Advice to Graduate Students

by Vibha Sazawal
PhD Candidate, Dept of Computer Science
University of Washington
based on speech given at PACW Forum on Mentoring, 18 Feb, 2003

The end product of your stay in graduate school is not your thesis. It's not your dissertation. The end product of your stay in graduate school is YOU.

Your goal in graduate school is to develop skills, gain experience, make connections, learn, do whatever it takes to BECOME someone who is capable of taking the next career steps that you want to take. Graduate school is about developing yourself. You are the most important artifact. Other artifacts, like the thesis, are just demonstrations of what YOU are capable.

If you accept that graduate school is about developing YOU, then the next step is to accept responsibility for your own development. You are the only one who knows what your goals are. But your advisors and mentors are your best resource in achieving the growth you want. Mentorship in particular is very important, because the focus of mentoring is you, the student, above anything else. But you must be in control of what is happening to you. The key is to take advantage of your advisors and mentors as resources towards developing yourself.

I believe that students are under-aggressive in using their advisor. They look at their advisor and say, "What does this person want from me? What does this person think is good enough? Have I done enough this week?" I believe that this is backwards. You need to look at your advisor and say, "What do I need that this person can give me? How can we work together so that I can learn things/gain skills/make connections/gain experience/get what I came for?"

For better or worse, your advisor is not likely to be interested solely in helping you with your goals. He/she is going to have an agenda of their own as well. You need to understand your advisor and his/her philosophy towards students. Try to ascertain whether you can get what you need from this person. Some advisors may be difficult or demanding, but it's still possible to get what you want by working with them. Maybe they know the people to whom you need to connect. Maybe you are both very excited by the same research area. Maybe he/she can give you access to tools or equipment that you need. But sometimes you may not be able to accomplish your goals from working with a person. You might be able to do great research with that person, but you won't actually develop in the specific ways that you want. In such a case, I don't recommend working with such a person or group.

If you have choices, choose the advisor whose style is most amenable to helping you get what you came for. And seek many mentors. A mentor outside your research area can still help you. Older graduate students are also a superb resource. In many ways, older graduate students may understand your concerns and needs much better than faculty.

Don't fear your advisor. Many graduate students are terrified of looking dumb. Or worse, they are convinced that they really are dumb and are trying desperately to hide that fact. Please take my word for it: you are not stupid!

And graduate school is NOT about whether you are smart enough or good enough anyway. Graduate school is about developing yourself. So it doesn't really matter what point you are at right now in your development. What matters is growth -- developing yourself, growing yourself along the dimensions that you care about.

If you are terrified of looking stupid in front of your advisor, you won't grow in the ways that you need to grow. At the same time, you also CANNOT over-criticize yourself. People will accept your own assessments of yourself. If I said, "I just don't have very visionary ideas", people won't think, "gosh, Vibha's really modest", people will think, "Vibha doesn't really have visionary ideas, look, she said so herself!". I think the way to avoid tipping the wrong way in either direction is to continually be focused on my professional development.

Instead of saying, "Oh, I'm really weak when it comes to this area." Say:

"How can I become stronger in this area?"
"How can I learn more about this area that I don't know much about?"
"What would this work need in order to not have that flaw?"
"How can I avoid this kind of criticism?"

Always keep pushing on how you can build yourself, your repertoire of skills, your knowledge base, and your set of experiences, always along the dimensions that are important to you. This attitude will help your mentors and advisors help you.