4. Understanding and Engaging with Faculty

Your relationship with the faculty will likely be stressful, even if it is productive. And although the right faculty member will push and guide you to do your best work, one can easily find stories about faculty who have made the lives of their graduate students far more difficult than they needed to be. So, what’s going on here?

The first thing to understand is that faculty are people too. When you are in your early twenties, it’s easy to think of faculty as complete and fully accomplished professionals, unbothered by the emotional crises and fraught decisions that cause so much distress for someone in their early twenties—someone like you, who is just starting out and trying to establish herself. You may think that professors have figured it all out and are now, from a position of serene maturity, moving without friction or frustration through their career and toward retirement and beyond.

To a certain degree, that is all true. With experience, with tenure, with a decade or more of nice salaries and good benefits, life gets easier. But challenges and setbacks nevertheless remain. In their thirties, many faculty members are dealing with the stress of raising children. Even if they are not the primary caregivers, they are dealing with stressed-out partners who are. In their forties, the children will still be there, and on top of that, some faculty will be dealing with strained marriages and divorce. In their fifties and sixties, health problems enter the picture—weight gain, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart attacks, cancer. Also, aging parents become a concern, often a serious one. At any point, faculty might be dealing with loss—the death of a parent, the death of a child, the death of a spouse, the death of an old friend. Although most faculty will act professionally and avoid bringing their personal problems to work, those problems are still there, on the margins and to one degree or another affecting their mood and their work. 

This is just a plea to remember that everyone is going through difficulties, including the faculty. It doesn’t excuse any particular behavior; but it may help to explain it.

Your first interaction with faculty will of course be in your classes. But soon you will need to select one of them to be an advisor to guide you through your field paper and, more important, through your dissertation. You can have a different advisor for each project; many people do.

There are two kinds of advisors: reasonable advisors and unreasonable advisors. (Those terms are informal.) Reasonable advisors understand that you are writing a dissertation, not a life’s work, and will have proper expectations about what you can do and the amount of time in which you have to do it. Unreasonable advisors are never satisfied; they always ask for more—more reading, more data, more analyses. You want to pick a reasonable advisor. If you discover that you have an unreasonable advisor, you should try to find, in a politically sensitive way, a new one.

Much like identifying research topics, I would begin looking for potential advisors as soon as possible. Unfortunately, you might run into problems, through no fault of your own. Some faculty are reluctant to work with students. They have all had students who wasted too much of their time by not following through on plans and commitments. Many are interested only in their own projects and prefer to be left alone. But there will always be faculty who enjoy mentoring and advising students. You will start to learn who they are, and naturally you will approach one of them to be your advisor.

So, what should you look for in an advisor?

If your faculty has a superstar, you might be tempted to ask the superstar to be your advisor. I would think twice about that. Professors who are quasi-celebrities are often unavailable. The attention they receive can also go to their heads, making them even more difficult to work with.

Make sure that your advisor has expertise on the topics you want to research. You probably don’t want to ask a theorist to advise you on an empirical project or vice versa. Your advisor should be sympathetic to the kind of work you want to do. If you want to conduct an experiment (rather than work with already existing data), make sure any potential advisor will support that. Experiments are risky: you don’t know what data they will yield until you’ve gone through the process. For that reason, some faculty will discourage them.

Pick an advisor who supports your career ambitions. If you would rather go into the private sector or government than the academy, will they encourage that?

Generally speaking, pick an advisor who already has tenure. Assistant professors can make great advisors, and some may be eager to play that role; but they really should be focused on earning tenure. 

Finally, confirm that your advisor will be around the department when you need him. Faculty often take sabbaticals or spend a year as a visitor in one place or another. So make sure any potential advisor will be around to meet with you.

Note that you’ll be spending three or four years working closely with your advisor. So be sure to pick someone who you like. Even better, pick someone who motivates you, who makes you eager to get to work.

Before asking someone to be your advisor, you need to do your homework. Know the faculty member’s research interests and recent publications. Try to find out how many students she is advising already; it could be that she’s overloaded. Ask fellow graduate students for recommendations. Find out what a potential advisor is currently working on. If she has a grant that will require her to do field work overseas for part of every year, she may not be right for you. 

When you approach a potential advisor, you should already have a good notion of what you want to research. Have two or three preliminary topics in mind (not just one), along with research questions pertaining to each topic. In other words, instead of telling them that you’re interested in, say, education, be more specific. Have two or three questions dealing with education that you’d like to pursue. Have some idea of the big issues connected with each topic. Are data the main problem? Is there a methodological problem that has plagued research on the topic? Something else? 

Once you have an advisor, your job is to make things as easy as possible for him. Professors are busy people with full lives—spouses, children, siblings, parents, friends, all of whom make demands on their time; they have health issues and relationship problems; they have their own commitments and deadlines. They are under no obligation to act as your advisor. You need to demonstrate to them that you’ll meet them more than halfway. The last thing they want is a student who is more trouble than he’s worth.

Unless you work out a different arrangement, see your advisor by appointment only; do not make it a habit of dropping in unexpectedly. Follow through on the plans you make with him. From time to time, you’ll fail to do that, but that’s ok—as long as you don’t do it repeatedly. Give your advisor notice that you may need more time or more resources to do what you have pledged to do.