I cannot effectively advise a student who, based on a fundamental distrust of faculty, doesn’t believe my advice. It is fine to ask questions and even get second opinions. You should! But if your advisor was never your first stop, how do you know they can’t be a person you go to?
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So I should say by the way that I have less than zero complaints about my own students and this is not about them! In fact I was writing nice emails about them today :-) But I have concerns about things I am hearing through the grapevine — and from other faculty.
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Your advisor has some power over you but they are not a god and approaching grad school like it is always a war zone and never anything else is a recipe for misery where you don’t give yourself and those around you a real chance.
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I have been in situations where I felt like I was enduring psychological warfare, and I know those are real. I know also it was harder to trust people afterward and I was more guarded. But. You can be guarded without demonizing ppl. You can be guarded and give ppl a chance.
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Be guarded. That’s a fine way to go through grad school. (And any professional environment, frankly.) But I need y’all to stop listening to people who are so traumatized that they are giving you traumatized advice. Traumatized mentoring is dangerous.https://link.medium.com/NkaEaMVQU4
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Anyway, here’s a nice piece by Jason Wright on what good advising looks like:https://sites.psu.edu/astrowright/2017/06/29/good-advising/ …
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And if you have academic trauma — and many of us do — you gotta deal with that trauma in healthy ways. Get help. Consider whether a spiritual practice might help you. Maybe Buddhism? Maybe not? Going to war with people who have done nothing to you isn’t how you deal with it.
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And also, frankly, it is not everyone else’s responsibility to rescue you from a bad situation either. Not one of us is Jesus. Just because someone didn’t rescue you from bad situation in program A doesn’t mean they can’t effectively support you in situation B.
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And unless you find out why, you may never know the real reason someone didn’t step in — and you may never know that they did step in and it didn’t work. Academic politics is like all politics: you can’t just discuss all your sensitive negotiations and expect it to work out.
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And for fuck’s sake: stop expecting postdocs to deliver things that even faculty can’t deliver. It’s so unreasonable.
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