Speaker 1: Reciprocity.com, the E is written with a three. And in this particular video, I actually wanted to talk to you about building graduate student and advisor relationships. This is a really important thing for anybody that is in graduate school, from both sides actually, for the graduate student and the advisor going forward. So I'm actually a professor of innovation, entrepreneurship, and strategy. And this is something that's really important. We actually talk about this in business school, the sort of relational aspect of business moving forward in terms of being able to find opportunities. So for example, both the advisor and the graduate student can actually get opportunities through these relationships. So for example, it might seem a little bit strange that the graduate advisor might get a opportunity, but let's say their student goes to a university and they really like what that graduate advisor is doing. They can sort of find opportunities in that particular institution for the graduate advisor. That does happen. There is all sorts of other ways. The graduate student obviously will gain from the relationship in terms of finding opportunities for their own jobs. There is, in terms of publishing relationships, it's really important, right? You can actually gain a tremendous amount of synergy, I guess, if you find the right graduate student that works with what you are doing, they're interested in what you're doing, and as well as the graduate student will find what you're doing that's interesting and that you have a kind of a good working relationship going forward. So I did a little bit of Googling before I started this, and I just typed in graduate student advisor relationships. And what was really kind of funny with this is that a lot of this stuff came up very, very negative. So for example, it was, you know, here's a list of all the things that sort of popped up. Changing advisors in graduate school, PhD advisor ignoring me, my PhD supervisor hates me, grad student dating professor. That's kind of funny. PhD supervisor problems. And this is like the worst one that I saw is can you sue your PhD advisor? That is, I mean, that's crazy when it starts getting into that sort of negative territory. And I just thought like, how is this possible? Why is this the case? And I thought, you know, that there's probably really four reasons that are really important. You know, the first one is that thinking that often we treat these relationships as very short term, and that's not the case. It's often a very long-term relationship when you start working on a project together. And it often could be, you know, it's not just one year. So short term, I'm thinking like one-year relationship, but it's often like a 10-year relationship, or if not longer. So you often have to think about that going forward when you make decisions is that this can be a very long-term relationship that you're building, right? So a lot more like a marriage than a sort of contractual relationship in any sort of way. The second thing that often happens that people forget about is, and particularly in academia, is that there's a lot of ambiguous norms in what they should do. So at any point in time, you know, the graduate student doesn't really know what they should sort of expect. Expect, actually, I should tell you right now, expect that you're gonna have to do a significant amount of work. That's just part of the relationship. And then the supervisor or the advisor doesn't really have clear norms in what they should do going forward. And in any particular relationship where there's not a lot of clarity, there's moments of tension, for sure. And if you have to think about how this actually works when you are going through this process from both sides. So the graduate students normally don't realize this, but there is a lot of external pressure that's put on advisors in terms of the publishing process. It's not necessarily them that has to give the, you know, that's providing the negative feedback. It's more of the marketplace because when you're creating ideas, the marketplace is gonna be very negative with those ideas for a long time. So the marketplace being going through the publishing process, right? That's the key thing when you're thinking about this. When you're going through the publishing process, you know, there's lots of smart people out there and they're gonna pick holes with all of the arguments that you have, with the paper that you have, and they're just not gonna let it through this whole publication process. And so the supervisor and the advisors have to sort of poke holes in these ideas before it gets into the marketplace. And that's their, kind of their job. So they have to be very negative all the time. You can think of them as a extremely negative parent that has to sort of poke holes with all these kind of relations, with all the paper at all times. So the third thing that you should be aware of is that when you're creating new knowledge, new ideas is nobody really knows what the right answer is. And this took me a long time to figure out what that is. Took me about three or four years to figure out, you know, your advisor doesn't quite know what the right answer is. You don't know what the right answer is. And even the marketplace, so your reviewers, you know, other faculty members, they don't know what the right answer is, but they know what a better answer is. And so they're often going to pick apart the problems with what you're doing. And by the way, the other thing that you should be well aware of when they're picking apart problems doesn't necessarily mean that they don't like you as a person or they don't like your idea. It actually is kind of the opposite. So if they didn't care, what they would do is just not say anything. They would kind of just not put any effort into what they're doing. And that is a signal, that's more of a stronger signal that there's nothing going on there. Because it's kind of a waste of their time if their idea cannot be developed or they're not going to get any sort of insight from that. And that took a long time for me to figure this out. Is this, when you're creating new ideas, there's so much ambiguity here. And that's why I think that there is moments where people feel like they should be suing other people in these relationships, because it's not clear. And there definitely is a sort of power relationship that goes on between advisors and students. And it should be really, you should be a lot more clear as much as you possibly can. And then the fourth thing that you should think about is that advisors are really just people too. And they have their own pressures and they're dealing with a lot of issues often. Often they might have family issues, which is really important. They might also be dealing with their own tenure requirements, for example. So I'm just about going through the whole tenure process really soon. And it is really stressful. It's really scary and uncertain, which means often you might have to move, for example. And people are dealing with that all the time. So if there's all these stressors and people feel really freaked out, then of course they're going to put pressure on other people to perform, to get them to help them out and sort of get them through to get the tenure position and stuff like that. Like that's obviously going to happen. And if you just kind of take the thought that people are really, advisors are just people too, that they're gonna freak out every once in a while. And that is okay. It sort of softens the blow a little bit when things do happen. It's not to say that, if you're in a really bad relationship, for sure, pursue a different supervisor. For sure, get out of that relationship as quickly as you possibly can, because it's not gonna get any better, any quicker. It's just like a marriage, right? That you should definitely treat this going forward, that there's strong signals going forward in terms of these graduate advisor, graduate student and advisor relationships, and you should treat it seriously. But in terms of building this relationship going forward and dealing with these issues, there's some really important things that you should be doing going forward to help navigate this issue. The first one is, make sure you meet on a regular basis. So that is a sure sign that people are having issues, is when they sort of cash out. And meeting on a regular basis kind of does help out a lot. And when you do meet on a regular basis, so if you are a graduate student, don't show up to their office without having done anything. So that's just gonna irritate people. So you actually have to get some work done. And even if it means writing one or two pages, that's going to be an important step going forward. The other thing when you go through, thinking about your graduate advisor and thinking about graduate students too, if you're the advisor, is think about just taking your time with the relationship as much as you possibly can. Often we wanna jump into these relationships because it's really exciting, you might learn something new, but then you don't know a lot about the particular person and the working relationship going forward. You should really take that seriously. These are long-term relationships and they don't end very quickly. And the last thing is really should be asking other people about advice when you're in these sort of sticky moments. So don't just watch a YouTube video about what you should do but go and ask senior faculty, other senior faculty. If you're a student, ask other PhD students what you should do. You often learn a lot from these moments because these are moments where there's ambiguity in the norms that we have and you should be just really aware of them going forward and what you should do so you can navigate some of these negative issues. So that's all I wanted to talk about today. Make sure you do subscribe to the YouTube channel and give me a thumbs up. All right, take care, bye.