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).
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).