What do Advisors do?

—reflections from Kelli Talaska (UM PhD 2010)

From talking to others, I know that many graduate students (and advisors!) don’t fully understand the role of the advisor.  Here are some things advisors do; note that of course, not all advisors do all of these things. The first couple are probably the most obvious, but there are many less obvious ways advisors and other mentors can help you succeed.

  • Advisors help you find appropriate problems to work on.  This can take many forms/styles, such as:
    • The advisor has a bank of problems they have collected and think are appropriate for graduate students.  They assign or match you to a problem somehow or have you experiment with several and go from there.
    • The advisor has a rough idea of an area that would be a good fit for you and helps you select reading, from which you develop further avenues of exploration.
    • The advisor puts you to work on some project they are working on.
    • The advisor helps to connect students with other students, postdocs, or visitors for collaborative projects.
    • You already have an idea of what you want to work on and your advisor helps you flesh it out.
  • Advisors give you feedback and tools to improve your research.
    • Largely accomplished through regular or irregular meetings, phone calls, emails.  Some advisors will want to meet weekly to check in even if you haven’t made much progress, and some will be fine with meeting more sporadically.  It may also change over the course of your advising relationship — perhaps you meet frequently early on, but less frequently once you are deeply into the writing stage.
    • Advisors may suggest coursework or reading that will teach you specific techniques or ways of thinking.
    • Advisors can try to answer your math questions, perhaps pointing you to other resources and mathematicians.
    • Some advisors give very extensive feedback and editing on drafts of papers or your thesis.  This can dramatically improve your writing, in two key aspects. 1) When you are a student, your advisor likely has a much better picture of how your research fits into a much larger body of work.  This is especially important in writing abstracts and later, if you apply to academic jobs, your research statement. 2) Getting small details right, like naming variables sensibly and sticking to conventions in your field, makes your papers more readable, and thus more accessible to a wider audience.
    • Advisors can help you figure out where to submit your work.  They can help you figure out which journals are looking for papers at the level you have produced, and ideally, they also have a sense for which journals have better turnaround times, especially when things are time sensitive (e.g. with job application deadlines approaching).
  • Advisors help you network and present your work to others.
    • Your advisor can introduce you to seminar visitors and to other mathematicians at conferences.  It’s really great if they can arrange these introductions over tea or dinner, setting you up to have more in depth interactions.
    • You advisor can talk up your work to their colleagues and help arrange for you to give talks in seminars or at conferences.  This makes a huge difference when you apply to academic jobs.
    • Before you give talks, your advisor can critique practice talks and help you find ways to improve your presentations.
    • Your advisor can help you find funding to travel to such seminars and conferences.
  • Advisors can give advice on teaching in addition to research.
  • Advisors can help you navigate tricky situations of all sorts, such as warning you about mathematicians who have exhibited exist or racist behaviors.
  • Advisors will write letters of recommendation for fellowships, post-doctoral positions, and more.
  • Advisors don’t usually stop advising when you graduate!  Obviously, this is a time when you take on a more independent role, but it’s still fine to ask for advice and letters from time to time.

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kesmith@umich.edu

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