When I first advised PhD students, I was determined to be more accessible than my advisor.
Where my advisor had been a bit more arms-length & protective of his time, I kept an open door policy & didn’t protect my time well at all.
Where my advisor made sure that I was ok, I wanted to be a resource for my students to manage the stress of a #PhDprogram.
Where my #advisor enforced quality in topic selection & research design, I wanted to teach students how to manage the publication process.
Like a wayward son, I wanted to be different, yet the same, as my advisor, e.g., focus on quality yet hold my students close.
That was a mistake.
I was confounding advising with friendship.
What is advising?
Advising is helping PhD students plan & build the skills required to fulfill that plan.
Like friendship, successful advising requires mutual trust and support.
Unlike friendship, successful advising requires the ability to make dispassionate decisions about ability, performance, & completing a degree program.
There is a power difference.
Advisors should not be friends; they should be stewards of students.
What mistake did I make as an early career advisor?
I did not realize that my advisor’s arms-length style made it easier to make the judgment calls needed to be an effective advisor.
As I was close to my students, I had a hard time seeing the limits on their ability & performance.
For example, when a paper was badly written, I fixed it. Rather than advising, I was collaborating as a friend & peer.
This created a ripple effect - where students didn’t receive the mentoring they needed - that may have helped them make better decisions about where to put time, what to ask for help to improve, and ultimately, while our ‘friendship’ made them feel better, slowed down the rate they grew as scholars e.g., they weren’t getting timely tough advice.
So what did I do?
I became more like my advisor.
While I kept an open door, I demanded students submit progressively higher quality work - as the project unfolded.
Where I still worked with students, I emotionally distanced from the outcomes - because it was their work & they needed to take ownership.
As part of that, I pushed early career students to own the more easily learned elements of scholarship- the method - & execute them as a first step in advising.
And took time to show them how to think through the entire paper - the story - & craft a manuscript as a second step.
Rather than fixing problems, I pushed the onus of doing so onto students - as a third step.
While not easy for me bc I like to help, this forced me to act as an advisor, evaluate progress and encourage independence.
Today. I am still passionate about my PhD students & compassionate about their challenges.
But, I take care to monitor and advise & wait for friendship, if appropriate, after the dissertation defense.
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