Your relationship with your advisor is key to your happiness as a graduate student. An advisor with whom you have a good relationship will advocate for you, share their enthusiasm and ideas with you, help you maneuver new and difficult research challenges, introduce you to their colleagues at scientific meetings, help find funding for you, encourage you to excel in your field, help land you a good postdoc position, and write an invaluable letter of recommendation. In fact, a good relationship can last your entire career, benefiting both you and your advisor. You may enter graduate school as a trainee, but you leave as your advisor's colleague.

But professors are not taught how to be good advisors, and some may not even try. Moreover, there is no such thing as the perfect advisor. "People are people after all," says Peter Uden, professor and graduate program director in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (UMASS). Plus, he says, "it's a two-way street." As with any relationship, problems are bound to arise and, when they do, knowing how to deal with them can be vital to your professional development.

One of the most important lessons learned by one recent PhD is that "you need to learn how to pick your battles." Sarah (not her real name) picked an advisor who she really liked. His research interests matched hers, she had tremendous respect for him as a scientist, and his work and research style was compatible with hers. For her first two years, everything was fine. In fact, she couldn't have imagined a better advisor, she says.

When it came time to publish her first paper on which she was first author, she encountered some nasty resentment—not from her advisor but her advisor's spouse who was also a professor in the department and, as Sarah describes it, very jealous of both her husband's and her husband's students' success. Even though her advisor and his spouse had their own research programs, they worked on about half of their projects together, including the one that led to Sarah's first publication. Sarah had clearly done most of the work on the paper. She had supervised the lab work, analyzed the data, and wrote the paper: "I basically did all of it, except for the original planning of the experiment. We all sat down together and thought that out. From the beginning, it was pretty clear that [my advisor's spouse] was just being included and wasn't really essential. Of course I didn't care in the beginning. I was ecstatic just to be involved and know that I was going to have my name on a paper."

Gradually, however, Sarah started to realize that her advisor's spouse was going to be a problem. The spouse told Sarah that Sarah didn't deserve to be first author and that she should "pay her dues" before she started earning so much credit for her work. The spouse also kept Sarah from being assigned to a new TA position in an upper-level course that Sarah was clearly the most qualified for. But Sarah was afraid to talk to her advisor because, other than the spouse, things were going well and she was still, in the end, coming out ahead. She was publishing, making all the requisite connections, and had a stellar postdoc lined up. She decided it wasn't worth risking her relationship with her advisor or her professional reputation by rocking the boat. "Maybe because I was older and had enough confidence to bat it away and think of it more as her problem and not mine, I did," Sarah says. "But it was definitely a thorn in my side, and in the beginning it made me almost doubt myself." Her advisor should have been aware of what was going on, she said, and on some level she thinks he was. But he obviously didn't know how to deal with it. Other than that, he was a terrific advisor, Sarah says. "We were very compatible in a lot of ways, and that made it easy."

Indeed, the most common problem that students have with their advisors is "personal incompatibility, with either the goals or style," says Uden. Of course, the way to avoid this is to pick an advisor with whom you are compatible to begin with. It's rare for a person's compatibility with their advisor to change over the course of time, he says. Sandy Wortham, a PhD student in the chemistry department at the University of Vermont and graduate student representative to the university's advisory committee, agrees. He attributes his good relationship with his advisor to the fact that he had worked for several years before starting graduate school, and so he had more perspective, knew what he wanted, and was able to pick somebody with whom he knew he was compatible.

But compatibility is only half of the equation. Equally important is "communication, communication, communication," Uden stresses. Ideally you should be comfortable enough to talk with your advisor about problems or conflicts as they arise. Wortham agrees: "If you are not a clear communicator, it can become a problem." Wortham feels comfortable enough with his advisor to talk about both social and professional concerns. However, he knows many other students who have had problems with their advisors, mostly due to lack of communication or, as in Sarah's case, an advisor's lack of sensitivity to an issue.

If you don't feel comfortable talking to your advisor or they are not willing or able to work with you in solving a problem, talk with other grad students, postdocs, or faculty who you trust can give you a more objective perspective on the situation. Decide whether the issue is something that you can let go or a serious problem that is hindering your progress and keeping you from achieving your goals.

If it is a serious problem, then depending on what the issue is and how issues are generally dealt with in your department, you might seek out the advice of the chair, the director of the graduate student program, or the members of your dissertation committee. In the chemistry department at UMASS, where there are about 100 graduate students, "we know what everyone's doing, so if necessary we can triage," says Uden. As the graduate program director, he maintains an open door policy for consultation.

Again, depending on what the issue is, the student counseling center on campus is another good resource for handling problems. Their services are usually free and always confidential. Talking with a counselor doesn't mean that there is anything "wrong" with you. Many students use the counseling center and for good reason. It can be tremendously helpful to get an outside perspective from somebody who is trained to help people understand and achieve better relationships.

As a last resort, you can always switch advisors. About 10 percent of the more than 4,000 PhD candidates, including 574 chemistry students, who were surveyed in a recent national study on doctoral education reported that they had switched advisors.¹ Speaking from personal experience, if you need to switch, do it. During my first semester of grad school, I realized that my research interests were actually very different from those of my chosen advisor. At first, I thought that I would have to leave school and reapply elsewhere the following year. But my original advisor encouraged me to talk with another faculty member with whom he thought I would be more compatible. I felt pretty bad for a while, feeling as though I had rejected my original advisor. But both he and I got over it soon enough. In fact, he ended up writing one of my letters of recommendation and is still an important professional contact.

Some people might caution against switching, arguing that it stirs up too much conflict and bad blood. But remember, it is your degree. You need to respect your own goals and needs. Moreover, it's probably better to switch before more serious problems arise and you end up severing a relationship with somebody who could become a future colleague.

Leslie Pray is a freelance science writer based in Leverett, MA. She has written extensively on the educational and professional development of grad students and postdocs for Science's Next Wave and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She is also a regular contributor to The Scientist. Leslie earned several national awards from scientific societies in recognition of her accomplishments as a graduate student. She received her Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Vermont.

¹ Golde, C.M. & Dove, T.M. 2001. "At Cross Purposes: What the Experiences of Doctoral Students Reveal About Doctoral Education" (http://www.phd-survey.org). Philadelphia, PA: A report prepared for The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Related Resources

Stanford Graduate Student Handbook

Caltech Graduate Student Handbook

Re-envisioning the PhD (a project sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts)