Syllabus for Eric's PhD Students

I think a point of tension for grad students is that many don't realize a PhD program is more so a job than it is another part of your education. Your advisor is generally paying for you with their hard earned grant money and relies on your results for their own success. In typical 9-5 job terms, the advisor is the manager and the PhD students are the individual contributors.

It's a harsh realization that many grad students come to, but unless your grad student is getting some level of results then the advisor will feel his/her grant money isn't going to good use. It's essentially the same thought process a manager goes through when they feel they are paying somebody a salary but that person is not contributing.

This is why independence is so critical and one of the most important traits of a grad student. Time spent telling a student exactly what to do, again, is not always a resource well spent.

Anyways, this is just my perspective on things based on conversations with a couple of my immediate family members who are professors. I went into the normal job market after getting my bachelor's, and I see a lot of parallels between the world of academia and the rest of us. There are different titles and the work is different, but much of the structure and politics are the same.

Just about to start their 5th year.

To add a data point, my advisor told me to do the same. In fact, I actually spoke to one of his then-RAs who was leaving to go to the other side of the world (by sheer coincidence).

That discussion confirmed I was making the right decision, and I was able to gauge as well from the "warnings" I received that I was going down the right route. So I would definitely echo the above, and advise you speak to at least one of their previous students. If none are still around, that might be a red flag (or they might all be getting snapped up right away into jobs, but they will make the time to discuss with you, if they felt their advisor helped them!)

I would personally find it surprising if someone who wanted me to advise them didn't seek views from those I had advised previously.

> at no point do we receive any training regarding practical components of research

I think the fact is that most advisors get no training regarding the practical components of being an advisor. So it really shouldn't be a surprise that there's a huge amount of variation here.

One my big takeaways from my own PhD was that different professors have wildly different levels of ability in terms of people management. All of the professors I met were very smart, but some of them were clearly very poor at the people management aspect of things.

Having said that, I'm not sure what I would actually suggest to a student going into a PhD program today. My observations were formed after watching a few projects crash and burn, and that's not necessarily the path I'd recommend for finding out if your advisor is a good one.

Admittedly approaching this with a non-US perspective, but it seems strange to me that PhD students approach their advisors to see what the project/approach is.

Is it normal (in the US?) for a PhD to be as "guided" or prescribed by the advisor as you suggest above? Perhaps my experience differed, but I went for an advisor who takes an old-fashioned "independent research" focus. That's not to say they were unavailable or disinterested; rather they were there to offer input and guidance when needed, but not to steer or even direct. It was up to me to plan what I wanted to do, when to do it how to go about it, what to write up and publish, which conferences to bother with etc. Perhaps this is unusual, but I felt it was a key part of the experience to deliver your own major research programme.

I'd definitely agree that if you can't ask the questions you outlined above, or if they can't answer it, that is a big red flag. A PhD is about learning to ask questions fundamentally, and then set about answering them, so may as well get started by asking your advisor. I'd also try to get an understanding of the culture of the group and practices, since some research groups have more of a "lab" culture where everyone works as part of a bigger project, while I was involved in the opposite - everyone had their own "thing", but would work together when it was helpful.