Survival Skill- The role of advisors

Prof: Two principles of advisors: your advisor is not your boss; your advisor will not do research for you

What that means?

Xi: In Asia culture, the perception for advisor is different from that of Western culture, we will do whatever the advisor asks to. But in the Western culture, we may critically think what is right and wrong from the advisor.

JT:

Zhe: It depends on how we define “boss”. Some students are dependent on their advisors, but advisors expect students to be more independent and live on their own. As Zhe pointed out, he is more independent and would like to spend nights to develop his own program. But we as students all need the general guidance from our advisors

Sid: When students join the program, we all have the mentality what a PhD looks like, but as we grow up in the program, we develop our own research ideas, working patterns, and perception for research.

Prof: In Asia, we treat teacher’s guidance and order as God truth and hold no doubt on them. But it is nor right, we should have the courage to disagree with our advisors. In Asia, the knowledge is one-way straight, the knowledge imparted from advisors to students, but in Western culture, the knowledge is two-way communication.

HK: In her class, she tries to build up collaboration atmosphere and encourage discussion about disagreement. It also depends on the stage we are in the program, as first year PhD students, we may follow completely on what our advisors ask us to do; but when we start to develop our own research, we will be more independent from our advisors and stand on our own points.

Prof: In terms of the second principle, we majorly focus on the research project that we are the lead authors.

Leting: Do not expect our advisors will do everything for us. As doctoral students, we need to initiate and lead our own project. The earlier we start our own work, the more we could grow up. But as young scholars, we do need inspiration and guidance from our advisors.  We need to better plan our communication strategy with our advisors and get their support to deal with challenges.

Prof: Our advisors are very busy. They are working on multiple projects at the same time, and they can not help us for detailed work. We could not expect our advisors spend much time to take care of us for every minute. Thus, Do not blame your advisors when your research goes south. We have to take leadership and responsibility for our own research. Advisors will help us and disagree with us, but at the end of the day, it is us who make the decision and lead the project. In the PhD program, we are trained to be independent researchers. Handoff advisors may let the students suffer from the program, but the ones who survive in the program usually are very successful in future career.

Prof: My advisor does not review my Stata code and even my data. If she/he wants to see the data and code, probably she/he is too hands-on. What if advisors are too hands off? It is a good idea to have two advisors: one is senior and experienced advisor who will give us big idea and general guidance; the other is junior advisor that is willingness to offer more hands-on guidance. The senior advisor may give us very great help to deal with the positioning of the paper, the contribution of the paper, and how to respond to the reviewer’s comment.

Zhe: To some degree, our research with the advisor is a kind of training. Thus, learning from the process could be more important than publishing the paper itself.

HK: If we have two advisors, we may face to deal with contradicting opinions. What shall we do?

Prof: We need to make the decision on choosing the opinion because it is our project and we need to think who right and which opinion is more reasonable. Like choosing coauthors, it is best to have 3 coauthors in one paper.