I remember walking into my advisor’s office as an undergraduate, having been accepted to both Michigan and a school in Massachusetts, wondering how I would decide where to go to graduate school. I was incredibly naive. I did not know about my funding situation, yet had to have the faith that it would all work out. But by senior year of my undergraduate days, I knew what I wanted my doctoral work to look like, and so I also remember being completely upfront (with my now advisor) about what I wanted to pursue in graduate school—I said that what I wanted to do was both engineering, and social sciences and humanities…that I wanted to try to do something different. Experimental combustion chemistry and environmental activism and ethics? Sure! Since then, we have embarked on a truly enriching journey together. As you can imagine, though, things have taken different courses than initially anticipated. But those courses were mutually agreed upon. At the same time, my advisor has allowed me to explore things that I have wanted to, but very judiciously used her wisdom that has allowed me not to veer too far off course.
As I mentioned in my previous blog post, the student-advisor relationship is the most important in achieving a work-life balance (if a “balance” is needed at all). You may love Ann Arbor because you subconsciously take comfort in knowing that all is well with you and your advisor.
Many people come to graduate school thinking that they will be able to work on whatever they want, on something they are passionate about, only to find themselves bound to working on things that don’t really interest them. As someone who has constantly tried—and with the good grace of a beautiful advisor—and succeeded in a beautiful balance of interests, I believe the most important things between the student and the advisor are then an understanding of each other’s expectations, and honesty.
In conversing with other students that have similar interests in pursuing non-traditional doctoral degrees, I have found out that many of them started graduate school thinking that if they pleased their advisor over their first couple of years here by doing what their advisors wanted, then they would be able to walk into their advisor’s office one day and say, “Sir, I want to also work on another project that concerns not with engineering, but more with [insert other interest here].” At that point, however, expectations have been set up differently in the mind of your advisor. The advisor has likely charted out a course for you in his mind about what your Ph.D. work will look like, and likely aligned your Ph.D. with his interests. If you’ve never said anything about your different interests to your advisor, how would he know what you want and what makes you happy? Is it your fault or his?
But setting up the right expectations can happen only if there is honesty from the outset. And if it means that your honesty removes you from consideration in joining a lab group or working under someone, then so be it. You don’t want to be doing what you don’t want to do. At the risk of sounding fatalistic, things tend to work out for the best, especially for those of us that are privileged enough to be graduate students at the University of Michigan. If your advisor doesn’t have the same motives as you do, then your experience is likely not set up to be a fruitful one anyway.
Published in: Student Voices