Why are we scared of our advisors?

In the spirit of Halloween, I decided to write about what the kids are scared of these days… advisors. I just finished my first year of my PhD. I went through A LOT this year (and wrote about it), but the thing I was surprised to be asked about the most, and that I caught myself giving advice about the most, was how I deal with feedback from my advisors in a chill way.

I’ve worked with three very different advisors across undergrad and my PhD. Mike is meticulous and extremely detail-oriented about our work. He will correct a period in my sentence, dead serious, and hand me pages and pages of red pen feedback. He can come across as reserved or stoic, even though he’s actually one of the funniest and kindest people I’ve ever met. Ben is also a perfectionist, but he gets pulled in a thousand directions and is on a gazillion committees, so I mostly text and Slack him rather than see him in person. He makes up for it with an incredible level of understanding and care. He doesn’t always have time to fully immerse himself in what we’re doing, so I do the low-level, meticulous work with Mike, and Ben comes in with higher-level feedback, a different perspective, a list of people to introduce me to for help with different stuff, and any kind of resource that I can possibly need to thrive. Before either of them, in undergrad, I worked with Marco. Marco is an acquired taste, but I adored him. He was demanding of my time, harsh with feedback but protective, loyal to the bone, and extremely supportive at the same time. Most importantly, Marco was extremely good at recognizing diamonds in the rough and giving them the care they needed to produce good results. That was useful to me at the time. I didn’t know how to manage myself, I needed discipline, and I needed to get into a top-tier CS PhD program with basically zero initial foundation. I also appreciate that he allowed me to voice my frustrations about it, not bottle them up. A little bit of frustration is a given.

Adjusting to all of them and switching between their styles seamlessly is a skill. Not everyone has the luxury of finding a perfect match for an advisor, and most people never find “the one”. That’s okay, because a successful research career shouldn’t be reserved only for people who can thrive while working completely unattended and unguided. Then your “mentor” is just a collaborator, and there’s no space for developing productive mentorship relationship. Your advisor is taking on an apprentice, and being an apprentice takes humility, patience, and some detachment. While advisors are there to guide you, in my experience you can help the process tremendously by keeping a few extra cards up your sleeve.

Below are the scenarios my friends/peers kept bringing up to me, and what I told them in response. This post mostly targets my fellow PhD students, but I think there are some useful bits for undergrads and master’s students. And maybe for advisors, if they didn’t know about these (sometimes funny and irrational) fears.

1. “I am scared to make a mistake because I’m scared my advisor secretly hates me and is just waiting to drop me”

This one came up a lot at the beginning. You have a new advisor, you don’t know them, and there’s no trust built yet. So if you make a mistake, you assume they secretly hate you or they’re just waiting to drop you. If they’re not overly supportive and gentle all the time, something must be wrong. The first-years that I talked to (and myself) were actually terrified of this, and some of their advisors were really chill, at least to my knowledge.

I’ve talked to people whose advisors stated their support verbally early on, but once the real work started and the pressure built up, it was hard for those advisors to constantly maintain a smiley face, a positive attitude, and a coddling environment. The feedback got harsher, and the advisors started putting more of their energy into their students. That energy is intense, especially when they care about the project. When you’re junior, it feels like they’re ripping apart everything you come up with because they can’t see you succeeding, and it’s frustrating when you’re constantly hitting a wall.

I handled this in two ways. First, I was hilariously transparent with Mike and Ben right off the bat. I told them, verbatim: if you hate me and you’re secretly considering dropping me, tell me now so I can prepare. I didn’t care how irrational it sounded, I figured I’d rather put it out there. That helped a lot, because they realized who they were dealing with, and realized not only that I needed reassurance, but exactly what kind I needed. I checked in about it a few more times, and then I let it go, because I literally gave them a way out and they haven’t taken it, so YAY, they don’t hate me. Second, I asked them what progress looks like, because I didn’t want to wait until the end-of-year evaluations to find out I wasn’t making any. Nobody really knows what progress looks like in research. It’s a vague definition, and it’s on you to define it for yourself and track it in very small increments. The way they described it to me: you feel like you’re going in circles. But every circle is slightly different. It’s a little sharper, a little rounder, or the last one gave you a bit more material for the next one. That’s progress. It’s not linear, and eventually you untangle yourself from the circle. That’s what happened for me.

A lot of the process feels like shooting blindly, because you don’t yet know which questions to ask. Once you know the right question and how to scope the problem, solving becomes easier. And if the majority of your job was to solve existing and easy problems, then you wouldn’t be doing research. I think the way you learn to ask the right questions is by putting something (anything) out there, and letting your advisors ask you all the questions you hadn’t thought of. Those questions first seem like an attack on you or an attempt to dismantle your half-baked solutions. Once you’ve seen enough of those questions, you start asking slightly better ones yourself and scoping your work a little better. Eventually, seeing the progress helped me put more of my trust into my advisors’ hands and realize that they’ve been building trust in me all along (and again, don’t hate me!!).

2. “My advisor criticizes me relentlessly, so I must suck”

Literally JUST flip the script. You’re a professor on a Friday night, coming home with a stack of things to review when you’d rather be doing anything else, maybe spending time with your family. If you really thought someone was hopeless, would you spend your Friday night telling them so in 50 lines of red pen? No. You’d be as concise as possible and try to get rid of them. When you care and see potential in someone, you spend two hours in a meeting going through everything they bring, because you want it to be better and you want them to be a better researcher.

The opposite of care is neglect, not criticism, so if you’re getting criticized, you’re clearly cared about.

It helps to separate the amount of criticism from the direction of it:

A decent amount means your advisor actually spent time on your work. A thing I’ve noticed is that your advisors eventually want you to push back and say no to them. You’re there to learn to build up and defend your own opinions, even if it means it clashes with your advisor’s opinion. And if you’re coadvised, like I am, this helps make the coadvising relationship better because you learn how to cherry pick and optimize between two people’s (sometimes conflicting) opinions and get the best of both worlds.

Direction is tricky. Is your advisor criticizing your work, or are they drifting into criticizing who you are? Hard-to-hear criticism about work is easy to take personally. For inexperienced students, it’s difficult to tell those apart. I’ve been in classes where what seemed like completely normal presentation feedback to me was taken personally, as “this person has something against me.” It wasn’t mean, and the feedback was valid, but there was just a lot of it because the person ripping into their work actually paid attention.

One of the biggest challenges of doing ambiguous, hard work is separating your work from your intrinsic value. We spend so much time with our work that it becomes our baby, and when someone else puts their care into ripping it apart, it’s hard not to conflate that with the care you put in.

So when I get pages and pages of feedback that at a glance clearly suggests I’ll have to rewrite or rethink everything, I leave it until I’m cold-headed, or until I feel relatively good about myself. In the meantime, I do everything I can to actually get to the place where I feel good before I pick it up again. I make stupid progress on something else, I go shopping, I read a book, I talk to people who will build me up, even consult my yes men. Surrounding yourself only with yes men is dangerous, but yes men are amazing when you’re bracing yourself to tackle something you’re scared of. Once you start tackling, get rid of them, because you won’t be able to get a realistic pespective of your progress.

3. “My advisor is too busy and I have to chase them”

Contrary to popular belief, advisors are human, and they don’t always have time because human things get in the way. So what happens when you have to chase your advisor (or any more senior researcher, really, if you’re on a bigger project) around, delegate tasks to them, ask for feedback, and make sure they actually get it done? Not every first year (or later year) has that skill, and a lot ends up depending on who you are and who you’re working with. That’s why it’s good to have a little compatibility test before you start working with someone. But you won’t be 100% compatible with anyone, and sometimes you’re left to fend for yourself or to manage the person who’s supposed to be the “senior” one.

What helped me was, again, absolute transparency. I tell them in advance that I’m going to bother them by email, Slack, whatever I can, to get what I need. It’s your experience too. People have a right to say no to you, but closed mouths don’t get fed. Sometimes being annoying is the best way. There might be some resistance at first, since nobody loves having someone constantly on top of them. But people appreciate it, because once you show you care, it’s much easier for them to care about your work. Even subconsciously, when something seems lower priority to the person who should care about it the most, it naturally shifts lower on other people’s priority lists. And if you’re dealing with your advisor, this isn’t some random professor you need to convince. This person chose to be your mentor, so there’s already some care there. You just have to push yours a little too.

Be selfish about what you need in one-on-one relationships. It’s much harder in groups, where you have to balance group dynamics, which I have always found challenging. But oh well, being annoying is not that bad of a cross to carry. I will stop a lecture until my question gets answered. I’m not sure that’s always a good thing, though in my case it was relatable and I became the sacrificial lamb who got everyone’s questions answered. One-on-one, I absolutely encourage it. What’s the worst someone can say? No, and that they think you’re annoying? Boo-hoo, their problem. You owe people basic levels of respect, and dazzling charisma is a bonus that not everyone gets to receive.

By getting these rejections, you’re getting an amazing gift of building a thicker skin, while you’re still in school with some level of structure and protection. Thick skin is technically a soft skill, but it’s a hard one to get. Growing it isn’t fun, and it has to be done in a way that doesn’t turn into toxic coping. And what better place to build that skill than a PhD, where your biggest obstacle for five years is dealing with yourself. To solve a problem at a really high level, you have to figure out what workflow and environment you need, in your work and in your head, to push past the current limits of what’s possible. That takes taking a hard, long look in the mirror. Advisors play a huge role in that, even though they don’t have much time. That’s why, when someone makes time for me, I treat it as a valuable resource, because I can see how much they’re dealing with.

4. “What if I just got dealt a bad card?”

Say your advisor really doesn’t care about you, neglects you, has to be chased around, insults you under the guise of “criticizing your work,” or just doesn’t have your best interest at heart, and it shows. Best case, you learn a valuable skill: how to deal with an asshole. Worst case, you deal with them while you network to find a way to escape their grip. But this post isn’t about actual bad people. It’s about dealing with unconventional characters, including people who give tough love. Respecting your own boundaries isn’t just stating them and expecting the other person to respect them. People see boundaries differently, you won’t always be able to explain why something is a boundary, and not everyone will listen, whether in friendships or at work. You won’t always be able to turn to the system or remove yourself from the situation, so learning how to state something without saying it is incredibly valuable.

A little bit about boundaries, though it can be a whole separate post. A boundary is knowing when to remove your energy, not give more of it. That’s why many people get it wrong by trying to say more, thinking it will reinforce a boundary. People react best to the absence of energy. Your anger, frustration, joy, passion - all of those things radiate presence. When you’re trying to preserve your energy, the most effective thing you can do is remove as much of it as you can from a structure that’s toxic for you. I don’t want this to be misinterpreted as running away from problems. Giving up on something and carefully removing your energy from its toxic aspects are different things. Think about it through the advisor lens: if someone’s absolutely terrible, running away would be switching advisors immediately. Reinforcing a boundary would happen from within, by deciding not to care about what your advisor says or does and showing that in your actions by doing what you think is best for you. This is an incredibly hard practice, and I will probably revisit it here at some point.

End note

PLSE, though, is an environment where harmful behaviors get nipped in the bud quickly. Luckily, we always have a caring eye on us, no matter who we’re advised by, and a supportive lab environment. I learn a lot through the little encouragement and pep talks I give and receive. I also don’t like the generic advice I usually see online, which mostly comes down to “if you’re naturally smart enough, you’ll survive,” or “if you’re lucky with your circumstances, you’ll be fine.” Even if our circumstances are perfect, which they’re often not, getting over irrational fears makes us do our work significantly better and faster, and makes our time here a little more enjoyable.

And to those who have just read the PLSE recruiting blog post and are considering joining us, I hope this post gave you some encouragement to apply to work with our fantastic advisors. I know how hard it is to look for a good match. If you haven’t tried already, my tip for you is to ask your potential advisor for their astrology birthchart, so you can assess the compatibility straight away. If they won’t share it, bookmark this post because you might need it later. Good luck with your applications!

I wish you all a safe Halloweekend!