5 ms·

Can you elaborate a little on these devious ways?

by asdflkj 19y ago

timr 19y ago
The basic principle is that your advisor has control over everything, and you have control over nothing. Need an important collaboration for your next paper? That won't happen without your advisor's support. The same goes for access to specialized equipment or supplies (the budget can become very tight when your PI doesn't like you). At most schools, your PI also controls your funding; you can expect to TA more often if s/he doesn't like you. Your PI knows the weaknesses in your research and knowledge better than anyone, and can use this to your disadvantage. I've witnessed faculty who aggressively attack their own students during examinations (a truly disastrous scenario). More often, advisors will simply fail to defend their poor students from unfair attacks by other faculty. Departmental lectures, defenses, oral exams, etc. are remarkably subjective affairs, and one bad comment can snowball into an event that will add years to your time in grad school. Another very common tactic is for the PI to hand out the best research projects to favored students. There's nothing so demoralizing as watching a first-year grad student get an publication in Science or Nature (by being assigned to an already successful project), when you've worked for years on failing experiments. I've seen this happen too many times to count. Like I said, there's no way to list all of the different ways that your PI can make your life painful. It's just an extremely unbalanced, unregulated power relationship, and with any creativity at all, an advisor can use that power to destroy you.
- mechanical_fish 19y ago
  This is true. While PI's can't always fire you gracefully, they have many ways to make you wish they had fired you. So, ultimately, if your startup-company moonlighting starts to eat too much into graduate research time, you're going to have to fish or cut bait: Either keep your adviser happy, or take the necessary leave of absence. Note that (most) graduate advisers are not evil people. I suspect that many of them will quite happily grant you six months off to pursue your startup-company dreams... if the timing is right (hint: don't ask until just after the Nature article is submitted) and after they explain to you that your publication record and your graduation time will be set back by a year or more. Oh, and you probably won't be given the plum projects ever again, since your adviser knows that you have one eye on the door... those are the breaks of the game. One very special caution: Your adviser may try to enlist your help in his startup company. Be very wary of this situation, or of any potential adviser with a history of this. You want your adviser to be unambiguously focused on helping you graduate and get a better-paying job... or as unambiguously as possible, anyway.

Can you elaborate a little on these devious ways?

by asdflkj 19y ago

Can you elaborate a little on these devious ways?

timr 19y ago

The basic principle is that your advisor has control over everything, and you have control over nothing. Need an important collaboration for your next paper? That won't happen without your advisor's support. The same goes for access to specialized equipment or supplies (the budget can become very tight when your PI doesn't like you). At most schools, your PI also controls your funding; you can expect to TA more often if s/he doesn't like you. Your PI knows the weaknesses in your research and knowledge better than anyone, and can use this to your disadvantage. I've witnessed faculty who aggressively attack their own students during examinations (a truly disastrous scenario). More often, advisors will simply fail to defend their poor students from unfair attacks by other faculty. Departmental lectures, defenses, oral exams, etc. are remarkably subjective affairs, and one bad comment can snowball into an event that will add years to your time in grad school. Another very common tactic is for the PI to hand out the best research projects to favored students. There's nothing so demoralizing as watching a first-year grad student get an publication in Science or Nature (by being assigned to an already successful project), when you've worked for years on failing experiments. I've seen this happen too many times to count. Like I said, there's no way to list all of the different ways that your PI can make your life painful. It's just an extremely unbalanced, unregulated power relationship, and with any creativity at all, an advisor can use that power to destroy you.

mechanical_fish 19y ago
This is true. While PI's can't always fire you gracefully, they have many ways to make you wish they had fired you. So, ultimately, if your startup-company moonlighting starts to eat too much into graduate research time, you're going to have to fish or cut bait: Either keep your adviser happy, or take the necessary leave of absence. Note that (most) graduate advisers are not evil people. I suspect that many of them will quite happily grant you six months off to pursue your startup-company dreams... if the timing is right (hint: don't ask until just after the Nature article is submitted) and after they explain to you that your publication record and your graduation time will be set back by a year or more. Oh, and you probably won't be given the plum projects ever again, since your adviser knows that you have one eye on the door... those are the breaks of the game. One very special caution: Your adviser may try to enlist your help in his startup company. Be very wary of this situation, or of any potential adviser with a history of this. You want your adviser to be unambiguously focused on helping you graduate and get a better-paying job... or as unambiguously as possible, anyway.