Question (from "Wanda"): As a graduate student at Super U, I'll have to do my dissertation with the only professor in my field, a recent widow who's very dependent on her students for company, emotional support, and household chores (taking pets to the kennel, painting the garage, even killing mice). One student before me lost his partner of five years because they never saw each other, thanks to Dr. Widow's time demands. She's very kind, melancholy, and needy, and I feel terribly sorry for her. And for myself.
Answer: Ms. Mentor, who carries the wisdom of centuries with her, sympathizes with the young who feel trapped. But she also knows that you all are quite capable of thinking and plotting and scheming with a healthy selfishness.
Ms. Mentor's own adviser, the famous Euclid, long ago taught her how to set up a geometric problem -- with givens, postulates, points to be proved or rejected logically. Ms. Mentor learned that a problem cannot be solved if the givens aren't utterly clear -- if, for instance, you believe you have an isosceles triangle, but it's really, secretly, a rhombus.
Ms. Mentor thinks your problem is too many givens and not enough give.
As you describe it, you must work in the sphere in which Dr. Widow navigates. You must work with Dr. Widow. You must be at her university. You must be at her beck and call.
But must you?
Ms. Mentor has long fulminated against the notion that graduate students are the indentured servants of faculty members. Female graduate students often rightly complain about their male professors: "When they look at me, they're thinking only one thing. Baby sitter!" Similarly, burly male students are often treated as in-house furniture movers: "Earl" threw his back out permanently while moving Dr. Great Man's fridge, and there was no worker's compensation.
Graduate students are not their professors' sexual toys, nor should they be coerced into activities that are painful or bizarre -- such as gathering tiger dung to fertilize a professor's marigolds, or drinking noxious liquids, or taking unusual drugs "in the interests of science." Grad students are, after all, human subjects.
And now Ms. Mentor, having completed her rant, returns to patient Wanda who -- if she blindly follows the map she has been given -- may wind up as Dr. Widow's servant-companion, not just her apprentice.
Ms. Mentor believes that we should all show compassion and generosity toward our fellow creatures, but Wanda cannot easily set up boundaries ("only Wednesdays and no mice"). Wanda may find good advice in Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen -- but it should not be the bible governing her graduate work.
Wanda's job is to do independent research, not to walk on eggshells for fear of offending or disappointing the person who will most influence the start of her career. (See Ms. Mentor's earlier column, "What to Do When You Are Not Your Dissertation Adviser's Favorite.")
Ms. Mentor wonders why Wanda would sign up for such an ordeal.
Which brings Ms. Mentor back to the givens, especially the common belief among the young and the new that the world of adults is immutable, and that newbies have to suck up what's served.
Nay, says Ms. Mentor, who asks:
Is Dr. Widow truly the only one in Wanda's field? Ms. Mentor urges Wanda to seek related project ideas from other professors in her department. They will be flattered by her interest, while she will be able to gauge their enthusiasm for her and her work (without, of course, mentioning any doubts about Dr. Widow). Unless Dr. Widow has done something utterly unique -- such as discovering a new element, widorium -- there should be someone else who can shepherd Wanda's work.
If there truly isn't, then Ms. Mentor urges Wanda to apply to other graduate schools -- and interview potential directors before she enrolls. Yes, yes, Ms. Mentor knows that Wanda has a Super U. fellowship or assistantship, and she'll lose money and she'll appear flaky and she'll have to leave her friends and the apartment she loves. ... Yes, but life is long, and graduate years are short, and losing a little money and time is nothing compared with leaving graduate school exhausted, depressed, and resentful, and asking yourself bitterly (as so many students do anyway): Do I really want to be an academic?
Wanda should be cordial toward Dr. Widow, but must not be diverted from her own straightforward path toward the training, the degree, the teaching, and the learning. Wanda must keep her eyes on the prize.
Or, as Euclid long ago told Ms. Mentor, as they strolled past his office in the library at Alexandria, one of the marvels of the ancient world: "You know, the shortest distance between two points is really a straight line."
Question: Does Ms. Mentor often get grammatically incorrect, poorly spelled letters from unsuccessful job hunters who wonder why "their not perseving what I can due for them"?
Answer: Sigh.
SAGE READERS: Ms. Mentor has been hoarding perspicacious letters about disability for a future column and welcomes more -- especially since one recent correspondent called Ms. Mentor a "sniveling wimp" on the subject. Ms. Mentor would like it to be known that she never snivels, and soon she will courageously publish her own and readers' anonymous thoughts and criteria for "The Most Dysfunctional Environments in Academia." There is still time to contribute gossip and dyspeptic ventilations for that column and all future ones.
As always, questions are invited and anonymity is guaranteed to Ms. Mentor's correspondents. She rarely answers letters personally, always masks identifying details, directs readers to her archive and her tome (below), and urges correspondents to employ subject headings, lest their epistles be eaten by her ever-hungry spam filters.
