The frustrating grad student (by an example of the species)

In light of my last post, which continued my somewhat dubious tradition of trashing Chronicle columns (about which I sometimes feel guilty, because I acknowledge that writing such columns isn't easy - although you know, people call me on it when I write troubling or stupid things, and besides, Chronicle columnists are getting paid for their insights, so I don't feel quite as bad as I might otherwise) - in any case, I thought I would say a little bit about the very real problem of frustrating grad students, based on a sample of one - myself.

Semi-regular commenter af noted in response to my last post that Gradgrind's column

did prompt me to think about the frustration that must be felt by even people like my own fabulous adviser. Think about how often we ordinary undergraduate faculty get frustrated with our students, and how great it feels when someone finally works hard, and gets it. If most of my teaching energy were dedicated to just a few students a year, or ten or fifteen students in a five-year period, and a lot of them dropped out of academia or got worse jobs than they could because of their spouses (usually husbands) or kids (usually true more of women), had big emotional problems, were difficult to get along with to the point where it presented problems in the job search, or were lazy or overcautious in their research - it'd be really tough. All of these things have happened to my adviser and other advisers in my PhD program, and though they don't complain, this got me to thinking about how hard it could be for them.

While I don't supervise graduate students, I do want to acknowledge the frustration that it must frequently inspire. Undergraduates can be frustrating enough, and our relationships with them last, at the most, usually no more than four years. My graduate advisor was stuck with me in one way or another for ten (yes, ten) years. I'm sure that over that length of time frustrations are only magnified (although hopefully the rewards are also concomitantly more satisfying). I also want to acknowledge that I cannot fully understand those frustrations without being on the advisorly side of them.

That being said, I can look back now on my own graduate career with a little bit of critical distance, and so doing, I wince at my own failings as a student.

So, in what ways was I frustrating?

First and probably centrally, I was incredibly intimidated by my big-name advisor. On the one hand, I think that she has a relatively intimidating demeanor. (For instance, you'd visit her in her office to discuss something - a paper, plans for the following semester, whatever - and you'd say your piece, and she would sit. And look at you. And sit. And look. And the silence would stretch out. And you'd start worrying about what you said wrong or what you should have said or what you didn't say, and just as when the professor sits and waits in class, you'd rush into the breach to say SOMETHING to break the silence. And then feel like you'd turned into a blithering idiot. It was a little unnerving. Eventually, you learned just to wait until she wanted to say something - if she was okay with the silence, then let there be silence - but initially it freaked me out.)

On the other hand, I was also easily intimidated. I went straight to grad school from undergrad. As a kid, I had always been shy around adults, and I hadn't really shed that by the time I started grad school. My undergrad profs were mostly distant authority figures to me, not human beings (I was really startled when I had one prof tell me he had had no idea what to say about one book we read in class [it was a common syllabus across three sections so he hadn't picked that book], because profs knew everything! And I was equally surprised when my undergrad thesis advisor told me she worried enough about missing class that she set three alarms - why would a prof worry about teaching? It was just what they did!). And because I hadn't worked fulltime between undergrad and grad school, I didn't get any experience working on at least a semi-equal footing with people older than me - my whole life, adults had been people very much further up a social hierarchy than I was. While I don't mean to suggest I should have been able to speak to my advisor as a peer (I wasn't her peer!), I would have been easier to deal with if I had possessed more confidence, socially and intellectually, and hadn't seen myself so much in the role of a supplicant.

I mean, it can't be easy to advise someone who sits dumbfounded by nerves every time she appears in your office.

Especially when that person has worked so hard to hide those nerves and cultivate a poised and unruffled appearance that you have no idea if she actually cares about this work at all, or indeed, what she is thinking about anything.

Second, partly because I was so intimidated, but also because of the experience I did/didn't have in doing original research, I was quite bad at articulating what I was thinking about my current work. If asked how my work was going, I'd say fine. Full stop. I never figured out that such conversations with faculty were an opportunity for self-promotion (in a tasteful, modest way) rather than mere politenesses. I never knew quite how to describe what I was doing - I was reading stuff, and when I'd read enough stuff, I would write stuff. What else was there to say? Therefore, I'm quite sure that when there were weaknesses in my work (and oh, there were weaknesses in my work!), it was very hard for her to pinpoint what exactly I was doing that I shouldn't, or what I wasn't doing that I should. I suspect that discussing my work with me often felt like throwing darts at an invisible board.

Finally, because of my intimidation and inarticulateness, when things weren't going well (or even when they were), I would pull the grad student vanishing act. This wasn't hard - for a variety of reasons, in the best of circumstances I could go about my business without running into my advisor. So it wasn't so much that I skulked through the hallways or avoided any particular campus spaces actively to avoid her - I just didn't make a point of going to see her. (Which also meant that I didn't have to work actively to avoid her and therefore become aware of my avoidance - I'd just occasionally think that gee, I hadn't spoken with Advisor for quite a while... and then would go back to my latest dissertation-writing block.)

To be fair (to me), my vanishing act was also inspired by my family's mantra that no news is good news - the idea that in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we should assume everything is going well (we're a relatively uncommunicative bunch, my family). So it didn't really occur to me that without something specific to go on, my advisor would assume the worst. (This also bit me in the ass at Former College, I think, but that's a whole other story.) I was honestly surprised to find out that she was worried about my progress because she hadn't heard/seen anything from me. I shouldn't have been surprised, of course, but I was. (I was kind of naive.)

In other words, my communication skills were crap in a variety of ways.

Looking back, I can see that these qualities, combined with my slow progress (medievalists take longer than those in some fields, but ten years is still slow - I was working full-time for the last two years of those ten, but yeah, slow), would have made me a frustrating student.

I have frustrations of my own with the advising experience, although they're probably as much about a mismatch of styles as anything else (communication is a two-way street), or else they're side effects of the typical structure of graduate education.

But I'm sure I wasn't an easy student. I don't think I was the most difficult out there - hey, my propensity to vanish meant that I wasn't very demanding! - but I wasn't a shining example of the student any advisor would love to work with.

That being said, I did finish, and I have been employed in tenure-track positions. I was successful at Rural Utopia, and whatever my problems with Former College, I don't think that in general (barring the one point I mention above) they have had anything to do with the frustrations I presented as a graduate student - because being a grad student is really not very much like being faculty. Gradgrind herself admits that graduate school is an "emotionally fraught time;" take away that particular emotional freight, and you have a very different person. (Being on the tenure track is emotionally fraught, too, but in a different way.) While I was frustrating as a grad student because of the personality traits/experience I brought to the table, those traits and experiences took on a different significance in grad school than they might have elsewhere. 

I have no idea what effect these frustrations have had on my advisor's view of graduate education. She may share some of Lagretta Gradgrind's disillusionment with training future scholars; I have no idea. But she has always seemed to have a clear sense of the external structures constraining students' behavior. She is well aware that plum research jobs don't always fall into her students' laps, not because they don't try enough or aren't qualified or were secretly deceiving her about their interest in R1 jobs, but because the job market is capricious (when her first doctoral student went on the job market, there was ONE medieval history job opening. ONE. Her student did get the position, but Advisor has no illusions about the possibilities for her students). She has never treated me as "less" than anyone else because I have worked at small teaching institutions. She has never considered someone who stepped back from academia for family reasons as "deceitful." I think she regrets it when someone leaves, because she believes that her students who finish are all qualified to hold jobs and she would like them to do so, but she recognizes that this is the student's decision, not hers. And she also recognizes that academia is not the most family-friendly profession. I do think she's somewhat disappointed when a student puts family before academia, but she does not characterize it as deceit.*

My point, I guess, is that the frustrations that individual grad students offer do not have to sour someone entirely on graduate education. Even if a graduate advisor decides that they no longer want to negotiate those frustrations - which is their prerogative, and frankly, understandable - I think it's important to recognize that those frustrations, however much they originate in the student's psyche, are the product of a specific professional and institutional culture, and not simply expressions of a student's poor moral fiber.

*At least, as far as any of us could tell. I think grad students can tell about this kind of thing. I should add that this description is based on my and my cohort's experience only.

Comments

[Dr. Moonbeam]

Yes. I think what irritated me most about Gradgrind's comments was that assumption of deceit -- as a kid, my parents taught us that lying was the worst thing you could do (white lies excepted) and that accusing someone of lying was almost equally as bad. What Gradgrind seemed not to realize is that there can be many reasons why her students might tell her they wanted R1 positions, and might even think they did, but could nevertheless be somewhat ambivalent or -- gasp! -- change their minds at some point in the process. Changing one's mind, or even being genuinely uncertain and thus going with the flow when doing otherwise can be risky, is in no way an indicator of poor moral fiber. Sheesh.

I suspect none of us are/were perfect grad students. I was also not terribly good at communicating (and still am not). And although I try to be more proactive about it now that I am on the other side of the desk, I do not always succeed -- in fact, I really need to email one of my MA students, who is theoretically writing a thesis but from whom I have heard nothing so far this semester. *sighs*

[SB]

Every grad student is frustrating in some way. And as a group they can be really frustrating; my personal frustration as an adviser of grad students at a 2nd tier institution is the unwillingness of many grad students to do what they would have to do to be basically qualified for the sorts of jobs they say they want. However, it's really central to the teacher/student relationship that the teacher doesn't insist that the student fit into his/her mold, and "Gradgrind" seems to be way overinvested in the success of her students. That kind of insistence on one career path isn't even appropriate in parent/child relationships, let alone looser mentoring relationships.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

SB, why do you think the grad students where you are are unwilling to do those things? Is it institutional culture, poor training prior to grad school, not really understanding the culture of academia (I used to work where undergrads who wanted to go to grad school thought it was like college, you should just go wherever was closest, rather than actually evaluate programs for their fitness for your interests, and it was really really REALLY hard to get them over this notion, because I was going against 21 or so years of educational culture), not really being capable of doing those things, laziness? I'm just curious.

[life_of_a_fool]

I agree that working with graduate students is a huge pain in the ass. I say that as someone who has and does work with masters level students, but mainly because of what a pain in the ass I know I was as a (long term) graduate student, for many similar reasons as you describe.

My main advisors were awesome, because they gave great advice, were patient, certainly seemed to respect my decisions and choices, and were not merely trying to churn out a newer version of themselves. The problem with the Grandgrind article, I think and as others have said, is that she seems to be relying on students' successes for her own sense of success and she takes any deviation from the one and true path to be deception (that strikes me as just weird). I suppose in a few instances that may be true, but more often than not it's much more likely a genuine reflection of the reality of academia and/or changing one's mind. That shouldn't come as any surprise as grad students learn more about academia and as people's lives and priorities change, especially when people start graduate school in their early - mid 20's, when most people go through many changes in life and perspective, independent of graduate school. That doesn't necessarily make it less frustrating and occasionally annoying from the perspective of an advisor, but for different reasons.

[Belle]

Advising is the most challenging part of my current position. I can do the academic side without too much trouble. But the other stuff; last week I had a student confess that he'd had an emotional breakdown and hadn't done his paper. Turns out he's in major crisis, on meds, the whole thing. But he is talking to me, not a professional counselor, and doesn't want to hear what I'm trying very gently to say. When he left, in came another, with a plea for help. Turns out he's having major transition issues, going from a non-academic field (musical theatre) to my own (history). As he noted, the study skills that always worked for him aren't now, and he wants it fixed.

My own advisors ranged from sucky to superb. And they were faced with a non-traditional, over-the-hill female student intent on doing a diss that didn't fit nicely into any of the academic niches. That experience keeps we working for my students; Gradgrind's bitching come from her own frustrations. But on the other side of the conversation, it would break my heart.

[af]

Hey, I'm famous! I don't have a blog so it's very exciting to see my comment right up there in your post. I wasn't really talking about the garden-variety grad student issues, like the ones you seem to have had (but of course, as a low-key, no news is good news person myself, I don't see those as big problems!) It was more the people who have regular meltdowns, can't meet any deadlines, etc. But yes, it is an emotionally fraught time, and we all deal with our emotionally fraughtedness in different ways.

[JaneB]

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, anywasy.

Sorry, didn't realise I had so much to say!

[New Kid on the Hallway]

af - I definitely understand what you mean about the students with constant meltdowns and an inability to meet ANY deadlines. I did know students like that - well, one particular shining example, anyway. It was frustrating even as a grad student to watch this person not produce anything, not because we thought they were getting away with anything, but because they really did seem to be wasting EVERYONE's time, and I think even as students we sympathized with the faculty for dealing with this person.

Maybe all of Gradgrind's students fell into this category, but I suspect not. ;-)

JaneB - thanks for your comment! I'm going to respond at a little more length in a post, fi that's not a problem.

[Ruviana]

I read that column too and I did find it annoying. My field is (like almost everyone's) extremely tight and when I got my job at a fairly undistinguished SLAC my advisor (lucky for me) was as thrilled as I was. I know the sadness too though. One of the first students I ever had as a TA,(Yikes! 22 years ago!), left in the middle (or end?) of writing his dissertation and now works in the entertainment industry. He got a shitload of money for research and did fascinating work and in a sense, it's "wasted"--someone who could have used the research funding, the work that won't even be published by UMI, sad. But his choice. It's that whole R1 mentality though. I NEVER wanted to be at one of those places--you have to work too hard, by which I mean all-consuming no time off kind of work and that's what most of the chronicle columns seem to value too, though James Lang (whose columns and book about teaching I really like) is at a SLAC. Anyway. I love coming here and am glad you've landed, at least temporarily on your feet.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Ruviana - thanks! And James Lang's Chronicle pieces are among the few I actually like. (He is unlikely to appear for dissection here.) ;-)

[SB]

IN answer to your question, I think it's because they don't really understand what goes into the kind of research that they are reading (and will eventually have to produce themselves) and because they often come from institutions where the extent of what their mentors do outside of contact hours is unclear to them. The "it's just like college" thing also extends into their work habits. The big issue in my field is languages--you need at least two, maybe three, and my institution is not in a position to demand that all the language be in place before they start. Which would be ok, if they would just learn the necessary languages when you told them to. Instead they don't learn the languages, miss essential primary or secondary sources (and this is in their seminar papers, we're not even talking theses or dissertations here), and then claim that these sources do not exist. Or (another pet peeve) they say "can you give me a good tip of a place to start reading on X" and you give them one, and then you get the paper and it's clear that they didn't bother to follow up your tip and that decision has negative consequences for the paper. I am not someone who think that the dissertating student needs to follow up every lead that I think is important in writing the dissertation. But during these training phases it is simply necessary to fill in these preparation holes. They show on the job market. And then students come back to us complaining that they are not getting interviews for the sorts of jobs they want. End of rant!

[Another Damned Medievalist]

Ok, despite the huge differences in their careers and personalities, and their experiences with our grandmother, it's amazing how they both have to at least seem that ability to draw boundaries in common.