Repost due to lack of reply: I’m a fourth year PhD student in the life sciences, and I need mentorship, preferably from a Slytherin, or at least someone with a Slytherin hat. My advisor doesn’t want me doing “mercenary collaborations”, or quick experiments with researchers outside my field in exchange for secondary authorships. He says I need to focus on my thesis research in the next year so as to publish and graduate. Are there any academics in the LW readership who have the insight to tell me whether this is good advice or whether he just wants me pumping out papers with his name on them so he can get tenure?
No one else is probably going to tell you this, but go ahead and do those collaborations. At the end of the day, your thesis is only going to be read by 3 people, and a doctorate degree is just a degree and isn’t important in and of itself. The important things are the work and publications you get done while doing your degree. So unless you doubt your ability to get your thesis done on time, you should be looking on doing all the collaborations you can get your hands on. You are the best judge of your own capabilities here.
I am a slytherin academic supervising a couple of PhD students now and I endorse the above message. If you finish your PhD, collaboration with others is key to future career development. If you don’t finish, though, it’s another story—so make sure you get through. You can always forget to tell your supervisor about some of your collaborations.
If the “mercenary” papers are unrelated to your field, it would also be advantageous to start thinking of ways to portray them as related—this will be helpful in presenting your research as a coherent whole, rather than giving the impression you are just helping on others papers for the sake of your CV. Or, as identifying a specific area of expertise that has cross-disciplinary applications.
Finally if you are not able to portray your mercenary papers as related.… maybe your supervisor has a point and you should work on developing collaborations that offer more than just a one-off publication. I have a couple of “mercenary” publications from my PhD period (no further collaborations beyond one paper) and they stood out like sore thumbs in my CV when I applied for postdocs.
I think the advice “do whatever you have to do to publish and graduate” is good advice. Whether this is better achievable through secondary authorships (which also are very valuable for networking—you’ll need a job once you get your Ph.D.) or through focusing on your thesis, I can’t say. It depends on your field and the specifics of your situation. But you need to be focused on graduating—“almost there but not quite” for many years is a very common failure mode for grad students.
Are you sure you have the right advisor? If you are so concerned that his interests may be that divergent from your own, it might be better to switch advisors than to continue with this one. Ideally, you want an advisor who already has tenure and looks at you like a son or daughter, and will advocate for you as your career progresses. If that’s not the vibe you are getting from your advisor, then look around and see if there’s someone whose personality and style of work better suits you. There will be costs to switching advisors, but they may not be as big as the costs of continuing with a mismatch between advisor and student for more than a year.
I’m in a PhD program in the life sciences and although I haven’t graduated myself (still in my first year), based on almost all of the advice I’ve read, this is good advice. The way to prove to your advisor that you deserve to be able to do quick secondary experiments with people outside of your field is to submit a paper of your own, and then you can do those experiments in the interim while you’re waiting for the reviews. That said, I don’t think I’m all that Slytherin (although I admit that this is what a Slytherin would say).
Ugh, that’s awful, sorry. It seems like you have a pretty complicated and frustrating situation—feel free to PM me or email me (gmail: amckenz) if you want to talk more.
Repost due to lack of reply: I’m a fourth year PhD student in the life sciences, and I need mentorship, preferably from a Slytherin, or at least someone with a Slytherin hat. My advisor doesn’t want me doing “mercenary collaborations”, or quick experiments with researchers outside my field in exchange for secondary authorships. He says I need to focus on my thesis research in the next year so as to publish and graduate. Are there any academics in the LW readership who have the insight to tell me whether this is good advice or whether he just wants me pumping out papers with his name on them so he can get tenure?
Given the lack of reply the last time how about posting the question to http://academia.stackexchange.com/?
Thanks, doing so.
No one else is probably going to tell you this, but go ahead and do those collaborations. At the end of the day, your thesis is only going to be read by 3 people, and a doctorate degree is just a degree and isn’t important in and of itself. The important things are the work and publications you get done while doing your degree. So unless you doubt your ability to get your thesis done on time, you should be looking on doing all the collaborations you can get your hands on. You are the best judge of your own capabilities here.
I am a slytherin academic supervising a couple of PhD students now and I endorse the above message. If you finish your PhD, collaboration with others is key to future career development. If you don’t finish, though, it’s another story—so make sure you get through. You can always forget to tell your supervisor about some of your collaborations.
If the “mercenary” papers are unrelated to your field, it would also be advantageous to start thinking of ways to portray them as related—this will be helpful in presenting your research as a coherent whole, rather than giving the impression you are just helping on others papers for the sake of your CV. Or, as identifying a specific area of expertise that has cross-disciplinary applications.
Finally if you are not able to portray your mercenary papers as related.… maybe your supervisor has a point and you should work on developing collaborations that offer more than just a one-off publication. I have a couple of “mercenary” publications from my PhD period (no further collaborations beyond one paper) and they stood out like sore thumbs in my CV when I applied for postdocs.
I think the advice “do whatever you have to do to publish and graduate” is good advice. Whether this is better achievable through secondary authorships (which also are very valuable for networking—you’ll need a job once you get your Ph.D.) or through focusing on your thesis, I can’t say. It depends on your field and the specifics of your situation. But you need to be focused on graduating—“almost there but not quite” for many years is a very common failure mode for grad students.
Are you sure you have the right advisor? If you are so concerned that his interests may be that divergent from your own, it might be better to switch advisors than to continue with this one. Ideally, you want an advisor who already has tenure and looks at you like a son or daughter, and will advocate for you as your career progresses. If that’s not the vibe you are getting from your advisor, then look around and see if there’s someone whose personality and style of work better suits you. There will be costs to switching advisors, but they may not be as big as the costs of continuing with a mismatch between advisor and student for more than a year.
I’m in a PhD program in the life sciences and although I haven’t graduated myself (still in my first year), based on almost all of the advice I’ve read, this is good advice. The way to prove to your advisor that you deserve to be able to do quick secondary experiments with people outside of your field is to submit a paper of your own, and then you can do those experiments in the interim while you’re waiting for the reviews. That said, I don’t think I’m all that Slytherin (although I admit that this is what a Slytherin would say).
I already am published. When we got the paper accepted, instead of congratulating me, he said “Now you need to get another one before you graduate.”
Ugh, that’s awful, sorry. It seems like you have a pretty complicated and frustrating situation—feel free to PM me or email me (gmail: amckenz) if you want to talk more.