged in to attack one another for any hint of wanting material reward for working hard… we are supposed to live off the benefits we provide to others, the immaterial rewards of doing something we enjoy, the “greater good.” While other sectors also are facing increased exploitation of workers and low wages compared to cost of living, the workers themselves do not seem to think that it is right or acceptable that they face continually decreased wages with increased cost of living or that their benefits are taken away. Yet, it seems graduate school trains us to have a baseline standard that is essentially being working poor, to which we compare any future opportunity.This has become so bad that even academics themselves have written articles to warn students to not go to graduate school Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go and Don't Become a Scientist!.Here's a stern indictment of the system and this sentiment is widespread:[9]Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon "the life of the mind." That's why most graduate programs resist reducing the numbers of admitted students or providing them with skills and networks that could enable them to do anything but join the ever-growing ranks of impoverished, demoralized, and damaged graduate students and adjuncts for whom most of academe denies any responsibility.I think students need to be realistic and give up the idea of graduate school as a pathway to faculty, give up the idealistic notion of having a stable, life long academic career and seriously prepare themselves for other options after PhD. Trust me, there's life after the PhD and even a zombie apocalypse isn't all that bad comparatively.Footnotes[1] Should I become a professor? Success rate 3 % ![2] Hanging up their labcoats: Australia's new brain drain[3] There Is No Excuse for How Universities Treat Adjuncts[4] Academia is now incompatible with family life, thanks to casual contracts[5] A generation at risk: Young investigators and the future of the biomedical workforce[6] Goodbye academia, I get a life.[7] Mental health: Under a cloud[8] The emotional toll of unemployment in academia[9] The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind'