by Shannon E. Grogans, M.S. & Nicholas P. Marsh, M.S., University of Maryland
Among the most important factors for determining a great doctoral program experience is having a successful relationship with your mentor (Gee et al., 2022; Sverdlick et al., 2018). Most of us likely enter the application process hoping for this, but unfortunately for some students, even with supportive mentoring, conflicting demands can strain your relationship with your mentor and dampen the graduate school experience. Regardless of how your current relationship with your mentor is going, there are some concrete steps that students can take to help facilitate positive working relationships or improve their working relationship with their mentors and thus, improve their graduate school experience. Importantly, these suggestions are opinions derived from our collective experience, and there may be specific aspects of your situation that necessitate other considerations.
Where can students start?1) Explicitly define your expectations and needs in your meetings; this could look like coming in with a rough agenda.It is easy, particularly in the first or early years of graduate training, to expect your advisor to lead and guide the meetings you have. However, many students may not realize the agency they can and do have in these meetings and how helping set the agenda is the easy first step to making sure you are getting what you need out of your meetings. Coming to your advisor meetings with written-down items you need to discuss will help your advisor ensure that you are getting the supervision you need.
What if you don’t know what you don’t know? Jumping into graduate training can be overwhelming and can take a while to get your bearings, so in our experience, it can feel like you don’t even know what items you are supposed to put on the agenda. That is okay. Letting your advisor know what you don’t have a clear picture of can be just as helpful. Questions like, “I’m uncertain about the timeline of my master’s thesis. Do you have examples or expectations of where I should be at the end of the semester?” or “How do I go about deciding what kind of externship opportunities would specifically help me?” are both great examples of articulating your uncertainty while expressing a clear openness to guidance. 2) Communicate schedule and working hours. Both advisors and advisees have a range of working hour preferences. If you are a night owl, early bird, honor religious days of rest, or are strict about not working on a Saturday/Sunday, that is important information for your advisor to know and for you to know about them. Don’t assume your advisor will know your working hour preferences. Some advisors may email you very late at night or even over the weekend. Does this mean they expect you to be working at that time and want a response right away? In our experience, this can be a stressful message to receive if you have never had a discussion around working hours and expectations. Your advisor may very well expect you not to check or respond to them until regular working hours, but you won’t know this if you’ve never discussed it.
Additionally, don’t assume your advisor has your day-to-day schedule memorized or a firm understanding of how responsibilities are stacking up for you throughout the semester. Let your advisor regularly know what is taking up most of your time during the week and when you feel your plate is getting full. Your advisor may suggest a good grant proposal, project collaboration or manuscript to work on not knowing how much you have on your plate that month. We’ve had luck with responding in ways that communicate, “That sounds like a great opportunity; however, right now I need to prioritize getting this deadline met and don’t want to come up short if I take on too much. After this big deadline, I would be able to redirect my attention and give my best effort to a new project.” While the exact wording may vary, we hope that this language can serve as a useful starting point as you navigate conflicting demands.3)Priorities evolve. And your advisor almost definitely knows this. Don’t be afraid to touch base with them to let them know that a project or deadline will be delayed because you need to attend a personal emergency, finish up exams for classes, complete simultaneous assessment reports that all came at once, etc. It is inevitable that our plans will have to shift through each semester, and while deadlines and goal-setting can keep us on track, there is likely going to be a need for some flexibility at some point in your graduate school experience. Communicating when the need arises–rather than not touching base about overdue projects–can be a highly effective way at managing conflicting demands and advocating for yourself. 4) Ask for feedback. If edits are made without you understanding the “why,” it could be a missed opportunity for learning and growth. Check in and articulate a desire to understand why a particular change was made because you want to make sure that you are not making the same mistakes in the future. Furthermore, everyone has different styles of feedback and preferred ways to receive feedback. For example, some of us may struggle with seeing all the critiques of our work, and may wonder whether there were any strengths. If this is you, it can be helpful to let your advisor know that while revisions are really helpful in knowing what you are not doing well, also getting feedback on what you are doing well is not only encouraging, but a potential teaching tool that can help you leverage these strengths moving forward.
More detailed conversations about feedback style can also be helpful. For example, maybe you communicate really well in the comments on your Word document and respond to your advisor’s feedback in the document itself. However, when you go back and forth multiple times you notice your advisor is not revisiting earlier comments, or is responding to some in email form and others in in-document text comments. This desire for consistency could be expressed by saying something along the lines of, “It would help me keep organized with your feedback if we stick to one method of feedback that we can both refer back to. I have found that I resolve the marginal comments that I have already addressed, but unintentionally leave other comments with follow-up questions in email unreplied to. Do you have a preference in the system we use?”5) Reach out to older lab members to hear their experiences in navigating the mentor-mentee relationship and what worked and did not work for them. The biggest barrier to this step may be not wanting to impose on other graduate students’ busy times. But, in our experience, this can be one of the best and most helpful resources to get honest, reliable information and tips. Older students in your lab or other labs within the department have likely also benefited from guidance from older students themselves. Older graduate students are typically more than happy to lend an ear and some advice on what to do or share their experience on how they navigated things. It can definitely feel intimidating to reach out, but we suspect that it will almost always be well-received. 6) Initiate collaborative conversations around tasks on your plate and how you are spending your time. If your plate is relatively lighter right now, expect that your plate will likely become fuller throughout the semester. It can be helpful to give yourself as much of a buffer as possible knowing those hours will likely be claimed quickly as additional projects and tasks arise. To do this, use your calendar to treat research time and other non-meeting responsibilities as set-in-stone/blocked meetings that you are not scheduling other meetings over. This personally is the hardest one for the authors to accomplish, but our peers who have stayed firm with keeping their “Friday Research Writing Blocks” on their schedule have significantly improved their ability to prioritize the tasks they need to work on and to efficiently accomplish their program milestones and other goals. Many different roles will be vying for student’s attention and priority, but remembering what your personal goals are and scheduling them in your calendar is a key step in making sure they are being attended to. It is easy for department meetings, class and homework, clinical work, teaching assistant duties, lab management and coordination roles, and study assessments to completely fill your calendar because you haven’t set a hard boundary for your own research and writing time! 7) If you have exhausted your own resources, consider reaching out to program leadership and/or the ombudsmen. We would suggest using the above tips first, but alas, challenges related to the mentor-mentee relationship may persist. Sometimes it can be helpful to reach out to program leadership first, perhaps more informally, to see if they have advice or steps that could be helpful for you managing school, conflicting demands and your relationship with your advisor. More rarely, it could be helpful to go to your official ombudsmen to see if there is a mediation that could help resolve issues that have lingered despite persistent efforts to reconcile them.
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References
Gee, D. G., DeYoung, K. M., McLaughlin, K. A., Tillman, R. M., Barch, D. M., Forbes, E. E., Krueger, R. F., Strauman, T. J., Weierich, M. A. & Shackman, A. J. (2022). Training the next generation of clinical psychological scientists: A data-driven call to action. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 18, 43-70.
Sverdlik, A., Hall, N. C., McAlpine, L., & Hubbard, K. (2018). The PhD experience: A review of the factors influencing doctoral students’ completion, achievement, and well-being. International Journal of Doctoral Studies, 13, 361-388.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this newsletter are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Psychological Clinical Science Accreditation System (PCSAS).