Question for you proffy bloggers
A friend of mine chose a supervisor for her thesis, after being told that Dr. Unavailable would be around for the first half of the summer (by Dr. U). (It’s a summer-long project.) She just finds uot that Dr. U is not around at all in the summer, so mostly she’ll be working with Dr. TotalStranger. Dr. TS is supposed to be hard to work with, and they have never met. It may or may not be possible to change thesis advisors now. So, should my friend: try to change projects and advisors, go with Dr. TS, something else I cannot think of?
May 16th, 2006 at 7:39 pm
Isn’t there a third option for someone she could work with? Alternatively, isn’t there an opportunity to get feedback from Dr. U electronically. My advisor was (literally) in Egypt while I was dissertating — the most crucial writing months — but we completely communicated via email about it all and it worked fine, but we had known each other for years by that point, so maybe it wouldn’t work for everyone.
May 16th, 2006 at 8:26 pm
Well, she could work with someone else on a different sort of project. But it’s a 1-year masters program, and from what I understand, without giving too much away (unless she comments here to give more info), it requires somewht more talking than just email.
May 16th, 2006 at 10:21 pm
Not knowing much about academia, but just about people, I’d say that it would be time for her to meet Dr. TS ASAP, at least for lunch. Best to find out if *she* finds him hard to work with, and then make the call.
May 16th, 2006 at 10:26 pm
It also depends, I think, on the nature of the project and how much supervising the student needs. If she needs an advisor more as a formality than anything, and Dr. TS isn’t known to be a a total boor who must insert his ego into every project, then she could take the gamble on Dr. TS. But Elaine is right–they’d need to meet, ASAP.
May 18th, 2006 at 7:57 am
Summerlong project makes me think we’re talking undergrad thesis here. Is that right? If so, then in my opinion, the most important thing is to do any project at all to get some experience, and it kind of doesn’t matter what and with whom it is. That said, I recommend Elaine’s suggestion of meeting and forming her own opinion of Dr. TS. If things seem not horrible after that, then it’s hard to imagine things getting intolerably bad in only four months of research.
May 18th, 2006 at 9:08 am
No, MA (or MSc, I’m not sure, actually). I disagree that it doesn’t matter who you do your undergrad thesis with (though I think it matters less what you do it *on*).
Anyways, I think she is going to meet and see what happens. I will post whatever updates are reasonable.