which can energize those on the lonely trail to a Ph.D. My view now is that it’s not the dissertation topic so much as what students do with it.

Here are four pieces of advice for advisors: help if they stumble, aid non-native speakers, try co-advising, and offer lifelong mentoring.

Help if they stumble. Students may underperform not because they lack ability but because they come to think that “good enough” is OK. Have a heart-to-heart discussion where you point this out and ask if they agree, and from now on they’re expected to perform to the best of their ability. The book The One Minute Manager offers advice on

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handling such touchy situations successfully for all involved.

One colleague asks students that seem stuck to send him a daily report about their research and progress. Some days it could just summarize a paper or talk, or even “I didn’t do anything.” He finds that three to four weeks of this often gets them back on track.

When students really stumble in the program and stop making progress, I have had luck with sending them to industry for a six-month leave, as three months may not be enough to do something significant. Twice students have come back fired up knowing what they want to do for their dissertation and, perhaps more importantly, why they want to do it. A third student decided to stay in industry. That was likely a good decision, as I didn’t look forward to trying to drag him across the Ph.D. finish line if he didn’t return with a greater sense of purpose, and I’m not sure he would have graduated if he wasn’t reinvigorated.

Berkeley CS faculty members hold two meetings a year to review the progress and give feedback to all Ph.D. students. Students meet with advisors beforehand to set mutually agreed upon milestones. Hearing others both praise and criticize your students provides a valuable perspective, and collectively we develop ideas on how to help students in need. Reviews also ensure that no student falls through the cracks. Occasionally, after several warnings, we tell students that their progress is so slow that they should drop out. In more than one instance, these letters lit fires under lethargic students and they filed their disserta-

Group projects
create communities
where students
have others with
whom to interact.

tions soon thereafter.

Aid non-native speakers. Non-native English speakers can offer another set of challenges. As far as I can tell, they just need practice speaking and writing English. (I wish this need were limited to non-native English speakers!) Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style is my

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writing bible, which I share with all my students. Some colleagues have had luck hiring graduate students from other parts of campus to work with CS graduate students to improve their writing. One colleague suggests making sure that if they share an apartment that their roommates don’t speak the same language so that they are forced to speak English. I am trying an experiment to improve the diction of an international student by having him take a course outside the university called “Learn to Speak like an American.”

Try co-advising. As part of our new open labs, we are also trying joint advising. I hear my co-advisors offer great advice that I wish I’d said, and I hope vice versa. Co-advising also has the benefit that when one advisor is traveling there is someone else to meet with the student. It also makes advising more fun for everyone involved. I believe it works well if the advisors meet with the student simultaneously, so that they give consistent advice. (From my long years of experience in academia, I’ve learned you get just as much credit whether you are the sole advisor or if you co-advise a student.)

Mentorship doesn’t end at graduation. After investing five or six years training an apprentice, it must be worthwhile to spend a little more time after graduation to help him or her succeed. I offer to give a talk at their new institution to give them one last shove in the right direction. Danny Cohen recently asked

for advice from Ivan Sutherland—who supervised his 1968 thesis—adding that Danny views advisor is a lifetime job. I agree. I still offer advice to, and receive it from, my former students. (In fact, my former student Mark Hill suggested I write this Viewpoint.)

advising in Retrospect

When I was finishing my Ph.D., I read a book based on interviews of people talking about their jobs to help decide what I would do next. ⁵ What I learned from the book was that people were happy with their careers if they designed or built objects that lasted, such as the Empire State Building or the Golden Gate Bridge, or if they shaped people’s lives, such as patients or parishioners. Thus, I went into the job of assistant professor with the hypothesis that my long-lasting impact was not the papers but the people.

Thirty-two years later, I can confirm that hypothesis: your main academic legacy is the dozens of students you mentor, not the hundreds of papers you publish. My advice to advisors is to get your students off to a good start, create stimulating research environments, help them acquire research taste, be a good role model, bolster student confidence, teach them to speak well publicly, and help them up if they stumble, for students are the real coins of the academic realm.

 

References

1. allen, t.J. and henn, g. The Organization and Architecture of Innovation: Managing the Flow of Technology. Butterworth-heinemann, 2006.

2. Blanchard, k.h. and Johnson, s. The One Minute Manager. William morrow, 1982.

3. carnegie, d. How to Win Friends and Influence People. Pocket, 1998.

4. strunk, W., and White, e.B. The Elements of Style, 4th ed. longman, 1999.

5. terkel, s. Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. Pantheon Books, random house, new york, 1974.

David A. Patterson ( pattrsn@eecs.berkeley.edu) is the Pardee Professor of computer science at u.c. Berkeley and is a fellow and a past president of acm.

i’d first like to thank former students for advice on this Viewpoint: remzi arpaci-dusseau, Pete chen, mike dahlin, garth gibson, and mark hill. additional thanks to mark hill for suggesting developing this Viewpoint about Ph.d. advising. the following Berkeley colleagues improved the draft version of this material: krste asanovic, ruzena Bajsky, armando fox, ken goldberg, marti hearst, Joe hellerstein, thomas henzinger, david hodges, randy katz, Jitendra malik, John ousterhout, alberto sangiovanni-Vincentelli, ion stoica, Jonathan shewchuk, and alan smith. finally, i’d like to thank everyone who worked with me on the projects listed in the table for helping nurture great students.