Previous: Doing Research
Up: How to Be a Good 
Next: Becoming Part of the Research Community
Advice for Advisors
In order to be a good advisor, you have to relate to your graduate
students as individuals, not just as anonymous research assistants
or tickets to tenure and co-authored publications. Work with all of
your graduate students, not just those whom you feel most comfortable
with, or who are interested in the problems you're most excited about.
Try to get to know your students personally and professionally. Help
them to identify their strengths and weaknesses, to build on the former,
and to work on overcoming the latter. Give them honest evaluations of their
work and performance: don't just assume that they know how they're
doing and what you think of them.
Read this paper and others like it with an eye towards discovering which
aspects of the graduate experience your students may be having trouble
with, or may not realize the importance of. Try to see the experience
from their perspective, which will be different for each student, because
each student has a different background and different talents and goals.
The roles of an advisor include:
- Guiding students' research: helping them to select a topic,
write a research proposal, perform the research, evaluate it
critically, and write the dissertation.
- Getting them involved in the wider research community: introducing
them to colleagues, collaborating on research projects with
them, funding conference travel, encouraging them to publish
papers, nominating them for awards and prizes.
- Finding financial support: providing research assistantships
or helping them to find fellowships, and finding summer positions.
- Finding a position after graduation: helping them to find and
apply for postdoctoral positions, faculty positions, and/or jobs
in industry; supporting their applications with strong recommendations;
and helping them to make contacts.
Although guiding your students' research is normally viewed as the central
task of an advisor, the other roles are also critical to their long-term
success. Section 
contains advice for students on
networking. You can help them in this process by funding and encouraging
travel to conferences and paper publication, and by introducing them
and talking about their research to colleagues.
-----------------------------------------------
finin@cmsc