College bound Students navigate the undergraduate admissions processes with the help of high school guidance counselors, family members or simply by attending open houses and information sessions hosted by college institutions. Just when you think you have the experience to do it all again and apply to graduate school, the rules of engagement change. The problem is, no one ever really tells students this. While both undergraduate and graduate admissions teams work to process your application, the review and selection criteria differs tremendously for graduate programs.
For instance, faculty members and department chairs may never see any applications for undergraduate programs during the admissions process. Faculty may interact with you at an open house, a tour or correspond via email, but it’s the admissions team and their review committees that read and weigh in on the decision to admit a student into the undergraduate program. Financial aid provided to undergraduate students comes from the university’s pot of financial aid earmarked for undergraduate students. How much you get is based on the rubrics the financial aid experts, not input from the faculty members. There are usually no strings attached to the financial aid except the student needs to maintain a decent GPA and remain a decent human being.
Now, enter the graduate admissions world. No one wants to pay for graduate education and many of us get jobs so our companies will pay for it. So, the name of the game is to get financial support in a graduate program. How to do that is to connect with faculty members in the department and program directors you wish to work with for the topics you want to pursue. Your application materials will still be processed by the graduate admissions team and they are there to help connect you to information, but they do not make the decision on your application and they do not determine what amount of aid, if any, an applicant receives. Financial aid is dependent on the specific department and faculty members that have reviewed and selected your application for admission. Grabbing the first person that says yes to fund you doesn’t mean you are home free. If you really aren’t interested in that research topic and say “yes”, you could be on a path to misery and disaster. Now comes the biggest misunderstanding that gets students in trouble, namely when you are funded by a faculty member or by the department, you are not necessarily a “free agent.” You are tethered to that faculty member.
What does this mean? The money awarded goes with the job and is not to be used at your sole discretion. You are being awarded admission into a graduate program that may come with free tuition and a stipend, but it also comes with obligations to fulfill a job role. That job can be a research assistant for a specific faculty member or a teaching assistant for courses. Faculty members write proposals and get grant funding to support research assistants, so when you are given one of these positions, your research adviser is your “boss.” You are obliged to: 1) work on the research topic area specified by the faculty member 2) Most likely take courses your research adviser thinks are best to prepare you for conducting research in their lab and 3) Carve out time to do the job you are being funded to do, which is impossible if you are taking 4 or 5 courses. Furthermore, a faculty member paying you to do research will not be happy if you join their team but can’t do any research for the first semester or year because you decide to just take classes. Some schools give all new graduate students full tuition scholarships and stipends for the first year and then expect these students to connect with a faculty member who will then take over supporting the student for subsequent years.
Students confuse receiving graduate aid with merit scholarships that allow them the freedom to take classes of their choosing and just focus on the classes. Accepting a position in a faculty members’ research group means accepting the job and the roles and responsibilities that come with it. Think of it this way, If you received and accepted an industrial job offer to write programs for developing web pages and then you decide that you prefer to do something else out of scope with that job description, such as perhaps, developing new robotic platforms, you need to find a new position within the company to do that. The money doesn’t follow you!
The schools that do support students for 1 year with the expectation they will connect with a faculty members’ research group and be supported for the rest of their program by that faculty member can be a stressful predicament. Unfortunately, some students think deferring admission into other schools that did promise them more long-term aid, is a good backup strategy. The thought is one can always join the other school in case things don’t work out and they don’t receive funding a second year at the institution they already enrolled at. Deferring admission means that the faculty member/department has to hold that funding over for you, which most likely means denying another student with true intent of enrolling. Besides being unethical, it doesn’t work. It only makes the student appear selfish and unprofessional.
Let’s summarize the Major Graduate Student Disasters that guarantee failure:
1) Telling your research adviser funding your PHD program that you do not want to do any research and only want take courses for the first few years of your program.
2) Approaching faculty members inside or outside your institution to work on their projects instead of your own research advisers’ projects, without even discussing it with your adviser. Your adviser is not paying you to work for someone else! If you do the work for a course, make sure your adviser is looped in so there are no surprises when a publication results from the efforts.
3) Gaining acceptance into a program that openly and explicitly states financial aid is not available and then pleading with the school to find you aid.
4) Applying to a PHD program just to get your MS degree paid for with no intention of pursuing the PHD.
5) Telling your supervisor that you have another outside job and can’t work the required hours and lab schedule for your teaching assistant responsibilities.
6) Accepting a Teaching Assistant position and not doing a good job and not being proactive in connecting with the instructor on a regular basis, or not responding to students or getting feedback and graded assignments back to students on time. Think back to when you were an undergraduate. How would you feel if you had a lousy Teaching Assistant?
7) Insubordination and disrespect for your adviser. Telling your adviser that you refuse to go to their group meetings because you don’t like someone in your lab, or going on vacation, taking time off and disappearing without informing your adviser is like not showing up for work.
8) Sending off research data and or presentations to others outside your research group without your adviser’s knowledge or permission.
9) Being supported by your faculty member to attend a conference for days and only showing up for the conference for the hour you have to present. This is your chance to network and build your knowledge, don’t abuse it. Your adviser is investing in your future. Take advantage of the group sightseeing events scheduled through the conference for the conference attendees so you can be with the other attendees and get opportunities to further network.
10) Misleading your adviser that you put in hours when you didn’t. Advisers can tell when a student only spent 20 minutes versus a week on a task. Trying to fake out the faculty member is a sure-fire way to create mistrust and damage your relationship with your adviser. Advisers are ok with students saying once in a while: “Life got in the way and I didn’t get everything done I expected too.”
Now, faculty members can be absolute Villains. They are not perfect. Even though they have a PhD and think they know everything about everything (even if they don’t), they never make mistakes. Ha Ha (sarcasm)!
While they may expect perfection, school is a place to make mistakes and learn. After all, that’s the engineering recipe for success. Some faculty may think you should KNOW what they want and anticipate their needs, so you need to learn their style. You need to have diligent work habits and be proactive in frequent communication and written documentation of your tasks and accomplishments. This is key. No adviser wants to chase down their students and beg for meetings or updates.
Panetta Tip: My students prepare a presentation for me when we meet and show what they worked on, the progress, the challenges and what they need my input and help on. They have no trouble writing their thesis because they have already kept a great log of their journey throughout our meetings. A presentation doesn’t just provide links to literature and say “Here, Professor, go read these.”
Second Panetta Tip: I allow my students to record our meetings for their use only. This helps them make sure they really heard what I expected. Not all faculty are willing to do this, but you can point to this blog and blame me for telling you to ask!
If you are lucky, you will have a faculty supervisor who cares about you and wants to help build your career. But it goes both ways! You should want to be a good contributor to their success and not just think that everything is about you. The best result is when you feel respected, trusted and a valued member of your faculty member’s team.
If your faculty member is teary eyed as you receive your diploma, know that this is a very good indicator that you and your adviser built a strong collaborative productive relationship.
