Week4_How to work with your advisor?

Discussion topic: How to work with your advisor?

Pang: There are two important principles:

1. Your advisor is not your boss.
2. Your advisor is not doing your research for you.

Let’s talk about what the first principle means. How is an advisor different from a boss?

Student1: A boss and an advisor are different in that an advisor gives guideline for what you are doing, while a boss gives you what you should undertake and follow.

Pang: Right. In your research, you are the boss, not your advisor is. You don’t need to do everything that your advisor tells you to do. If you only follow your advisor’s instructions, you are no more than his/her research assistant. You should be the boss for your own project, dissertation, or job market paper.

I understand that to Asians, what a teacher says is always God-given truth. You must change such a mentality. Sometimes, you have to have a courage to disagree with your advisor and should be able to convince him/her why your way is better. If you can’t convince your advisor, how would you convince your editor or reviewers?

Pang: What do you think with the second principle? – Your adviser is not going to do research for you.

Student2: You should be an independent researcher.

Student3: From my own experience, I had to recheck and have a second look at a paper before submitting it, because I am responsible for it.

Student4: We should be the one who pushes your project forward.

Pang: Yes, you should be the one who manages your research. The bottom line is, your advisor is not going to solve your problems. His/her role is helping you do quality research and complete it, not offering solutions to you every time you hit a wall. “My advisor does not let me graduate..” does not really make sense from this perspective.

Student5: I think the relationship between a student and an advisor varies in disciplines.

Pang: True, but in a business school, as we’ve been discussing, you are expected to become an independent researcher. Remember this – Don’t blame your advisor when your research goes south. Your advisor is not the person who solves every problem of yours. It is your job.

You are the one who knows the most about your project. An advisor often does not know everything about your work. At a conference presentation, I’ve seen a professor talking to the audience that “I don’t know why my student chose this method..” He may not be supposed to say it, but he was likely telling the truth. Since you’re the boss in your research, you make the decisions, and therefore, you’re responsible for it.

Pang: I also want to talk a little about who should be your advisor. It might be a good idea to have two advisors – a senior professor and a junior/assistant professor. There is a study in a science discipline that the most cited papers are ones with a three co-author combination – a doctoral student (first), a junior faculty (second), and a senior professor (third). The doctoral student is the one who came with up the idea, did the bulk of the analyses, and wrote most of the paper. What are the roles of the other two co-authors, then?

Student1: The senior advisor provides a big picture, and the junior advisor provides detailed skills.

Pang: That’s right. The junior advisor can provide hands-on and detailed skills and tacit/intimate knowledge on how to make a progress in research, how to get it done. The senior professor, on the other hand, can provide a big picture: What is interesting to reviewers, what is not, how to frame/sell the paper, and what contribution the paper makes, and etc. This is a complementary role between the senior and the junior faculty members.