A PhD Examined: Advisor and Mentor Relationships

What I Learned from My Advisors and Why I Wish I Had a Mentor

9 min readOct 6, 2024

The most influential person on your grad school career will be your advisor. This may not be the case if you are pursuing a non-thesis master’s degree as you probably won’t have an advisor, but it may be worth reading this article nevertheless since you will be getting a boss someday. The benefits of cultivating a good relationship with your advisor are twofold: you get a better experience in grad school and you give yourself a chance to learn a lot from your advisor (about technical and non-technical matters).

My Experience

In my grad school career, I’ve had two advisors, one for my master’s thesis and one for my doctoral dissertation. I learned a lot from both of them. One big thing they both had in common is their management approach. They were both senior professors who had a lot of students and worked on diverse research topics so they only managed big-picture issues with their students. They trusted the students to manage themselves and handle the day-to-day details of their work. This was the first lesson I learned from them: I had to make my own way and stay motivated.

Each of my advisors had his own quirks as well. One of them was always calm and unfazed, even when it seemed things weren’t going very well. The other one had an incredible zest for life and wasn’t afraid to show that to his students. One of them cared deeply about students’ personal well-being and organized regular social gatherings for our research group. The other one let himself get informal at times and helped put me at ease when I was meeting with him.

I learned many things from my advisors, but here are some of the non-technical lessons that stuck with me:

Patience and resilience are great qualities to have. It’s good to realize that most things one worries about tend to not be as bad as imagination makes them.
Never let your work make you forget to enjoy life and all the other wonderful things it has to offer.
Never stop learning (both professors were constantly learning new things from the research their students were doing).
It’s important to be flexible and ready to adapt to whatever life throws your way. If things don’t go according to plan, change the plan and make the best of the new situation.
Your boss is a flawed person too. They will have moments of doubt, of anger, of unreason. Allow them these moments and don’t hold that against them.

I think at its best, the student-advisor relationship can last a lifetime and has so many wonderful things to offer besides only the mutually-beneficial relationship of academic research.

Types of Advisor

Even though my personal experience was with only two advisors, I have come into contact with many professors who advised students of their own. I heard stories from my friends about their own advisors. The clear pattern that emerged to me is that graduate advisors tend to fall in one of two camps:

The micro manager
The big-picture manager

Typically, but not exclusively, micro managers tend to be younger professors. The younger professors are usually still trying to apply for tenure and need a very strong track record of producing publications and advising grad students. For these reasons, they tend to work their students at a very high pace and expect them to be producing output all the time. If your style of work fits with this type of management, you will thrive with such an advisor.

I know people who finished their PhD program in less than 4 years with such professors, which is a record duration. The downside? They almost never had a full weekend off where they weren’t working. This kind of work pace takes a physical and an emotional toll on you and, if you’re not cut out for it, can lead to burnout which is catastrophic to both life and work.

I find what works best with micro managers is being very organized and setting clear boundaries. If you manage your time well and minimize distractions, you can get a lot of meaningful work done during the work day and still be able to find time to relax in the evening. You can then set the expectation that you don’t respond to email outside of work hours, for example. A reasonable professor should respect that, as long as you’re getting the work they expect from you done on time.

On the other hand, big-picture managers are usually older, more established professors. They tend to have larger research groups and lots of other responsibilities, and therefore don’t have the time to micro-manage their students. This was my experience with both of my advisors. I definitely had a more relaxed time than my friends who had more hands-on advisors. The tradeoff of course is that it took me longer to finish my program (I needed 6 years for my PhD program). The best way to manage work with such an advisor is to set artificial deadlines for yourself to stay motivated. Even better, commit to these deadlines with your advisor: say “I’ll have this ready by next week” even if your advisor doesn’t require it.

There are also advisor types who are completely toxic and if you’re unfortunate enough to have to work with one of them, you may seriously want to consider switching to a different advisor if and when your situation allows:

Advisors with big egos who are very sensitive and completely immune to any criticism and contradiction from their students
Advisors with anger management issues so bad they yell at their students in public
Advisors with no personal boundaries who have no trouble calling a student on their cell phone at 3am or stopping by their house
Advisors who encourage and foster a toxic environment of competition between students and give preferential treatment to students who are “better”.

Traps and Pitfalls

Over the years I have made mistakes in dealing with my advisors and seen others make them too. I want to bring them up here to help others avoid them.

One big mistake is not setting clear boundaries with your advisor. It’s easy to fall into the trap of accepting every task you’re given because you want to impress your advisor and show that you’re a hard worker. In reality, this is a sure-fire way of getting overloaded, not accomplishing much, and giving your advisor the opposite impression.

Unless you’re willing to forego leisure activities like eating and sleeping, you will have to turn down your advisor for some requests. The trick is to learn to say ‘no’ correctly. You don’t want to seem like you’re rejecting work because you’re being lazy. If you are really organized with your time and have a clear view of your responsibilities and commitments, it’s easy to know when a new task would over-burden you. You can then reply to the request by saying: “Does task take priority over projects X and Y? Because if I work on it now, one of them would have to be delayed.” This kind of answer will put things in perspective for your advisor and hopefully also demonstrate that you’re organized and have your priorities straight.

Another mistake that’s all too easy to make is forgetting that your advisor is human. Don’t approach them with a request after they’ve had a long and exhausting meeting; pick the right time when they’re in a good mood. If they suggest a technical approach that you know won’t work, don’t bluntly tell them that they’re wrong. Again, you have to approach things more tactfully. If you tried this approach already, show them results and explain why you think this is not the way to go. If you hadn’t, commit to at least giving it a cursory try and show them your results in the next meeting. If you know the approach won’t work for theoretical reasons, patiently explain these reasons. It helps to talk through your thought process: “I used to think the same thing until I realized that theorem ABC contradicts it for such reason…”

The final point is kind of the opposite of the previous one. Don’t forget that your advisor is expecting to learn from you. If they already knew everything about your topic of research, they would have carried it out without your help. They are expecting you to correct them at some point and demonstrate that you’re building knowledge about your field and your area of research.

Mentoring

Mentoring is another great if more informal relationship that you can have in grad school and throughout your career as well. Your mentor can be a peer or a superior, but shouldn’t be your advisor. Preferably, they also shouldn’t be any other professor you work closely on research with. Good candidates would be friendly senior students (in your department or another one) or professors who taught you classes that you found interesting or inspiring.

A mentor should ideally provide career guidance and maybe emotional support during your grad school journey. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the foresight to choose a mentor for my PhD program. I did have some impromptu mentoring-type relationships with some of my more senior friends, but nothing that was continuous and long-lasting. One of these relationships actually gave me the push I needed to finish my dissertation work, all thanks to the guidance of a friend of mine who had just finished his own PhD program. I’m now trying to more intentionally find mentors in my professional career and have found it to be a really fruitful relationship.

I’m writing this section to encourage you to take advantage of this as early in your career as possible because it has the potential to accelerate your learning and help you avoid pitfalls and mistakes that others have made before. It can also be very rewarding for you to mentor younger students when you’re in a position to do so. I’ve often found that explaining something to someone helps me understand it much better myself. If you keep an open mind, you can even learn from people you mentor and find things out about yourself you wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

Concluding Thoughts

Advisors are similar to any kind of boss: you have to manage them so that they can better manage you. Make sure to take their specific personality into account, remember that they need to learn from you and avoid working with professors who have abusive or toxic personalities as much as you can. If you also have the chance to foster mentoring relationships, you should definitely take advantage of that to accelerate your own growth and that of others.