Doing Economics

7
Advising Students
I stated in the introduction that I would not be discussing teaching.
Although advising and mentoring sometimes counts as teaching, and
sometimes as service, I view it as a mixture of both. Because of the
teaching-and-service nature of advising and mentoring, and because
advising is not something that is taught in graduate school, the topic
deserves its own chapter.
Before anything else, I should distinguish between advising and
mentoring. In what follows, I use “advising” to refer to a formal
relationship wherein a faculty member formally guides a student through
their studies, and I use “mentoring” to refer to an informal relationship
wherein a researcher occasionally offers their advice to a student or a
(usually junior) colleague in the context of a less formal relationship. This
is not a hard and fast rule; it is merely a convention I follow in this chapter.
Why advise and mentor? In the case of advising, you may get formal
credit for it. In my first job, I would get credit for every master’s student
whose thesis I advised, and when I had enough credits I could buy out of
teaching one class. In my current job, advising master’s theses and PhD
dissertations is expected of me, and doing so only counts insofar as annual
merit raises go. In other words, the more students I help get through our
graduate program, the more likely I am to see a greater salary increase.
Another incentive to advise students is that you may see promise in a given
student as a future collaborator or coauthor. Mentoring, for its part, is
usually done because the mentor has an interest in seeing the person they
mentor succeed. In either case, much like participating in volunteer
organizations, you get out of advising and mentoring what you put into
them.
The remainder of this chapter will first discuss some general principles. It
will then discuss each of advising undergraduate and graduate students—
master’s and PhD—and mentoring students and colleagues.

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