Doing Economics

7.3 Advising Graduate Students
If you are at a research institution, odds are you will eventually have to
advise graduate students, either master’s or PhD students.
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Even in cases
where your department does not have a graduate program, there is still a
good chance that graduate students in other departments whose research
interests are close to yours will find their way to you, even if it is to just to
serve on their committee as an external member. In all cases, it is worth
having some idea of how to advise graduate students.
For most of us, how to advise graduate students is not immediately
obvious. Much like our experience of the parent–child relationship before
having children of our own is our own relationship with our parents; our
experience of the advisor–advisee relationship before having advisees of
our own is our own experience with our advisor. So how do you go about
doing a good job of advising graduate students?
By my count, I have so far served as advisor or co-advisor for 24
graduate students—19 PhD students, and five MS students. If there are any
general lessons to be drawn, they are as follows.
It is their degree, not yours. I mentioned this earlier in this chapter, but
your graduate students are there for themselves, and not for you to bask in
their reflected glory. You may have grand plans for a student whom you see
as exceptional, but they may not want to continue on to a PhD program, or
they may want to get a job in government or in the private sector, and there
is nothing wrong with that. Conversely, some students may not show much
promise even after going through the necessary pre-dissertation milestones
(e.g., qualifying exams, second-year paper). In all cases, unless they have

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repeatedly ignored your advice or been downright antagonistic, the students
whom you agree to advise deserve that you give them your best.
Think carefully before you refuse to advise someone. Once, a number of
years ago, I declined to advise a student. My reason was simple: they had
told me they could not take my class because it was held at 8:30 in the
morning, and there was no way they could get up that early. Given that, I
concluded that I was unlikely to want to advise someone who let their
preference for sleeping in overrun their preference for the subject I was
supposed to be advising them on. But at an early-career mentoring
workshop in 2017, a colleague who has won numerous graduate teaching
awards for his advising changed my view when he said that he never saw it
as his place to refuse to advise a graduate student, and that by virtue of
getting admitted into your graduate program and satisfying all pre-research
requirements, a student has clearly earned the right to an advisor. There are
obviously some exceptions. If a student has a reputation for having a toxic
personality, you may wish to steer clear of them. Likewise, if you are on the
tenure track and you already have more than your fair share of advisees,
you should be careful about taking on more of them, and carefully weigh
the costs and the benefits involved.
Lay out your expectations clearly and early. One of the things my
institution has been encouraging (but not requiring) faculty to do these past
few years is to write an advising statement, i.e., a document that tells
prospective graduate advisees what you expect of them, and how you
approach the advisor–advisee relationship in general. When our then-
director of graduate studies asked me to write such a statement given how
many students I typically advise, I saw it more as a chore than anything else
—as something to write to help a friend cover their administrative bases.
But as with so many things in this line of work, just writing about
something will help you clarify how you think about it, and my advising
statement has grown to two and a half single-spaced pages. It starts with a
preamble explaining what kind of department our department is, and how
that should affect what students work on. My statement then lists ten
principles that guide my advising, from how it is an advisee’s responsibility
to seek my advising and to schedule meetings with me to how I approach
coauthoring with them, and from how and when they should think about
asking for letters of recommendation to how I envision a good thesis or
dissertation.

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