Choosing the right research advisor
Research Advisor Series: Part 1
For graduate studies, a research advisor can make or break you. I did not quite believe that until I started my Ph.D.
Most people assume that a doctoral degree is independent research and depends solely on your motivation and skills only. Well, it is partially true. What you are missing is the importance of a suitable mentor who can guide you to sail through the entire process. Though your passion and hard work matter, the importance of experience cannot be neglected. This is where your research advisor comes in. Based on his years of research and mentoring experience, he can truly change your life. He can be like your dad who held your hand while you took your first steps as a child. Besides guiding you to learn essential skills to acquire for a successful Ph.D., a good advisor can help you plan your research by establishing realistic goals and validating research ideas. Not only this, but he can also be your networking guide for finding resources and market your ideas and work to the broader audience.
But the bigger question is, how do you find a mentor who can do all these things for you? I will share a series of articles to help you find one. You can follow these steps to choose the right advisor for you by digging deep into their personality.
- Match your research interests
Of course, the first most filter would be to match your research interests. Once you have established your area of research according to your interests, the next step is to find a suitable faculty member who is working in a similar area. There are two ways to do that, through university search or publication search. The university search would obviously be based on your choice of country and your dream university, but the publication search would be more specific according to your desired research area, and you might want to assume that you do not care about anything rather than the research topic.
For the publication search, you can simply go to the Google Scholar webpage and type the research topic that you are interested in. That will lead you to a number of publications and you just dig deep into that and find out who was the faculty advisor that mentored this student to write a particular paper that you liked, and you can go to their main profile and contact them to find out if they have an opening or not.
The other method which is probably more common is to filter out your priorities based on the country you want to visit and shortlisting some universities based on your profile or the dream universities you aspire to attend. You can explore the faculty profiles on the university web pages and make sure that the advisor you are seeking should have projects and expertise relevant to your research interests.
2. Find about their recent projects
Whether you have found your advisor through a university search or through the publication search you need to make sure that they have relevant projects and vacancies to hire more students. Find their scholar profiles on research gate, academia.edu, and google scholar, etc. to learn about their recent publications and projects. That will not only help you identify relevant recent projects but also you will be able to analyze a pattern like how many students are working on a similar project, how many publications the group has been publishing per year, whether these do seem like good work or just a bunch of crap articles to ensure their presence in the scientific world? You can also look out for diversity in the research group. Generally, a professor whose students are from all backgrounds, and are not just limited to one ethnic or national group, is a nice professor who would not be racist or unkind for bizarre reasons. All this information can be very useful in determining the professor’s attitude and foreseeing the kind of life you would be living after accepting his offer.
3. Find their key qualities
To know them better, you can take one step further and find them on LinkedIn. Well, it may seem like stalking, but it is what it is.
You can look out for their comments, people and organizations they follow, if they support their students openly, if they talk about their work openly on social media, and especially if they have a normal personal life besides their work that they share with their colleagues, mostly those are the good signs of a happy advisor who might not make your life miserable and would understand that you are just another person having other things to worry about besides research as well.
4. Reach out to their students
Always ask people who have personally interacted with your potential advisor. The best resource is his current or past students. If the students seem to be open in sharing everything about the research group and advisor, it’s a fair chance that they are being treated nicely.
5. Evaluate their character
Finally, the evaluation that you can totally rely upon is looking out for the email language. Given the unprecedented life circumstances due to the recent pandemic, things have changed, and it is highly likely that you will receive a teleconference meeting invitation, so you can totally judge their behavior on the call. Good professors will try to learn about you and your personality as well, they will try to break the ice and make you comfortable to openly share your ideas. They will let you speak and will behave respectfully. I have come across some people who seem to be so full of themselves that they cut off students and do not let them complete their sentence, even further they try to assume your answers themselves and start giving their advice right away. You better avoid them and look out for better options.
