Timeline for Choice of adviser
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 3, 2009 at 2:05 | comment | added | Chris Godsil | In my experience as an advisor, remote supervision works very poorly. There might be occasional exceptions, where the student does not need supervision, but this will be rare. | |
| Dec 1, 2009 at 22:01 | comment | added | Ben Webster♦ | Charles- David Shea Vela-Vick's advisor moved to Georgia Tech after David had started working with him at Penn. | |
| Dec 1, 2009 at 17:48 | comment | added | Charles Siegel | Michael, yeah, that's what I was thinking about, but also, I think Shea did that here at UPenn with someone outside the department, don't remember the details, though. | |
| Dec 1, 2009 at 17:25 | comment | added | Ben Webster♦ | I'll note: the MIT and Harvard situation is different from any other pair of schools. As far as I can tell, no distinction is made for advisor pairing between the two schools. I know a couple of people who had remote advisors (most, though not all, as a result of the advisor moving to another school), where it worked fine, but that doesn't mean I would recommend it. | |
| Dec 1, 2009 at 17:05 | comment | added | Deane Yang | These days, with the telephone, email, and skype, you can definitely work with a remote advisor, if you don't need constant guidance. My recommendation is to start by establishing email contact and asking for informal guidance ("what should I read if I want to learn...") from someone appropriate. If you develop a good rapport, then you can ask if that person will be your advisor. The most successful example that I know of this is Curt McMullen, who was a graduate student at Harvard, but somehow became a student of Dennis Sullivan, who had joint positions at IHES and CUNY at the time. | |
| Dec 1, 2009 at 17:04 | comment | added | Michael Lugo | It also helps to have two schools in very close proximity; I'm guessing the example Charlie is thinking of involves people at Harvard and MIT, which are about two miles apart. | |
| Dec 1, 2009 at 16:43 | comment | added | Charles Siegel | I'm not doing it, so I can't go into much detail. Everyone I know who has done it has their elsewhere advisor at a nearby school (in particular, the main example I'm thinking of was in Boston, and so were both of his advisors, just at different schools). As for how resistant profs may be, I would assume it varies wildly from prof to prof. | |
| Dec 1, 2009 at 16:19 | comment | added | user709 | I am quite curious about how the local-elsewhere advisor setup could work. If your advisor is quite far away from where you are, then how can the supervising process work? | |
| Dec 1, 2009 at 15:52 | history | answered | Charles Siegel | CC BY-SA 2.5 |