Individual Advising: Guidelines for Advising/Mentoring Relationships
Role of the Director of Graduate Studies
The DGS furnishes graduate students and faculty with timely information about any changes in program
requirements, and clarifies any ambiguities in departmental rules. He/she should be available to help students in the coursework stage as they design a course of study that fits their intellectual interests and needs. The DGS will often play an especially significant advising role for incoming and first-year students, because the department encourages to students to formalize a relationship with a permanent advisor only after the first year. The DGS meets regularly with incoming and first-year students, to counsel them on course selection and other programmatic issues. The DGS also assigns incoming students temporary advisors, after communicating with them about their needs and discussing the choice with relevant faculty members. In the first year, both the DGS and the temporary advisor are crucial in introducing students to the program, the department, and graduate school.
Once a student has identified a permanent, primary advisor (see below), the DGS will defer to that faculty member in decisions related to course selection and the construction of an intellectual agenda for the graduate student. But the DGS will play a significant ancillary role, furnishing advice about course offerings, professional development (the DGS, for example, should help to coordinate mock interviews in early January for graduate students who will be interviewing for jobs at the AHA), or dilemmas of professional ethics. In addition, the DGS should offer assistance in mediating any complications or difficulties that arise in the advisor-advisee relationship.
The DGS, along with the department's Graduate Committee, also serves as a crucial conduit of information from graduate students to the department, offering feedback about graduate student concerns, as well as proposals to the Executive Committee and the faculty as a whole.
Selecting and Changing Advisors
The department encourages prospective, incoming, and first-year students to communicate with potential advisors, inquiring about such issues as:
• the range of their intellectual interests;
• their views about how closely they expect advisees' interests to track their own;
• their expectations about courses the student should take and languages in which they should have competence;
• their practices in offering feedback about written work, teaching, or other intellectual matters;
• their particular style in advising (tending toward the requirement of regular meetings, or tending toward a willingness to provide a sounding board when asked; tending toward greater formality or informality); and
• their general expectations regarding dissertation topics and research methodologies (preference for overseeing topics directly related to their own research expertise, or willingness to advise more broadly).
By the end of the first year or the beginning of the second year, students should have settled on a primary advisor whose research interests coincide with his/her expected major field of study. Most of the time, this selection will be fairly straightforward: the primary advisor will be a faculty member who initially drew the graduate student to Duke or someone with whom the student has taken a course and discussed research interests. In all instances, primary advisors must formally agree to supervise the student's work.
Students' interests sometimes shift in graduate school, and occasionally an advisee and an advisor fail to develop an effective working relationship. Advisors also retire, go on extended leave, or move to other universities. Students thus have the option of changing their primary advisors, within the limits set by the Graduate School (such as the prohibition on changing the membership of dissertation committees within two months of a scheduled exam). Because such a change can have short-term and long-term consequences, students should first discuss it with the DGS, before doing anything else. The DGS must agree to any change in a student's primary advisor.
Students should be aware that no faculty member has the obligation to take on a particular graduate student. Therefore, any student who wishes to change advisors should ensure that another faculty member is willing to assume the role of primary advisor before severing the relationship with the initial advisor. Before taking on a student who wishes to change advisors, faculty members have an obligation to acquaint themselves with a student's background and progress in the program, and judge carefully whether the proposed fit is a sensible one.
Responsibilities of Primary Graduate Advisors
Historians who advise graduate students rely on a variety of approaches to advising, and often adopt different approaches with different students or with the same student at different moments in his/her career. Any list of principles concerning the relationship between faculty advisors and graduate students must provide substantial leeway for this spectrum of advising styles, as well as for the tenets of academic freedom. At the same time, the training of graduate students represents one of the most important functions that our faculty performs, and so the department wishes to articulate several basic principles about the respective responsibilities of faculty and graduate students, so that the individuals on each side of this very special pedagogical relationship clearly understand their roles and obligations.
• Members of the graduate faculty should know the basic rules of the program, especially concerning numbers and kinds of courses, the parameters for fields and language exams, the mechanics of preliminary examinations and the prospectus colloquium (for those students entering the program before the 2005-06 academic year), preliminary certification (for those students entering in 2005-06 and after), and the dissertation defense. (This principle takes on particular importance in the context of the various reforms associated with the department's participation in the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate, since we have made significant changes to the curriculum.)
• Primary advisors of graduate students commit themselves to regular communication with their advisees, to discuss not only ongoing courses, research, and written work, but also the full range of issues relating to the course of study and broader professional development. Those issues will differ somewhat from student to student, but would likely include: course selection; preliminary examination fields; issues relating to teaching; other faculty members with whom the student should work; grant opportunities and proposal writing; potential dissertation topics and the shaping of a dissertation prospectus; job market strategies; etc. If both advisor and student are in residence, such meetings should occur at least four times a year. When faculty members or ABD students are not in residence, primary advisors should communicate regularly via email and/or phone.
• Primary advisors should provide prompt feedback on research and writing for coursework, including papers for research seminars, even when the primary advisor is not teaching a particular research seminar. During the dissertation phase of graduate students' careers, advisors should provide timely reading and feedback on dissertation drafts, as well as advice about strategies for publication.
• In fostering the professional development of their advisees, primary advisors should take reasonable steps to pass along information about funding opportunities and conferences, and where appropriate, to connect their students to other relevant scholars, both inside the department and beyond Duke.
• Graduate advisors should offer their students advice about how to develop and sustain an intellectual agenda, how to handle the job market, and how to build a career; advisors further should expect to write letters of recommendation on behalf of their students, for grants, fellowships, and employment opportunities.
• At all times, graduate advisors owe their students candor about their performance and prospects, as well as respect in all communications, verbal or written. All faculty members who work with graduate students should also take note of and abide by the university's policies on sexual harassment.
• Where appropriate, advisors should act as a liaison between the department/DGS and their students; whenever discussing a particular student's situation with other faculty or university staff, graduate advisors should demonstrate discretion and respect for privacy.
• No graduate advisor should be expected to furnish psychological counseling, nor to meet deadlines for recommendations without timely notice and provision of relevant materials (draft application letters, wording of advertisements, etc.), nor to share information with advisees that would violate standards of professional ethics.
• All obligations of a primary graduate advisor REMAIN IN FORCE during sabbaticals or other leaves.
Responsibilities of Graduate Students in the Advising Relationship
Like faculty, graduate students will approach the advising relationship with a variety of needs and expectations. But all graduate students should recognize that they are responsible, in the end, for their own education, and for their development as scholars and teachers. Indeed, in most instances, good advising from faculty depends on the willingness of graduate students to initiate channels of communication, to identify key issues and questions, and to weigh proffered advice with an open mind. In particular, graduate students:
• should become familiar with the basic rules of the program by reading the graduate student handbook and by asking either their advisors or the DGS to clarify any bureaucratic ambiguities. Graduate students are responsible for knowing the correct rules even if they have been misinformed on a particular issue by a faculty member.
• have the responsibility to exercise substantial care and thought when selecting an advisor. This selection is a crucial decision, and students should give it the time and attention it deserves. Graduate students, for example, should ask for clarity about a potential advisor's expectations and style of advising.
• have the obligation to keep in regular touch with their primary advisor, making him/her aware of their progress, of any pressing or looming decisions, and of any emerging difficulties or problems in their course of study. Uninformed advisors cannot give sensible or timely advice. On occasion, the desire for privacy leads some graduate students not to inform an advisor about personal circumstances that are impeding their academic progress; when those circumstances are clearly going to have a substantial impact on the student's ability to meet programmatic requirements and expectations; she/he owes a confidential explanation to the advisor.
• owe their advisors respect and candor in all communications, verbal and written, and should respect their advisors' privacy.
• have the obligation to give their advisors reasonable notice of upcoming deadlines for letters of recommendation.
• should take care that any particular arrangement or agreement with the DGS that diverges from ordinary departmental rules and regulations be put in writing. Occasionally, individual circumstances lead the DGS to make an exception from standard policy. If such exceptions have a clear paper trail, students can avoid any complications arising when a new faculty member, not privy to the earlier agreement, becomes DGS.
• do NOT owe their advisors any work outside the formal, paid roles of research assistant or teaching assistant, and should not feel obligated to furnish advisors with a sympathetic ear for the latter's personal problems.
Mentoring/Advising Responsibilities of Faculty Other Than the Primary Advisor
We strongly encourage graduate students to seek out faculty members other than the primary advisor, to gain exposure to a variety of scholarly approaches, intellectual perspectives, and pedagogical philosophies, as well as a range of practical opinions about the kinds of issues and choices that confront graduate students in history. The faculty members who play supporting roles in a graduate student's education -- whether as teacher of a seminar, supervisor of a teaching assistant, supervisor of a preliminary examination field, member of a prospectus or dissertation committee, or just plain provider of advice -- have analogous obligations to those of the primary advisor. The obligations of particular faculty roles, however, deserve additional articulation:
• Faculty who teach graduate students in seminars or independent studies in a given semester have the obligation to complete candid evaluation forms for ALL students in a timely fashion.
• Faculty who oversee teaching assistants should meet regularly with their T.A.s to discuss such matters as: strategies for section discussions; advice for assisting students as they work on assignments; parameters for grading papers and exams; and possible approaches to difficult situations in the classroom or with particular students. Where appropriate, faculty should also give their T.A.s opportunities to develop teaching-related skills, as in developing potential examination questions, or preparing, with the faculty's assistance, a lecture in the course.
• Faculty who supervise a field for students working toward preliminary certification should communicate clear expectations about the appropriate contents of the portfolio. Field supervisors should also furnish ongoing feedback to students as they prepare materials for the field.
• Faculty who serve on dissertation committees should provide detailed feedback on the completed dissertation, with particular attention to the kinds of revisions that would likely be required for publication of the dissertation, either in parts on whole.