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The advice I continue giving folks looking into PhD programs is to look for an advisor who is kind.
Don’t look for the “most brilliant” advisor. Look for the person who is kind, who mentors you, lifts you up.
And pro-tip: kind folks are usually the most brilliant.
#PhDChat
Don’t look for the “most brilliant” advisor. Look for the person who is kind, who mentors you, lifts you up.
And pro-tip: kind folks are usually the most brilliant.
#PhDChat
Getting a PhD is a long journey. And it’s a journey that is challenging not just intellectually but emotionally. You learn a lot about yourself in this process and you grow in ways you weren’t expecting.
#PhDChat
#PhDChat
Kind advisors walk through the PhD process with you and help name your growth, name your gifting, and push you where you need to be pushed. Kind advisors don’t just care about you as a “scholar,” but as a human being. And in the end that matters more.
#PhDChat
#PhDChat
I share this as someone who has kind, loving, life giving advisors who constantly affirm my connections to community and remind me that life is so much bigger than the academy even as we choose to work within it. I’ve been truly blessed.
#PhDChat
#PhDChat
Because it keeps coming up I want to add one thing to this thread: “kindness” does not mean an advisor isn’t rigorous. In fact, that an advisor sees you as a whole person and sees your full potential precisely means they will be rigorous and push you and challenge you.
I want to interrogate this idea that a “kind” advisor isn’t rigorous. Because to me that logic buys into the toxicity of the academy that says “good scholars” must be cut throat and climb over everyone else—a notion that’s inherently white supremacist and masculinist.
#PhDChat
#PhDChat
It’s white supremacist and masculinist because it keeps upholding an imaginary of the “ideal academic” who is historically constituted but doesn’t exist. This imagined academic is white, male, wealthy, and has maids and a wife to take care of the household while they pontificate.
Kindness isn’t in the per view of this imagined white male academic because it doesn’t have to be: their position was given to them and they assume they’re entitled to it.
But is this the academy we want to reproduce?
But is this the academy we want to reproduce?
Kindness is not antithetical to rigor. In fact kindness and rigor go hand in hand precisely because we see each other as full humans with so much potential. And I wonder if our assumption that kindness is antithetical to rigor stems from the toxicity of the academy.
