4 ms·

Serious question, how much does your Ph.D. advisor actually matter? I would think that the fact that scientific findings are published for everyone to read woul

by c3534l 10y ago

Serious question, how much does your Ph.D. advisor actually matter? I would think that the fact that scientific findings are published for everyone to read would imply that a person gets more of their knowledge from the common pool than the teachers they worked with. So basically I'm asking if these 24 families are actually meaningful in some way, or just an arbitrary grouping.

roel_v 10y ago
Only a bit for the 'look who I published with' factor, but a lot when it comes to teaching how to get published, how to do efficient research and work ethic in general. Unfortunately it's almost impossible to know up front how your relationship with your advisor will play out.
semi-extrinsic 10y ago
The sad truth is that it matters quite a bit for getting your papers into a good journal. It's just human nature (may even be subconscious) that reviewers are a bit kinder on a paper with a Harvard professor as the last author than one with a professor from the University of Southern Mississippi. Some journals have tried double-blinded peer review, but it's difficult to do well. You have to remove important bits from the paper, like "this builds on our previous study [3]" or "our software has previously been verified and validated, see [6]".
- tachyonbeam 10y ago
  Furthermore, people in the field kind of know who is working on what. No amount of editing will allow you to anonymize that.
denzil_correa 10y ago
A recommendation from an influential professor can help you get ahead in the queue for competitive positions.
xapata 10y ago
Quite meaningful. You can observe large differences of opinion in some fields that carry on from advisor to student. Take "freshwater" vs "saltwater" economics for example.
- alimw 10y ago
  Even in a field you might think "opinion-free" (like Mathematics) I'm sure there are big differences in approach.
  - posterboy 10y ago
    At least with regards to naming, reading nLab I thought the lemmas with ambiguous names for different concepts was rather unfortunate.
sn41 10y ago
Mostly, your initial years as an independent researcher will be spent working on problems that you had worked on during your doctorate degree. So in most cases, the Ph. D advisor tends to have a lot of influence both in the topic and the style of your research. There are also many people who end up not working at all in actuality with their advisors, they end up working with fellow grad students etc. In none of the cases are they from a common pool as you suggest. I think there is a lot of "school" philosophy in mathematics. Most productive groups tend to work on the same topics : analysis, algebra, number theory, probability etc. in the case of Soviet Union, for example, but not many on combinatorics.
rjtobin 10y ago
Most of the other replies focus on the unfortunate (and valid) political aspects: that having an important advisor helps your career via contacts and higher likelihood of being published in top journals. But I don't think this is in the spirit of the question asked, which seems to be about whether someone's advisor has an impact on the sort of work they do (in terms of 'flavor' instead of academic impact). Definitely the advisor usually has a big role here. Even within a given subfield, the sort of problems one decides to tackle is a very subjective thing, and the sort of problems your advisor works on / presents to you has a big influence on this. Then personal taste gets mixed in, and you get a fairly unique brand which then influences your own students and so forth (in a vaguely "genetic" way). And anecdotally, I've heard so often from professors about how their advisor's take on mathematics has influenced their own, so it does seems to be a factor. Honestly though it seems a bit dubious that these 24 "families" share anything apart from their common ancestor ~500 years ago. If I'm an descendent of Leibniz and you are a descendent of d'Alembert, I don't think there are any interesting qualities about our research that we could guess from just that information. To use the analogy implicit in the article, the "genes" have all become uniformly distributed through the population by now.
- vidarh 10y ago
  As an example of "flavor" (picked because it's a field I have a particular interest in; with people I've "followed" peripherally for many years): Former CTO of Mozilla, Andreas Gal, who wrote TraceMonkey, had professor Michael Franz as advisor. Gal's thesis was on tracing JITs. Michael Franz had Niklaus Wirth as advisor. Franz' thesis was on JITs - he contributed a technique called Semantic Dictionary Encoding, which was added to Oberon to allow architecture independent binaries. (Franz' thesis pre-dates the public release of Java by two years). Niklaus Wirth, obviously having a long history of compilers behind him. Presumably that's quite unavoidable - most of the dissertations of Wirth's PhD students I've seen are on compiler technology, for obvious reasons: if you wanted to study under Wirth badly enough to in many cases move to a different country in order to do so, presumably odds were good that's where your interests were. Franz even declined a Fulbright Scholarship in order to continue studying under Wirth. He then went on to continue work on code generation in various forms at UC Irvine - presumably most people, like Gal, seeking him out for a PhD would be people interested in the same areas. Of course you will then be influenced - after all you hopefully don't seek out an adviser to ignore their advice...
kkylin 10y ago
This is an excellent question. I think it can actually matter a lot, at least in some cases. (Disclosure: I am on the faculty of a research university, and of course I don't want to think I'm wasting my time or my students' time. :-) There are a couple reasons. One, as mentioned by other posters, is that the advisor can have a lot of influence on choosing good problems to work on; in my field (applied mathematics), it can be tempting for a bright student to focus excessively on interesting but narrow technical problems, or on chasing flashy things that have little depth or substance. Second, precisely because of how much material is published these days, beginners need a guide to the field. For whatever it's worth, a good advisor's job (I think) is to put new findings in context, which is increasingly hard to do on one's own. In short, one significant way in which the advisor can have tremendous influence has more to do with decision-making, and not so much fact-finding (although sometimes that is important too).

by c3534l 10y ago

roel_v 10y ago

Only a bit for the 'look who I published with' factor, but a lot when it comes to teaching how to get published, how to do efficient research and work ethic in general. Unfortunately it's almost impossible to know up front how your relationship with your advisor will play out.

semi-extrinsic 10y ago

The sad truth is that it matters quite a bit for getting your papers into a good journal. It's just human nature (may even be subconscious) that reviewers are a bit kinder on a paper with a Harvard professor as the last author than one with a professor from the University of Southern Mississippi. Some journals have tried double-blinded peer review, but it's difficult to do well. You have to remove important bits from the paper, like "this builds on our previous study [3]" or "our software has previously been verified and validated, see [6]".

tachyonbeam 10y ago
Furthermore, people in the field kind of know who is working on what. No amount of editing will allow you to anonymize that.

denzil_correa 10y ago

A recommendation from an influential professor can help you get ahead in the queue for competitive positions.

xapata 10y ago

Quite meaningful. You can observe large differences of opinion in some fields that carry on from advisor to student. Take "freshwater" vs "saltwater" economics for example.

alimw 10y ago
Even in a field you might think "opinion-free" (like Mathematics) I'm sure there are big differences in approach.
- posterboy 10y ago
  At least with regards to naming, reading nLab I thought the lemmas with ambiguous names for different concepts was rather unfortunate.

sn41 10y ago

Mostly, your initial years as an independent researcher will be spent working on problems that you had worked on during your doctorate degree. So in most cases, the Ph. D advisor tends to have a lot of influence both in the topic and the style of your research. There are also many people who end up not working at all in actuality with their advisors, they end up working with fellow grad students etc. In none of the cases are they from a common pool as you suggest. I think there is a lot of "school" philosophy in mathematics. Most productive groups tend to work on the same topics : analysis, algebra, number theory, probability etc. in the case of Soviet Union, for example, but not many on combinatorics.

rjtobin 10y ago

Most of the other replies focus on the unfortunate (and valid) political aspects: that having an important advisor helps your career via contacts and higher likelihood of being published in top journals. But I don't think this is in the spirit of the question asked, which seems to be about whether someone's advisor has an impact on the sort of work they do (in terms of 'flavor' instead of academic impact). Definitely the advisor usually has a big role here. Even within a given subfield, the sort of problems one decides to tackle is a very subjective thing, and the sort of problems your advisor works on / presents to you has a big influence on this. Then personal taste gets mixed in, and you get a fairly unique brand which then influences your own students and so forth (in a vaguely "genetic" way). And anecdotally, I've heard so often from professors about how their advisor's take on mathematics has influenced their own, so it does seems to be a factor. Honestly though it seems a bit dubious that these 24 "families" share anything apart from their common ancestor ~500 years ago. If I'm an descendent of Leibniz and you are a descendent of d'Alembert, I don't think there are any interesting qualities about our research that we could guess from just that information. To use the analogy implicit in the article, the "genes" have all become uniformly distributed through the population by now.

vidarh 10y ago
As an example of "flavor" (picked because it's a field I have a particular interest in; with people I've "followed" peripherally for many years): Former CTO of Mozilla, Andreas Gal, who wrote TraceMonkey, had professor Michael Franz as advisor. Gal's thesis was on tracing JITs. Michael Franz had Niklaus Wirth as advisor. Franz' thesis was on JITs - he contributed a technique called Semantic Dictionary Encoding, which was added to Oberon to allow architecture independent binaries. (Franz' thesis pre-dates the public release of Java by two years). Niklaus Wirth, obviously having a long history of compilers behind him. Presumably that's quite unavoidable - most of the dissertations of Wirth's PhD students I've seen are on compiler technology, for obvious reasons: if you wanted to study under Wirth badly enough to in many cases move to a different country in order to do so, presumably odds were good that's where your interests were. Franz even declined a Fulbright Scholarship in order to continue studying under Wirth. He then went on to continue work on code generation in various forms at UC Irvine - presumably most people, like Gal, seeking him out for a PhD would be people interested in the same areas. Of course you will then be influenced - after all you hopefully don't seek out an adviser to ignore their advice...

kkylin 10y ago

This is an excellent question. I think it can actually matter a lot, at least in some cases. (Disclosure: I am on the faculty of a research university, and of course I don't want to think I'm wasting my time or my students' time. :-) There are a couple reasons. One, as mentioned by other posters, is that the advisor can have a lot of influence on choosing good problems to work on; in my field (applied mathematics), it can be tempting for a bright student to focus excessively on interesting but narrow technical problems, or on chasing flashy things that have little depth or substance. Second, precisely because of how much material is published these days, beginners need a guide to the field. For whatever it's worth, a good advisor's job (I think) is to put new findings in context, which is increasingly hard to do on one's own. In short, one significant way in which the advisor can have tremendous influence has more to do with decision-making, and not so much fact-finding (although sometimes that is important too).