Ingredients to a Good Advisor

1. Ingredients to a Good Advisor Joseph S. Francisco Mónica Martínez-Avilés Claudette M. Rosado-Reyes

2. What is an Advisor? • An educator who advises students in academic and personal matters. • One who advises another, especially officially or professionally: consultant, counselor, COACH, MENTOR.

3. Advisor: Mentor and Coach • Professional and personal relationship with advisors (in harmony and balance) can motivate students to work harder and provide a sense of belonging and direction. • MENTOR = deep personal interest, personally involved—a friend who cares about you and your long term development. • COACH = develops specific skills for the task, challenges and performance expectations at work.

4. Ingredients for a GOOD Advisor • HUMAN • Role model • Enthusiastic • Supportive • Respectful • Available • Organized • Open door policy • Good communication skills

5. Roles of an Advisor • Guiding students' research • Getting them involved in the wider research community • Finding financial support • Finding a position after graduation

6. Interacting with Students Tradeoffs that have to be made in each advisor-student relationship are: • Amount of direction • Self-directed/hands-off vs. ``spoon-feeding'' topics and research projects. • Personal interactions and psychological support • Do they want advice on career, family, and the like? Are you willing and able to give it, or to find someone else to advise them? • Amount and type of CONSTRUCTIVE criticism • General directions vs. specific suggestions for improvement. • Frequency of interaction • Daily vs. once a semester.

7. Improving the Atmosphere of Your Interactions • Meet over lunch or coffee to make interactions more relaxed and less stressful. • Strive to maintain an open, honest relationship. Respect your students as colleagues. • Tell them if you think they're asking for too much or too little time or guidance.

8. Advisor-Protégé Relationships • Find in your advisor someone who • Listen respectfully to your ideas, even when he/she disagrees with them • Believes in you under any circumstance, even when others might doubt your abilities • Share his/her own real-life experiences as a professional and as a person • EMPOWERS YOU • Help you develop your definition of success, since success can be achieved in a number of ways • Macro and micro manage with balance the culture of the work place

9. Issues for Women • Impostor Syndrome • Isolation • Low self-esteem • Harassment and discrimination • Unusual time pressures arising from family responsibilities • Lack of a support network • Lack of relevant experience

10. Women as Advisors and Mentors • Help other women in navigating their careers while guiding them in combining full-time careers with satisfying personal and family lives • Universities are urged to involve female faculty members in all aspects of university life • Leadership and decision-making roles

11. Female Advisors Empowering Relationships • Students learn that mutual empowering relationships mobilize the energies, resources and strengths of both people • Mitigate situations that bring about unspoken stereotypes of female vs. male roles • Psychosocial functions • Role Modeling • Model diversity in women’s lives today • Acceptance and Affirmation • Career Functions • Sponsorship, coaching and networking

12. Students Thoughts on the Matter… What to look for in an advisor: • Schedules regular meeting with individual students (as opposed to saying drop in anytime, which makes the student have to look for the professor and guess when he/she is around) • Actually shows up for scheduled meetings • Funds students • Encourages students to write and submit papers • Takes students to conferences (with a paper? without a paper?) • Introduces students to colleagues when at conferences • Points out workshops, interesting mailing lists, professional societies, and current publications of interest to the student • Gives the kind of help *you want/need* for finding research topics • Is currently up-to-date on research in field • Allows students to take proper credit for their work • Writes good letters of recommendation • Helps students find jobs (recommends people to contact? contacts people for the students?)

13. In Summary… 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. A good advisor will help their students to identify their strengths and weaknesses, to build on the former, and to work on overcoming the latter.

14. Sources • Graduate School and Advisor Advice http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wicse/advice.html • How to Be a Good Graduate Student|Advisor http://www.cs.umbc.edu/www/graduate/advice/advice.html • Women Mentoring Women http://www.apa.org/monitor/nov00/mentoring.html • Mentoring http://www.impactfactory.com