More about grad students (just when you thought it was over!)

I'm continuing this conversation yet further, because commenter JaneB raised some really important issues about working with graduate students (lending some support to Gradgrind's case). I hope JaneB doesn't mind if I reproduce her comment here, because I started to respond to it, and my own comment grew so unwieldy that I thought I should just go ahead and post it.

I'm an advisor of grad students (in the UK, so a different system). In an ideal world, advising would be entirely student-centred, focusing not just on getting the student the job most appropriate to them, but on supporting every student as fully as possible. But academic faculty also have insecurities and career needs, and this is the rant I sometimes want to have at students...

"When I've poured every last penny from my small allocations for lab costs and conferences and earnings from consultancy into supporting your fieldwork and extra lab costs, and found the money to get you to conferences when you could only raise half of the necessary, is it unreasonable to expect the student to write up in a decent amount of time?

When I spend at least an hour a week acting as sounding board and doing my damndest to encourage you to believe in yourself and your ability, and offering you every tip I have and all the help I can to develop into a good data analyst and writer, don't I deserve some reward? At the least, PLEASE can we never have a huge, emotional tussle over authorship because you feel that your work is all your own. I will encourage you to get at least one sole-authored paper, but when you've benefited from my time, my ideas, my knowledge of the literature, and my emotional support, not to mention my editing - is joint authorship of a couple of papers too much to ask? Or a little help from you with one of my projects, suitably acknowledged?

And as for the life crisis thing - yes, I know that things happen, and that work is not everything - but dammit treat graduate work like a real job and take sick leave or compassionate leave if you need to, or go part-time, don't mess up MY track record of supervision by not telling anyone you're sick or distracted, taking the salary, and doing no work. It's too late to fix it when you've passed your submission deadline, by then all we can do is get you extensions - which, note well, get ME into trouble with my department. All I'm asking is that you let me know if there's a problem when it starts - I don't need to know the details unless you want to talk (and in fact I'd often rather you didn't, there's enough trauma in my life without yours!). I have my own battles - elderly unwell parents, clinical depression, food issues, loneliness and my own history of romantic failure - and sometimes dealing with yours as well is a bit much. But I try my darndest. And sometimes wonder what on earth I tried for, when after taking my time and energy and resources for 3 or 4 or 5 years you decide to quit, or that your dissertation is purely your own creation and I have hampered you, or deserve no credit or co-authorship on your papers or posters or talks, that you want nothing more to do with me. I really hate hearing that you've bad-mouthed me to colleagues at a conference I didn't attend. What did I do to deserve that?

The time I spend with you is mostly time taken from my own research, because the so-called workload model assumes that I comment on text for an hour or so a month and see you for maybe a couple of hours once a month - averaged over your three years, even ignoring the time I spend in the field and the laboratory with you, this just isn't sufficient. I freely give you that time, because it's not your fault that the system doesn't reflect the actual work I do. But a tahnk you would sometimes be nice. I am human, I lack confidence, I worry that I do a bad job or let you down sometimes - let me know how I'm doing, especially if I'm doing OK."

Gradgrind is overly obsessed with where her students end up, I think, and her language is excessive - myself, I'm delighted if they end up with good jobs of any type, and if they don't regret having done a research degree - but I can relate to the sense of betrayal and rejection that comes through in the piece. As a supervisor, I spend years building a relationship, work hard to come up with ways to communicate and teach skills to very different people, pour creative energy and thought and time and other resources into a project not my own (and frankly sometimes pretty dull to me), and at the end of it the newly-fledged little researcher is ready to fly on their own, and that's really rewarding. The transitions and changes made by students during graduate research are fascinating for supervisor and student. But at the end of the day being a supervisor (advisor) is the hardest, most emotionally draining, most difficult work I do, and feeling that those efforts are wasted is incredibly hard to deal with (personal examples of situations where I have felt let down by a student : a) student who quits because her boyfriend doesn't like her studying all the time, and takes her data with her (an issue in the sciences!), b) student who doesn't write up because once she's finished her three funded years she's got a mortgage to pay so has to work a fulltime job, has found the time to research her husband's family tree and take multiple night-school classes in another field, but not to write the thesis, but will write up 'one day' so I can't even begin to use the data, c) refuses to put my name on any papers as it's 'his' thesis and tells people at conferences that I made no input into his thesis and am totally unreasonable (hello, if I made no input, who spent two months editing the final draft?) (of course this gets back to me, it's a small field), d) fails to tell me about her illness and her partner's alcoholism until she's past her deadline and I find out that she's lied consistently about how much data she's collected and how much she's written and the funding agency blacklists the department because it has no paper record of any problems with the student's progress...). Sigh!

But when you get a good student - one who appreciates the help, and learns, and goes on to become a colleague - it's all worth while. So far, anyway.

I wanted to thank JaneB for saying all this, and what's funny is that I wasn't at all upset with her rant, compared to my displeasure with Gradgrind's. I think it's largely the material differences between disciplines that make JaneB sound more reasonable - in the humanities (which is where Gradgrind seems to be, though that's an assumption), there are no labs and no fieldwork, and (generally) no conflicts over authorship, because the student's thesis and papers written along the way are entirely the student's. Thus I've always thought of frustrating grad students as hurting themselves more than others, because I haven't generally seen their failures as materially affecting their supervisors. In the sciences, however, this is clearly different, and frustration with the material setbacks a dysfunctional grad student can cause seems entirely reasonable.

When I stop to think about it, I guess I can't say that humanities faculty don't expend any of their own material resources on their students. Most faculty I knew who had money for research assistants usually hired their own students, and I know of a few instances when faculty have done things like hire a student to grade a course and paid them out of pocket (the latter is, I think, purely out of the goodness of their hearts, although they do get a valuable service in return!). I don't know if the research assistantship money was usually money earmarked specifically for that (so the supervisor wasn't giving up the chance to spend it on other things), or was money taken from a general pot to use on a research assistant instead of on other things (in which case the supervisor was choosing to support a student over other uses of the money). I suspect it depends on how they'd got the money.

And I do know one case in which a research assistant, who was supplying the technical expertise in a very specialized project, without warning up and vanished, leaving the advisor without the data or with data in a form she could do nothing with. Not. Good.

Nor, would I imagine, do extensions necessarily reflect well on an advisor, although the timelines for U.S. doctoral degress vary significantly from the U.K.

But in general, I think that in the humanities, unsuccessful students are less of a drain on material resources (partly because there are fewer resources!) than those in the sciences. Even research assistants seem different from graduate students working in a lab - largely because if the humanities student does unsatisfactory work, there's no obligation to rehire them, in the same way I imagine there's a kind of obligation to keep a student in your lab. Research assistants in the humanities don't generally create or conceptualize projects, or do anything that any other of the supervisor's students couldn't do, so they can usually be slotted into a project interchangeably. Nor do their own projects depend on the work they do in a research assistantship - the two are most likely unrelated - so not rehiring them wouldn't negatively affect their ability to earn their degree.

Moreover, the issues of who gets access to data and who gets the right to write it up are pretty much moot. In history, students' "data" is [are?] stuff accessible to anyone. Many scholars before and after me have examined the materials I used in my dissertation, and if my advisor had wanted to write something based on those materials, there were no barriers to doing so. So if had failed to finish my dissertation, for instance, this would in no way have hindered the course of my advisor's own research.

So I look at JaneB's frustrations with students who take data or make it impossible to use data and see that as rather different from what Gradgrind was saying, because to me, the material consequences that frustrating grad students cause JaneB are truly significant, whereas for Gradgrind, they're not. It may simply be that some of the material damage in the humanities is more invisible, I don't know, but it seems like the team research model in the sciences does mean that troublesome students really do cause more measurable problems that, to me, make for a much more legitimate critique.

I don't mean to suggest that material consequences are the only things that justify advisorly frustration. But I do seem them as in a different category than the kinds of psychological suffering Gradgrind claims to have experienced. Perhaps because Gradgrind's unhappiness seems to have come from inappropriate expectations for her students - expectations that only she brings to the table - while JaneB's problems derive from behavior genuinely beyond her control?

I have to confess to a sneaking sympathy with the student who lies about her lack of progress, however. I realize that doing so causes someone like JaneB huge headaches, and I'm not condoning or justifying it. But what this suggests to me is someone who's really scared of the consequences of not having done their work, who perhaps hopes against hope that if she can just keep her supervisor happy or oblivious long enough, somehow magically she'll be able to catch up. Which will never happen, but hope springs eternal. This is the kind of thing I was thinking of when talking about the "emotionally fraught" nature of grad school - there is something about it which infantilizes students and encourages them to see the supervisor as the ultimate authority over their lives. Somehow this makes it seem justifiable to hide lack of progress, rather than speak directly and risk the supervisor's wrath or disappointment.

Again, it's not a good thing to do, and it's counterproductive in the end, because the student looks worse than they would if they came to the advisor when the problem first began. But I think the pressure to appear perfect, not to admit mistakes or failures, can make grad students do some very unwise things. I'm not sure where this pressure comes from, because clearly JaneB and all sensible faculty would rather hear about a problem when it can still be solved. And yet, such pressure permeates the culture of graduate education.

Anyway. In some respects this wordy pontification is really the prelude to a question, especially for my scientist readers: since when I talk about what goes on in graduate education in the sciences, I'm essentially talking out my ass, does this distinction work? Are frustrating grad students a different species in the sciences than in the humanities? (And social science people, feel free to weigh in about where they fall in your disciplines!)

Comments

[Belle]

Maybe the answers can be found in clarifying our own expectations early on. As you say, the differences between the sciences and history are notable. And let's be honest, grad students rarely have a clue what advisors do besides lecture/teach.

Let's shoot for greater and clearer expectations on both sides. Early and often?

[mimi]

Hm. Gradgrind's whingeing sort of rubbed me the wrong way. I do supervise grad students--only MAs so far, but I've only been here 3 years, and our PhD program is pretty small--and I can agree that some of them are ... not terribly intellectual, and sorta not into scholarly growth. In these cases, it's pretty clear that these students are not going to set academe ablaze (at least, not with their theses) and I adjust my investment in them accordingly. Of course, I push them to grow, just as I would any other student, but? Any student? I'm not giving up my research or my personal life to nurture anyone.

I just don't see what seh's complaining about. The kinds of 'deception' she's writing about may not be deception at all, and the intellectual pretention she's right to deride is, even from my junior position, pretty easy to recognize pretty early in teh supervisory relationship.

This gave a whiff of sour grapes to me. It doesn't relate meaningfully to my life as a scholar, nor to the lives of my colleagues, such as I've been able to glean from discussion. I'm actually surprised the Chronicle published it--it seems so odd, and cranky, and not generalizable.

[KC]

This conversation has reminded me a an excerpt from A.S. Byatt's novel 'Possession,' which perfectly encapsulates some of the supervision I'm getting as a grad student in the UK. Byatt writes about Roland, a graduate student, and his supervisor Blackadder:

'There was no such professional method about Blackadder, who nevertheless noticed and corrected a plethora of errors, accompanying this correction with a steady series of disparaging comments on the declining standard of English education. In his day, he said, students were grounded in spelling and had learned poetry and the Bible by heart. An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream. '"Felt along the heart" as Wordsworth said,' Blackadder said. But in the best English tradition he did not consider it his business to equip his deficient students with tools they had not got. They must muddle through in a fog of grumble and contempt.' (p. 26)

Muddling along in a fog of grumble and contempt - seems to me like Gradgrind has that part down pat.

[maggiemay]

I was annoyed by Gradgrind, although like Jane B, I could somewhat relate to the general sense of disaffection from the piece --I've felt that way about some students.

But one issue that I don't *think* anyone has mentioned yet is that grad programs are often very irresponsible in terms of admitting and advancing students who SHOULD NOT BE admitted or advanced.

Examples: (1) To have a constant supply of cheap labor, mid-range grad programs (not to mention lower end ones) admit a lot of under-qualified students. I went to a decent program and was ASTONISHED at how many people did. not. belong there. (2) Grad programs place a huge amount of emphasis on the GRE. I've known more than a handful of people with extremely high GREs who never ever met a single deadline in their lives. If grad profs want students to act professionally, perhaps they should work harder to admit professionals? and (3) Grade inflation in grad school programs is notorious, and it's often not until comps --or later-- that people start to express genuine concern about grad students' abilities. Be clear about your expectations, and if students don't meet them, there should be consequences. And that penalty should not be a B-.

But mostly, I just hope that I am never as bitter or disappointed as Gradgrind seems to be.

[Sisyphus]

A grad student weighing in here. ---- While humanities grad students aren't the same type of money or resources cost as for science advisors, I'm sure we're a huge *time* cost. We get (to varying degrees) advice and comments on papers and letters of rec and long meandering talks in the office trying to push us from a fuzzy blob to a dissertation topic and passing on readings and names of other scholars (and sometimes, even, gasp! get introduced to them at conferences --- though not by my advisor).

Not that this is in any way to legitimate the Gradgrind column. That sounded pretentious and cranky. I also got the impression that if all of Gradgrind's students were lying or "being deceptive" in order to get any attention and mentoring, it says something more about her and her advising styles than the students themselves.

[life_of_a_fool]

I am a social scientist, so maybe somewhere between JaneB's science and a humanities person. I am hugely sympathetic to JaneB's frustrations. A lot of it probably is communicating expectations (as Belle said; on an individual, but also an institutional level) and weeding out those who don't belong at all (as maggiemay said). I have RAs that seem to look at their RA work as something to do once their other obligations are fulfilled, whereas I am counting on their work getting done so that I can do my own (analysis, writing). This is HUGELY frustrating to me.

So, basically, I had no problem at all with JaneB's rant. While I could relate to some of Grandgrind's frustration, her column still struck me as a bit off, for reasons I won't repeat from my last comment on this. . .

[hypatia cade]

I'm in the social sciences but the lab costs and time investment JaneB talks about are very real to me. At the same time I read the Chronicle column and my first reaction was 'ick' she's over invested in her students. It's a shame she doesn't have a research career in her own right so so that she can feel pride and ownership in that instead of (in addition to) where her students end up. Yes, bad students can leave you hanging. Clearly stating expectations at the beginning of the program, at the start of each new project, at each transitionary advisory meeting is a good way to avoid it. Making clear the expectations and tensions that you are working under is also helpful (e.g. I explain to students why I am choosing one project over another or choosing to present in one venue over another, both as it relates to advancing their careers and my own). Being open to a variety of career paths and encouraging communication about life choices (and providing models of alternative paths - bringing in people who took other paths as guests to talk about that) is also important. I dunno. The Chronicle post has the wrong attitude, but so does the attitude that what the student does has no bearing on the advisor.

[Kate]

I wrote about this over at my place too, but just wanted to say how much I appreciated your take on this -- all of the posts on it. I feel like you got to the heart of why Gradgrind was so annoying and, frankly, hurtful. There are massive institutional pressures on all of us at all levels and they make us more than a little crazy sometimes. It's unacceptable to take them out on students though, and that's how I felt Gradgrind was getting out her job angst. Ugh.

[withneedle]

Maggie May's comment reminds me uncomfortably of my own experience in grad school. I was in math, which I think from an advising standpoint is more like the humanities than like a lab science. (To be clear, I was a singularly unsuccessful grad student, so I never got to the point where I could fit the hazing rituals into any kind of larger perspective.) The department I was in was torn--on the one hand, it was deeply attached to the hothouse model of advising, where all the care and resources are lavished on a few specimens that, for whatever reason, are believed to have the best chances of success, and on the other hand, it had service courses to teach. The end result was that the golden children got proactive advising, and everyone else got nothing as long as they weren't flaking out on teaching. I had three advisors, one of whom was afraid of women, and one of whom was saving his wisdom for someone else. The third had some serious boundary issues, but was out of the mainstream of the department enough not to be affected by the passivity around advising. He was the one who told me that I was too unhappy to be successful in that department, and I should just bail. Which wasn't exactly fun for either of us, but it was what I needed to hear.

[(Not that) Paris]

I did my PhD in the UK and what I noticed was that the brevity of the program (3-4 years for most) seemed to give my supervisor a very different relationship to her PhD students. Quite simply, because it was only for a relatively short time, she accepted that many might elect to do something entirely different afterwards. I heard her and other humanities faculty express minor regret that a very good dissertation was unlikely to be published, but I encountered way more openness to the fact that many humanities PhD students do not continue on in academic careers, even in a top-flight program such as the one I was in. People who failed to submit did annoy, but more from an administrative perspective in that a program's access to government funding could be jepardized rather than as a personal slight.

If you got hired somewhere in academia without finishing your PhD when your supervisor had vouched that you would, however, was an entirely different matter and taken as a very personal breach of trust.

[JaneB]

Wow, my comment looks even longer pasted into your blog - thanks for your thoughtful response, and sorry for going on so long!

I'd perhaps comment that the UK PhD is short but it is also probably more intense - the student is working on their thesaural research from the first day they arrive, mainly with one or two supervisors... my impression is that US grad school involves contact with a wider range of people in the first couple of years at least, and a shorter period of pure dissertation research (ABD). The relationship is probably different in the UK in that you start working together from day 1 as a total novice (and remember that it's still not unusual for a student to go straight from undergrad to PhD in the UK - I was done with my BA (mostly in science) and PhD in just six years).

Gradgrind is overly invested in her students - but at it's best, an intense relationship is formed around working together and around the nature of the work, and will persist as long as you both work in the field. My relationship with my own supervisor has gone from rather rocky (he never said anything unless he really needed to, I talk incessently especially when someone scary and senior is being silent... plus he's a very clever, efficient person and I'm a messy, play with many ideas, occasionally inspired person...) to highly collegial and supportive over the last 15 years or so (Lord but I'm getting old), and I wouldn't be without him now.

Will stop now before go on too long!

[bad apple]

so, i'm a grad student at a large, "prestigious" public university, currently writing my dissertation. i hope it's ok that i add to the comments here, and i have to say that i found the gradgrind column infuriating, though almost funny, because it is almost the exact OPPOSITE of what i have actually experienced in grad school. i don't mean to read as ungrateful but i have never experienced the kind of attention gradgrind must give her students, and to my knowledge, neither have my cohorts. our professors say they are "extremely busy," or even "too busy," but it's not because they have spent all of their personal time on our problems, or even our papers. we're not really sure what they do with all of their time. i've gotten one paper back from one of my adivsors in SEVEN YEARS, and though he is full of compliments every time we "chat" it seems as if he has to be, simply because it's the easiest way to be when you haven't read your own student's work.
in my dept. we also have to carefully navigate around two professors who basically run the show, but are romantically involved, and though we are not supposed to talk about it, they seem to frequently pass info. back and forth about grad. students. we are basically required to work with both of them, so we have to maintain a careful balance between the two at all times, and no information to one is safe from the other. so the dysfunctional family gradrgrind mentions is entirely on the side of the professors.

now i have been aggressed several times by both male and female profs., but never have i heard of an instance where the profs. are running from student predators. it's funny to me, simply because i was told by one "illustrious" professor that the only reason she let me in her class was because i was "sexy." she expected me to reciprocate, and when i didn't, she decided she didn't want to work with me because she was "too busy."

there's also the case of another "extremely busy" and "illustrious" prof. who refused and refuses to submit grades on time. usually it is because she is, again, just "too busy" to grade our papers, but a few years ago a new article appeared from her that had liberally borrowed from one of those ungraded papers written by an underadvised and mostly ignored grad student. after she published her work, she had the audacity to give him a low grade and tell him he was a bad writer.

but i really could go on and on. i have too many examples of the opposite of gradgrind's complaints, and given my experience in the academy, i just have to laugh at hers, and try not to sound so bitter.

[bad apple]

so, i'm a grad student at a large, "prestigious" public university, currently writing my dissertation. i hope it's ok that i add to the comments here, and i have to say that i found the gradgrind column infuriating, though almost funny, because it is almost the exact OPPOSITE of what i have actually experienced in grad school. i don't mean to read as ungrateful but i have never experienced the kind of attention gradgrind must give her students, and to my knowledge, neither have my cohorts. our professors say they are "extremely busy," or even "too busy," but it's not because they have spent all of their personal time on our problems, or even our papers. we're not really sure what they do with all of their time. i've gotten one paper back from one of my adivsors in SEVEN YEARS, and though he is full of compliments every time we "chat" it seems as if he has to be, simply because it's the easiest way to be when you haven't read your own student's work.
in my dept. we also have to carefully navigate around two professors who basically run the show, but are romantically involved, and though we are not supposed to talk about it, they seem to frequently pass info. back and forth about grad. students. we are basically required to work with both of them, so we have to maintain a careful balance between the two at all times, and no information to one is safe from the other. so the dysfunctional family gradrgrind mentions is entirely on the side of the professors.

now i have been aggressed several times by both male and female profs., but never have i heard of an instance where the profs. are running from student predators. it's funny to me, simply because i was told by one "illustrious" professor that the only reason she let me in her class was because i was "sexy." she expected me to reciprocate, and when i didn't, she decided she didn't want to work with me because she was "too busy."

there's also the case of another "extremely busy" and "illustrious" prof. who refused and refuses to submit grades on time. usually it is because she is, again, just "too busy" to grade our papers, but a few years ago a new article appeared from her that had liberally borrowed from one of those ungraded papers written by an underadvised and mostly ignored grad student. after she published her work, she had the audacity to give him a low grade and tell him he was a bad writer.

but i really could go on and on. i have too many examples of the opposite of gradgrind's complaints, and given my experience in the academy, i just have to laugh at hers, and try not to sound so bitter.