April 5, 2010

Traveling again

Today, I'm leaving for my home state. I'm going to visit my parents for about two weeks. My cat is coming with me, of course. Blogging will continue as usual.

But while I'm on the road, if you haven't seen it already, I strongly recommend this post over at Psycgirl's blog about power in advising relationships. The discussion in the comments is also very interesting and insightful.

I found myself getting worked up over one of the comments, but I haven't even had the exact problems described -- I've had plenty of advising problems over the years, but I've never had the problem of being neglected by an advisor who won't read my work (except for the usual "hey it's been two months..." followed by action). And, I'm in a really good advising situation right now.

But, I definitely related to the discussion of feeling powerless, especially in my first three years. And I have a few friends who are dealing with neglectful advisors, so I know it can be a huge problem. Departments don't enforce expectations and standards for advising graduate students, so your success comes down to whether professors like you and want to help you -- and that can leave students in a really bad position when the advisor isn't doing his or her job.

(Psycgirl I hope it's okay that I linked to you -- if it's not, let me know and I'll take it down)

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