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As fall rapidly approaches, incoming doctoral students are preparing to begin new graduate programs by embarking on coursework, engaging in research and connecting with peers and faculty. Selecting and establishing a relationship with an adviser is an essential part of this early transition, driven by factors such as compatibility, research interests and funding. Many students have heard horror stories from other students and social media about doctoral advisers who are variously noncommunicative or demanding, either entirely checked out or guilty of overworking students to support their grant and publication records. The ubiquity of these narratives can make it seem as though these horror stories are an inevitable part of graduate studies, a gauntlet that students must resign themselves to in order to succeed.
While issues related to graduate advising are not concentrated in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields, the well-developed body of literature on issues of attrition, bias and structural inequities makes these environments particularly ripe for exploration. A prior research study on more than 3,800 underrepresented minority STEM doctoral students found that 36 percent of students withdrew from their graduate programs within seven years of starting, while 44 percent earned doctorates in that time (another 20 percent remained enrolled in their doctoral programs at the seven-year mark). Relationships with advisers can help STEM graduate students manage the stress and multiple demands of their education, but when those relationships are fraught with tension, they can also exacerbate other stressors. Yet, despite their importance, academia provides very few resources or support structures related to developing good advisers.
In 2019, we began exploring how power shapes doctoral education, specifically advising and mentoring. As early-career scholars, our doctoral journeys had largely been exceptions to those we often encountered—supportive advising experiences with mentors who encouraged us to prioritize our well-being. However, even within those positive relationships, we still experienced the power imbalances rife in graduate education and struggled to avoid enacting them as we both became faculty. Our research has sought to push faculty, programs and departments to take ownership for promoting student success rather than placing the onus solely on students.
To date, we have examined how power manifests in STEM advising relationships and how power in STEM advising impacts student development. Our participants are all students who switched—or were forced to switch—advisers, a unique context that often helped to create clear illustrations of power and comparative examples to illuminate our understandings. Here, we build on prior advice regarding things like chairing dissertations and establishing mentoring models to offer suggestions for STEM faculty, programs and departments to better facilitate graduate advising. Our advice is specifically targeted at systemic change that can alter strict hierarchies and power inequities to holistically support students as they develop into independent scholars.
Establish transparency and shared expectations where possible. Doctoral education is often shaped by entrenched rules of success that doctoral students are expected to follow. Many of our research participants regularly received messages that they should be working all the time, prioritize their adviser’s work above all else and accomplish tasks with little supervision or support. Without broader, explicit policies about things like working conditions or the role of a research assistant, our participants were left on their own to gauge what the normal expectations were; often, they internalized problematic expectations for themselves. For example, several of our participants told us they felt like failures when they couldn’t work all the time or when they needed more explicit instruction to accomplish tasks.
Resultantly, our first suggestion is for departments to develop publicly available expectations around advising processes (e.g., frequency of meetings) and research (e.g., field norms about authorship, expectations for hours). Such content could easily be incorporated into existing student handbooks or program websites to provide some basic shared understandings between students and advisers. Not only would this information illuminate hidden expectations, but it would also provide departments with a chance to revisit areas of confusion and to encourage engagement across faculty and students. Moreover, these guidelines would provide students with a mechanism to gauge their situation and to seek redress if needed.
Develop and integrate training on how to advise students as part of faculty development. Most faculty receive little to no training on how to advise graduate students, instead relying on their own doctoral experiences or trial and error to develop strategies. While training on processes and logistics would be undoubtedly beneficial, we also encourage broader training to help doctoral advisers understand their disciplines, graduate education and the power structures therein. Intentionally encouraging faculty to reflect on how power shapes doctoral education and one’s own advising style can help advisers rethink existing systems rather than reproducing the same environment they experienced. Rather than having these trainings be a single session, we encourage institutions to think about how they might leverage vehicles such as communities of practice to create ongoing learning.
Provide feedback—and accountability—for advisers on advising. Teaching evaluations and even peer audits of one’s teaching are standard parts of faculty feedback and tenure processes; similar feedback on faculty performance related to student advising is not. Our participants shared how the lack of infrastructure regarding feedback for advisers often meant that the students themselves had to create processes through which to voice their concerns. Several students noted that by voicing their feedback, they were often seen as creating a problem and placing themselves in tenuous situations. Alternatively, participants also noted the lack of mechanisms to share positive feedback that could reward faculty for their advising work.
Here, we argue that feedback and accountability are crucial to fostering successful advising relationships. Furthermore, this feedback should be incorporated as part of annual reviews, tenure and promotion with real mechanisms for accountability when advisers exhibit problematic behavior. Many of our participants highlight the void in accountability in their current system, sharing that bad advisers often were merely distanced from working with students—a dynamic that often concentrates work on others, particularly advisers with marginalized identities.
Rethink traditional advising dyads. While all doctoral advising contains power inequities, the specific nature of STEM disciplines allows for power to be uniquely concentrated through the lab component. In general, each faculty member has a lab that they sustain through grants; these labs fund students and ultimately provide equipment for students to complete their dissertation research. As a result, STEM faculty wield an enormous amount of power over their advisees’ experiences. Our participants frequently described how quickly an issue in one facet of their doctoral experience, such as an inability to get results in one experiment, impacted all aspects of their relationship with their adviser and their doctoral education. In contrast, other disciplines may have greater separation across the different elements of doctoral study. Students in humanities and social sciences, for example, may utilize a greater range of funding sources (e.g., teaching assistantships, student life assistantships) and complete dissertations on topics distinct from their adviser’s research.
Rethinking traditional advising dyads offers the opportunity to distribute power beyond one individual and to provide students with multiple points of support. For example, programs could consider having students select a research adviser who would help them develop methodological expertise and whom they might work with in labs. They may complement that choice with a program adviser who can then oversee their coursework, program milestones and dissertation. These different configurations would decouple funding from academic progress and provide students with multiple opportunities to find mentors who could support them through shared values or cultural awareness.
Our present line of inquiry explores the tolls that power imbalances in advising relationships have on STEM doctoral students. Participants in our research have described numerous detrimental impacts resulting from negative advising relationships, including delayed academic timelines, financial uncertainty, stress, somatic symptoms (e.g., hair falling out, sleeplessness, physical pain), diverted career pathways and diminished relationships with others. Our emerging findings align with other research showing that many graduate students are experiencing mental health issues and impacts on their well-being. At the same time, slowing enrollment growth will soon mean that fewer graduate students may be available to replace those students who depart or are pushed out by their programs. It is past time to rethink doctoral advising in STEM specifically, but across academia as well. Institutions may not be able to fully implement our suggestions before onboarding new faculty and students this fall, but moving toward these aims can ensure that incoming doctoral students have different advising experiences to better support their journeys.
