Fresh Wallaby Juice

This week the lab completely rearranged two of the instruments. These are basically microscopes with some extra optics, and we got in some optical breadboards to mount the laser and optics on. (One disadvantage is that the 532-nm laser is now pretty much at eye level for everyone in the lab…. oops.) One thing that my advisor seemed very concerned about was the effect on student morale of having to sit back in a dark corner in order to do an experiment. This sort of mystified the students concerned, since “doing an experiment” generally means about 10 minutes of telling the computer how to control things, and then a couple hours doing other stuff while it runs.

It got me thinking, though, about how much I’ve seen in the past 6 years of good advising, and bad.

One advisor never expressed any particular concern about student morale; the other buys an occasional LCD monitor to keep us motivated. The first sprang for donuts every group meeting, but made them high-stress events by making them as close to a seminar or “real” conference presentation as he could; the second frowns on us eating donuts at all, but his group meetings are very low-key chats around a conference table.

So, a tentative list of advice for advisors, on keeping your students happy and healthy:

Be interested in our work. Come talk to us. You’re the expert; make suggestions on a regular basis, instead of saying “why didn’t you do _____?” about stuff we finished a month ago. This keeps us accountable, ’cause sometimes we do get distracted, and frequent meetings help us stay on track. This also keeps us enthusiastic, if it’s a project you’re excited about.

Be willing to buy stuff. Grad students aren’t greedy; we understand that grants don’t grow on trees, and that you really did have to work to get us the $1000 we’re asking for. We wouldn’t ask for it if we didn’t think it’s really needed. That doesn’t mean hand us a blank check, perhaps we’re overlooking a way to adapt something we’ve already got lying around the lab — but if it’s something that’s going to save your students a lot of work, be willing to be persuaded. *Our time is as precious as your money, or more so.*

Be flexible. You’re pretty smart, you’ve been doing this for a good long while. You probably do know how that doohickey needs to be arranged, or the framis rejiggled into alignment, or whether to fit the data to a fifth- or a third-order inverse Gaussian. You may well be right that research is best done starting early in the morning, or on the weekends. You probably have a good reason for preferring that we not listen to music in the wet chemical lab. But…. it’s our careers on the line too. (More so than yours, for that matter, since it’s not going to impact your next grant or your chances of making the National Academy if a grad student drops out because his experiments don’t work.) And maybe spending every one of the last 72 hours studying every line and angle of the framis has shown us that your way of rejiggering it will just make it broken, while if we spin it around and drip hot wax on it, it’ll work just fine. And if we don’t show up for the next two days after getting the framis straightened out… well, we’ll get the work done somehow, so let us pick our own hours, okay?

Be talkative. Keep us in the loop. If you’re planning on writing something, or going on a trip, let us know; maybe we’ve got things to talk about while you’re around. If you know you’re going to need new data for a conference a month from now, make sure we know; if we don’t know, we might take the time to change the instrument and leave it in useless bits for two critical weeks right before you go. If there’s a new requirement that comes down from the graduate school, please tell us as soon as you know about it. Give us feedback after we give group meeting, after we come up with a good idea, after we stumble into your office for a gloomy chat about why things haven’t been going well in lab this week.

(Note that none of this necessarily has a thing to do with either my former or current advisor, or any professors living, emeritus, or deceased.)

Tags: advisor, graduate school, research