Advisee to Advising (your first research student)

Advisee to Advising (your first research student)

by | Jul 28, 2023 | Career Navigation, Guides, Personal Experiences, Teaching

As graduate students in astronomy progress through their degree-granting programs, they evolve from students into teachers, mentees into collaborators, and occasionally from advisees into advisors. Taking on a younger student to advise them on a research project may seem difficult, stressful, or daunting, and that’s because it can be. But it can also be an incredibly enriching, exciting, and fun experience for you and your student. Advising students, to many, is one of the most rewarding aspects of doing research, but it’s one that many graduate students may not experience over the course of their Ph.D., in part because it can appear so intimidating.I won’t claim to be a great expert on the subject, but this summer I advised my first undergraduate researcher on a project, and my hope is that this Astrobite can serve as an encouragement to others who might be interested in taking on that kind of responsibility during their Ph.D.Your opportunity to advise a research student varies dramatically depending on your employing institution, research group, and funding situation. You might work in a large lab, where older graduate students are expected to supervise younger graduate students; you might be your advisor’s only student; you yourself might be funded through a teaching assistantship, a large grant, a fellowship, or a variety of these; your institution might have money set aside for PIs to take on undergraduate summer students. The point is, most student projects aside from undergraduate theses or unpaid internships require funding in order to compensate the researcher for their work, and often the source of this funding is beyond your capacity to influence.In my...