Managing Your Advisor
Over the years, several of my students started to put together a list of practical advice for incoming students — including various niceties such as how to gain access to the lab, how to get accounts, how to submit reimbursements, and so forth. I wanted to contribute to the list of advice, and I figured I could offer some value by giving advice to new students about how to gain traction on their research as quickly as possible. This post is the first in a series of a few posts on that topic; in this post, I will cover the topic of managing your advisor.
The notion of an advisor is an interesting concept for many new Ph.D. students. Incoming graduate students typically have one of two backgrounds: some come straight from undergraduate studies (and, hence, may have never had a manager or a boss overseeing their career); others have spent some time in the workforce and have decided to return to the university and begin a career in research (and, hence, have some notion of what it is like to have a manager).
An advisor-student relationship is unique, though, and will be a new experience for both types of incoming students. The relationship is similar to a manager relationship, but has several differentiating features. First, your advisor is often a collaborator on equal footing. Although an incoming Ph.D. student is not (yet) a peer of his or her advisor, the goal is that by the end…
