The first graduate student I hired as a professor was a young lady named Tara. She was very bright, and I wish I would’ve done a better job advising her. She came to Penn State from Bradley University, a small private university in Peoria, Illinois. While I’m sure she got a sound undergraduate education, I should have suggested taking upper-level undergraduate classes when she got to Penn State instead of graduate classes. The graduate classes seemed to overwhelm her as a new graduate student.
I understood part of the issue almost two years after first meeting her. Another professor asked me how old Tara was, and I remember looking at him and saying, “I don’t know. Graduate student age? 24 or so.” He said that his students had told him she was young. I then pulled her application from the department files and realized that she was 18 when she started working with me. She had spent four years in high school and four years in college, as usual, but started high school very young.
I wish I had known this when I hired her. Knowing how young she was would not have changed my decision, but I would have handled things somewhat differently. It’s not like Tara was immature; for an 18-year-old, she was probably too mature. She always seemed extremely serious and didn’t seem to be enjoying her time as a student. Tara also didn’t seem interested in the research project I’d given her. It seemed like an exciting topic, but Tara never seemed motivated to work on it; thus, she made plodding progress. I asked Tara many times if she’d like to work on something else or even find a different adviser. She always said everything was fine, but I knew if Tara weren’t excited about the research at the start, she would hate it after a few years.
After three years of making very little progress, I wasn’t sure what to do. I supported Tara with research money, and as a new professor, I needed her to be productive. At some point at one of our weekly meetings, she broke down and started to cry. Once she collected herself, she told me that she didn’t have much interest in doing any research and had been miserable trying to force herself to make progress. I think she understood my situation–needing her to be productive–and wasn’t sure how to say she wanted to quit school after I’d supported her for a year.
She also made it very clear that getting a Ph.D. was not her interest or goal; it was her parent’s. Thus, I’m sure she also didn’t know how to tell her parents she wanted to give up on the dream they had for her. I’m not sure if her parents had advanced degrees or if they thought that as a “gifted” child getting a Ph.D. was the best thing for her. I let her know that I was okay with her decision and would help her transform her work into a thesis for her Master’s degree.
After this meeting, her demeanor completely changed. She cut off what had been extremely long hair and just seemed to be happy for the first time. I think she finally admitted that not getting a doctorate did not mean she hadn’t fulfilled her potential. She also clearly had decided that she needed to do what was best for her and not what her parents felt was best.
She spent about a year finishing her thesis and got a job at an excellent company that makes software ubiquitous to all of science and engineering. I have not kept in touch with her, but I hope she’s happy. Every once in a while, I’ll check her LinkedIn page. She’s now a “Senior Quality Engineering Manager,” so she must be doing well. I certainly hope so.
Through this and other experiences as an adviser, I quickly learned that it’s not something at which I’m particularly good. I knew managing people was never something I wanted to do, which was a significant reason I went to graduate school. However, I learned as a professor that I’m not good at motivating people. Motivating people usually means creating some stress for them to get something done, and I so hate being under pressure that I avoid putting other people under it.
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