I am of the opinion that if you do grad school and you don’t attach yourself to a powerful and wise mentor in the form of your academic adviser, you’re doing it wrong. Mentorship is a highly underrated phenomenon among rationalists.
I mean, if you’re ~22, you really don’t know what the hell you’re doing. That’s why you’re going to grad school, basically. To get some further direction in how to cultivate your professional career.
If you happen to have access to an adviser who won a Nobel or whose adviser won a Nobel, they would make a good choice. The implicit skills involved in doing great work are sometimes passed down this way. The adviser won’t even necessarily know which of their habits are the good ones. I’m thinking specifically of a professor I knew whose adviser was a Nobel laureate, who would take his students out for coffee almost every day. They would casually talk shop while getting coffee. This professor’s students were generally well above average in their research accomplishments.
Relying too much on getting one very specific advisor is risky. Most advisors are middle-aged (or outright old), especially those with Nobel Prizes, and they do sometimes die or move away with little notice. If that happens, universities can be very bad about finding replacements (let alone comparably brilliant replacements) for any students cast adrift.
Also, an adviser’s personality & schedule are as important as their research skills: a Nobel Prize winner who’s usually away giving speeches, and is a raging, neglectful arsehole when they are around, is likely to be more of a hindrance than a help in getting a PhD. Put like that, what I just wrote is obvious, but I can imagine it being the kind of thing potential applicants would overlook.
Yes… but is it about mentorship, or connections? Anyway, one problem is that powerful and wise mentors don’t have anything to say to you until you’ve got a dissertation topic, and the curriculum is structured so that this seldom happens before someone’s third year in grad school.
My experience at the U. of Buffalo was that there were 2 kinds of student-advisor relationships: The exploitative kind, where the “mentor” gets the student to do gruntwork on the advisor’s project, and write a whole bunch of code for him, and keeps them around, ungraduated, as long as they can; and the pro-forma kind, where the advisor cheers the student on in whatever the student is doing, then puts his or her name on the resulting papers. The idea that a dissertation advisor teaches something did not correspond to the reality I observed.
“A friend” (cough) had an exploitative advisor. But this friend also learned a tremendous amount doing all the gruntwork, writing the code, writing the papers. Yes, “my friend” did take over six years to graduate, but “my friend” was pushed harder than he’d ever been pushed in his life and probably harder than he’ll ever be pushed again, and he learned the limits of his own abilities, which were far greater than he would have believed otherwise. Overall, he’s glad he did his PhD even if there was a lot of suffering and struggle.
An (actual) close friend of mine had an advisor who had himself been a student of a Nobel laureate. The relationship was primarily of the second type that you describe—lots of cheerleading and encouragement. But there was certainly an element of discernment which I think was passed along. I remember distinctly that my friend was extremely skeptical that his paper would be accepted by Science (the journal) but the advisor instructed him to submit it; the paper was accepted. So now my friend has a publication in Science basically just because his advisor had the judgement to know when something is important enough to submit to Science. This may seem like a small thing, but having a Science publication is not a small thing, I think.
And I realize this is all highly anecdotal, but I can definitely attest that I have neither seen nor experienced any kind of mentoring relationship similar to either of the above since I left Academia.
My experience having an advisor wasn’t quite either of those.
I was certainly working on his research, but he wasn’t trying to keep me around as long as possible. He also didn’t want me gone as soon as possible.
He seemed to have something he was trying to teach me, and I dare say I learned a few things, but I’m still not sure if they were the things he intended me to learn. He would often directly articulate things, but they weren’t learnable or understandable principles, just sort of… mottoes. Things like, “Look. At. The data.”
The whole thing taught me the most about how many ways there are for noise and human error to creep into an experiment, and how very much prior knowledge and information you actually need just to be sure that your data is at all real in the first place. It also combined with my exposure to LW-y stuff to spark an interest in machine learning and statistics. Oh, and I learned a lot about the importance of using very nice Latex to make papers look properly professional.
Adviser’s mission accomplished? Fuck if I know, but I did still manage to pass a thesis defense (on what I think was sheer politics: my manuscript was quite unpolished, but nobody wanted to speak the impolitic fact that I should have had more guidance in certain aspects before submitting, so I passed with an entirely acceptable grade nonetheless).
I am of the opinion that if you do grad school and you don’t attach yourself to a powerful and wise mentor in the form of your academic adviser, you’re doing it wrong. Mentorship is a highly underrated phenomenon among rationalists.
I mean, if you’re ~22, you really don’t know what the hell you’re doing. That’s why you’re going to grad school, basically. To get some further direction in how to cultivate your professional career.
If you happen to have access to an adviser who won a Nobel or whose adviser won a Nobel, they would make a good choice. The implicit skills involved in doing great work are sometimes passed down this way. The adviser won’t even necessarily know which of their habits are the good ones. I’m thinking specifically of a professor I knew whose adviser was a Nobel laureate, who would take his students out for coffee almost every day. They would casually talk shop while getting coffee. This professor’s students were generally well above average in their research accomplishments.
I mostly agree, but would add two caveats.
Relying too much on getting one very specific advisor is risky. Most advisors are middle-aged (or outright old), especially those with Nobel Prizes, and they do sometimes die or move away with little notice. If that happens, universities can be very bad about finding replacements (let alone comparably brilliant replacements) for any students cast adrift.
Also, an adviser’s personality & schedule are as important as their research skills: a Nobel Prize winner who’s usually away giving speeches, and is a raging, neglectful arsehole when they are around, is likely to be more of a hindrance than a help in getting a PhD. Put like that, what I just wrote is obvious, but I can imagine it being the kind of thing potential applicants would overlook.
Yes… but is it about mentorship, or connections? Anyway, one problem is that powerful and wise mentors don’t have anything to say to you until you’ve got a dissertation topic, and the curriculum is structured so that this seldom happens before someone’s third year in grad school.
My experience at the U. of Buffalo was that there were 2 kinds of student-advisor relationships: The exploitative kind, where the “mentor” gets the student to do gruntwork on the advisor’s project, and write a whole bunch of code for him, and keeps them around, ungraduated, as long as they can; and the pro-forma kind, where the advisor cheers the student on in whatever the student is doing, then puts his or her name on the resulting papers. The idea that a dissertation advisor teaches something did not correspond to the reality I observed.
Yeah, it’s complicated.
“A friend” (cough) had an exploitative advisor. But this friend also learned a tremendous amount doing all the gruntwork, writing the code, writing the papers. Yes, “my friend” did take over six years to graduate, but “my friend” was pushed harder than he’d ever been pushed in his life and probably harder than he’ll ever be pushed again, and he learned the limits of his own abilities, which were far greater than he would have believed otherwise. Overall, he’s glad he did his PhD even if there was a lot of suffering and struggle.
An (actual) close friend of mine had an advisor who had himself been a student of a Nobel laureate. The relationship was primarily of the second type that you describe—lots of cheerleading and encouragement. But there was certainly an element of discernment which I think was passed along. I remember distinctly that my friend was extremely skeptical that his paper would be accepted by Science (the journal) but the advisor instructed him to submit it; the paper was accepted. So now my friend has a publication in Science basically just because his advisor had the judgement to know when something is important enough to submit to Science. This may seem like a small thing, but having a Science publication is not a small thing, I think.
And I realize this is all highly anecdotal, but I can definitely attest that I have neither seen nor experienced any kind of mentoring relationship similar to either of the above since I left Academia.
My experience having an advisor wasn’t quite either of those.
I was certainly working on his research, but he wasn’t trying to keep me around as long as possible. He also didn’t want me gone as soon as possible.
He seemed to have something he was trying to teach me, and I dare say I learned a few things, but I’m still not sure if they were the things he intended me to learn. He would often directly articulate things, but they weren’t learnable or understandable principles, just sort of… mottoes. Things like, “Look. At. The data.”
The whole thing taught me the most about how many ways there are for noise and human error to creep into an experiment, and how very much prior knowledge and information you actually need just to be sure that your data is at all real in the first place. It also combined with my exposure to LW-y stuff to spark an interest in machine learning and statistics. Oh, and I learned a lot about the importance of using very nice Latex to make papers look properly professional.
Adviser’s mission accomplished? Fuck if I know, but I did still manage to pass a thesis defense (on what I think was sheer politics: my manuscript was quite unpolished, but nobody wanted to speak the impolitic fact that I should have had more guidance in certain aspects before submitting, so I passed with an entirely acceptable grade nonetheless).