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).
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).