afternoons are for socializing and exercising, and work late at night. I decided very early on in graduate school that weekends were for me, not my thesis, and I think it helped me to stay sane.

Many graduate students hit the doldrums around the end of the second or beginning of the third year, when they’re finishing up their course work and trying to focus in on a thesis topic. Sometimes this process can take quite a while. Try to find useful, enjoyable activities that can take your mind off of the thesis: sing in a choir, learn a foreign language, study the history of ancient Greece, garden, or knit. If you schedule regular activities (rehearsals, tennis lessons), you will probably find it easier to avoid drifting aimlessly from day to day.

In the final push to finish your thesis, though, you will almost certainly have less time for social activities than you used to. Your friends may start to make you feel guilty, whether they intend to or not. Warn them in advance that you expect to turn down lots of invitations, and it’s nothing personal— you need to focus on your thesis for a while. Then you’ll be all done and free as a bird! (Until the next phase of your life starts...)

I think an oft-noted bad thing about finishing is adjusting to no longer having a long term, ever-elusive goal. But now that five months have gone by, I find I’m much more efficient in my work because I no longer have that awful weight hanging by a thread over my head, and much happier, more relaxed, more light-hearted.

Issues for Women

Although this paper started out from a discussion about the problems women face in graduate school, it has evolved into something that I think is relevant for everyone, not just women. This is not to say, however, that there aren’t special problems faced by women.

In many cases, women and men face the same obstacles in graduate school, but react differently to them. For women, the additional factors that are sometimes (but not always) present include isolation, low self-esteem, harassment and discrimination, unusual time pressures arising from family responsibilities, lack of a support network, and lack of relevant experience. Having an unsupportive advisor can thus become much more of a problem for women than for men. I hope that to some extent, this paper will help both women and advisors of women to provide the supportive, positive environment that all graduate students deserve.

Part of the reason that I changed the focus of the paper is that there have been many articles written recently on the subject of women scientists and women graduate students. These include [ 27], [ 17], [ 19], [ 22], [ 13], [ 15], [ 14], [ 28], and [ 26]. McKay [ 18] talks about issues relevant for minority faculty members, many of which pertain to minority graduate students. The systers mailing list is an electronic resource for women in computer science; send e-mail to [e-mail] for more information.

Conclusions

In addition to the papers I have cited directly in the article, I found a variety of other resources to be useful, and have included them in the References section.

The UC Berkeley Graduate is a newsletter published by the UC Berkeley Graduate Division with articles of general interest to graduate students. I found this publication very informative both during graduate school and while writing this article. A number of particularly interesting articles are included in the References section.

Several articles [ 4, 2, 3] give general advice on graduate school and doing research. Guidelines and suggestions for reviewing papers are given in [ 24] and [ 23].

A number of articles on writing proposals and successfully applying for research grants are available [ 16, 29, 30, 25]. The topic of how to find a job, and how to prepare for the job search during graduate school, is the topic of [ 12].

Graduate school is not an easy process, and too many students are thwarted and intimidated by unsupportive or unskilled advisors, lack of knowledge about what graduate school is all about, inflexible bureaucracies, and a myriad of other obstacles. I have tried to give advice that graduate students and caring advisors can use to lessen some of these obstacles.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Susan Epstein, Diana Gordon, and Devika Subraman-ian for the original discussion that led to writing this paper. Many people provided useful feedback on an earlier draft that was circulated on the Internet, especially Mark Kantrowitz, John W. Buchanan (who suggested the idea and wrote the original draft for the section on social aspects of advising, and Marti Hearst. I gracefully acknowledge defeat with respect to the original title (it was supposed to be “How to be a Good {Graduate Student/Advisor },” but was too often misinterpreted as “How to be a Good (Graduate Student) Advisor”); thanks to Peter Soderquist for the first half of the new title. Any deficiencies remaining in the paper are entirely my fault!

How to be a Terrible Thesis Advisor

by Nigel Ward (a young faculty member and advisor who hopes others can learn from his mistakes)

• Assign students thesis topics based on the section headings in your grant proposal, or on the boxes of the flowchart for your master plan.

• When someone brings up a research paper, tell anecdotes about the author, his or her advisor, and his or her colleagues. This will impress [on] students that who you know is more important than what you do.

When laying out your laboratory, give first priority to minimizing the cost of cable, last priority to good workplaces for students, and no priority to fostering interaction among students.

• Read your students’ papers at most once.

• When honest differences of opinion arise, paper them over with words. For example, say “Well, we could talk about this forever, but I think we’re all working towards the same basic idea, let’s call it a ‘neologistic/noetic knowledge representation.’ Now let’s move on.”

Regarding other schools of thought, make sure students know just enough to be able to point out the “fatal flaws” in each, and so can be good foot soldiers in the crusade for your own approach. A useful phrase is “Why do you want to waste your time reading that?”

• Never visit the laboratory; learn about students’ work only from what they tell you.

Define your research aims with catch phrases (“dynamic X,” “emergent Y,” “the Z problem,” etc.).

On Finishing

Despite how difficult graduate school can be at times, the benefits are significant. Of course, you’ll learn useful professional skills like doing research, formulating problems and critically evaluating alternative solutions, giving written and oral presentations of your work, and interacting with other researchers. But graduate school—and in particular the process of formulating, researching, and writing a dissertation—gives you confidence in your ability to tackle hard problems and to become an expert in a new field. A fellow PhD put it much better than I can: ^•

...it isn’t just that I can write technical things and I can talk to other researchers with confidence—I can talk to almost any authority figure with confidence. Partly this is because I now know what it is to be an expert in something, and although I respect other peoples’ expertise in their areas of specialization, I also know that I’m just as respectable and they (usually) aren’t any more so than I. I also think I can write about things in other areas, provided I’ve done my homework and learned the area. I feel empowered! And I would never have ^• gotten this from a CS programming job or even a masters degree.

Of course, there are also the incalculable benefits of finishing the dissertation. Even though it can leave you at loose ends (what will you do with your weekends, now that you no longer have to work on your thesis?) there’s often a feeling of euphoria, heightened by exhaustion, when you • finally hand in your thesis. As the person quoted above put it: