When you’re juggling research projects, a 4/4 schedule, and domestic life, taking a quiet hour to advise a graduate student on a dissertation is always pure joy, right? Right.

The pseudonymous Lucky Jane, an assistant professor at Jumbo Public University, is trapped in a frustrating e-mail relationship with an advisee, and she’s catching herself writing large chunks of the student’s proposal herself.

Profgrrrrl, too, is worried that she’s letting an ABD student become too dependent on her for nudging. She’s asked for advice from graduate students, and she’s harvested 27 comments so far.

At Clashing Hats, the pseudonymous Hilaire is suffering a certain measure of impostor syndrome. “Having just defended my own Ph.D. in December 2005,” Hilaire writes, “it feels — no matter how much I reason with myself — a bit presumptuous of me to be gatekeeping for advanced students.”

In The Chronicle in 2006, Diana Carlin and David Perlmutter urged departments to provide better training to fledgling faculty members who are suddenly charged with supervising dissertations.

(Photo by the Flickr user Orin Optiglot. Used under a Creative Commons license.)