How to Be a Good Dissertation Adviser: Guidance From Some of Our Field’s Most Successful Mentors

Abstract

The academy has undergone substantial change in the last decade with many new internal and external pressures. Relatively fewer full-time faculty are asked to do much more. Advisers are taking on more roles than previously expected, with little to no training. Graduate student enrollment has increased while the job market has tightened. Graduate students are experiencing worse mental health than any past cohort. The challenges associated with mentoring the Ph.D. students of today require renewed evaluation of what works and what doesn’t. Here we solicited advice from political scientists with a history of outstanding mentorship to share their collective wisdom and experience about how they advise and provide effective mentoring for today’s Ph.D. students.

Keywords:

• Advising
• mentoring
• dissertation
• mental health
• career
• professional development

Acknowledgements

We give our deepest thanks to all those who provided their guidance to the next generation of mentors and advisers and more importantly for being great mentors and helping to bring out the best in their students.

Author contributions

Both authors designed the study, collected and analyzed the data. Both authors drafted the manuscript, and both authors provided critical revisions. Both authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission.

Ethical approval

All procedures contributing to this work comply with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human subjects and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1968, as revised in 2008. This study was approved by the Office of Research Protections, Human Research Protection Program at the Pennsylvania State University (STUDY00022054).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Open practices, transparency and replication

The raw data, even unidentified, is identifiable and therefore will not be deposited to a public Dataverse repository. A redacted version is made available to the editors. Respondents were guaranteed confidentiality in their responses but were offered the opportunity to make their contributions public.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter K. Hatemi

Pete Hatemi is Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Co-fund in Microbiology at Penn State University. He conducts research in the fields of political psychology, human behavior, genetics, public policy, health care and national defense, working in the academic, government, private and public sectors.

Rose McDermott

Rose McDermott is the David and Mariana Fisher University Professor of International Relations at Brown University and a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of five books, a coeditor of two additional volumes, and author of over two hundred academic articles across a wide variety of disciplines encompassing topics such as American foreign and defense policy, experimentation, national security intelligence, gender, social identity, cybersecurity, emotion and decision-making, and the biological and genetic bases of political behavior.