| > I eventually decided I felt that way because he didn't make his expectations for me finishing and tailoring those expectations to my career goals clear up front, and very few advisors do so. I come at this from a different field (the biomedical sciences), wherein it is rare to find clearly-articulated career goals from the PhD students, and even harder to find supervisors who care. This problem is made worse when supervisors often rely on their students' naivete to keep their labs staffed. The students can be forgiven for this naivete: they often start their degrees with the assumption that, if they work hard, a tenure-track or similar position will be available to them at the other end. Of course, reality is that they may fail to achieve that goal no matter how hard they work, simply because they have the wrong project/wrong mentorship/poor funding/etc. The supervisors, on the other hand, are often quite happy for their students to remain naive, as the incentives of students and supervisors are often misaligned. The solution is probably twofold: First, it should be essential for prospective students to come in with a very clear idea of their career goals (e.g. "I want a tenure-track faculty position in a leading research university" or "I want a dedicated teaching position at the community college level"). Second, said prospective students should be given clear, objective advice, along the lines of your expectations document, on what it takes to achieve those goals. This advice should help guide students in choosing a lab that will help them achieve these career goals, and ideally should come from a neutral third-party. One can't expect supervisors to be unbiased in this regard. |