The joys and perils of teaching doctoral students

The vast majority of people in the world don’t get to experience doctoral education. And that’s a shame. The intellectual freedom, the pursuit of curiosity, and expanse of time are unparalleled in any other form of work or education. Of course, I’m glorifying the best parts and eliding the struggles, but I think most people who’ve done at least part of a Ph.D. program would agree that at its core, the free pursuit of knowledge might be the highest form of agency our civilization affords.

If few people have tried doing a Ph.D., even fewer have tried teaching doctoral students. And even after ten years of being a professor, it’s not something I talk about a lot. Yes, in the UW iSchool we have doctoral student annual reviews, where faculty can discuss each student and what they need. Yes, I talk informally all the time with junior faculty about how to advise doctoral students. Yes, occasionally we teach doctoral courses. And at conferences, I spent a lot of time talking to colleagues about advising. But in few of these contexts do we ever have explicit discussion about what it means to teach a doctoral student.

One striking thing about doctoral education is that it’s relational. Because it’s arranged as a 5–7 year apprenticeship in the United States, it’s fundamentally a relationship between a doctoral student and a professor. Everything else around that, whether it’s courses, thesis proposals, dissertations, or other requirements, are all arbitrary accoutrement. The core of advising is the management and development of shared interests, clear communication, development of shared goals, and through this process of developing and maintaining a relationship, the transfer of knowledge and skills.

However, because doctoral education is fundamentally relational, it also has an incredibly wide scope. A typical course in a college or university has relatively fixed boundaries around what one will learn. In doctoral education, I find myself talking about:

• A student’s past and future interests, and how they are developing
• A student’s motivation, and how to manage it
• A student’s communities, and their role in it
• A student’s ideas, and the development and dissemination of them
• A student’s ability to communicate through writing, speech, and diagram
• A student’s ability to collaborate
• A student’s ability to form and critique their own arguments and others’
• A student’s social relationships and how they are supporting the above
• A student’s mental health and how it is mediating the above
• A student’s economic stability and how it is threatening the above
• A student’s career aspirations and how the above supports them
• The entire range of skills necessary for succeeding at research and all of the above aspects of life

Yes, teaching doctoral students is partly about transferring and developing expertise, but it’s also about a student’s entire identity, their past and their future, and their role in the world.

This is hard work. Earning a PhD through this process doesn’t really prepare anyone to teach all of the above. And because of the scope of topics that arise in doctoral education, it’s easy to wander into areas that others are much better trained to support (mental and physical well-being most notably). It’s also easy for the power imbalance in an advising relationship to mask deep struggles that doctoral students face and fear discussing. It’s no wonder that doctoral advisors get it wrong so often, or that they draw sharp boundaries around the type of support they are willing to give.

In some ways, I make this harder for myself. I’m interested in doctoral students’ lives. I welcome this broad scope. I want to support their entire humanity, and not just their expertise. I believe in academia as a place that’s supposed to develop people in all dimensions, not just in knowledge and skills. I’d like to do this for students at all levels, but fail for lack of time. And I suspect that because I’m open to this broad scope, I attract students who seek it, which makes my job even harder.

Most people who get PhDs don’t become professors and don’t advise PhD students. I’m not sure it makes sense to teach doctoral students to teach doctoral students. Finishing a dissertation is hard enough. But new faculty definitely need guidance on this from day one. Few get it.

If you teach doctoral students, how do you learn to improve your teaching? If you’re a doctoral student yourself, what are you not getting from your advisor that you desperately need?