Day: April 24, 2025

You and Your Advisor – A Relationship that Matters

Graduate school is tough enough. Classes, papers, research. Sometimes you feel like you’re hanging on by your fingernails. The last thing you need is a complicated relationship with your advisor.

For a grad student, one of your most important relationships is with your faculty advisor. This relationship shapes a student’s career while in school and is often key to the student’s future success. Suppose a student has a supportive and positive relationship with their advisor and is truly mentored by them. In that case, the student gains confidence, experiences effective leadership, and gains an ally for their professional future. That’s the way it should work.

However, the student-advisor relationship is often marred by poor communication and misunderstood expectations. It’s not good, but it is understandable. The students and the professors who serve as advisors have lots on their plates. And let’s be honest. There is a power dynamic between a student and mentor that can be pretty daunting. Overcoming or working within that dynamic can make a huge difference in building a mutually beneficial, productive, and professional relationship. Grad students need the guidance and experience their mentors provide, and advisors take pride in their students’ successes and academic achievements.

Communication is key! Wherever your relationship stands, you can level the power dynamic with some strategies that are easy to learn and, with practice, can become part of your “communication toolbox.”

We are thrilled to work with the stellar graduate students at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering to help them learn new approaches to building a successful relationship with their advisors. Through Exact’s mix of improvisation exercises and facilitated discussions, we’ve developed some strategies the students have found especially useful. These include:

• Approach the relationship as a collaboration: you both benefit when the relationship works, and you both need the other to achieve goals.
• Clarify the goal for each interaction with your advisor and present your needs clearly
• Understand and address your mentor’s needs and priorities
• Make sure your mentor knows that they have been heard
• Find confidence in what you know

Try these approaches yourself by setting up a practice session with a friend. See how quickly you can change a daunting relationship into a productive academic partnership.

And contact us at Exact if you’d like to know more about including our Navigating Your Relationship with your Faculty Advisor workshop in your academic program. We’d love to hear from you.

Somewhere Between Happy and a Total #@%! Wreck!

I’m getting used to talking myself down. This is the pattern my life is following during these tumultuous times. I’m an optimist by nature and usually maintain a positive outlook on life, the people in it, and the circumstances I face. However, lately, even if I start the day bright and cheery, all I have to do is pick up my phone, read the headlines, and my cheerful optimism takes a nosedive.

I experience more emotional swings than a kindergartner on a rainy day, and like that kindergartner, I want out. I want all the chaos to end, and I want to go outside and play. Well, not exactly play, but I want to remember what it was like to hear the news without thinking Armageddon. I want to chat with family, friends, and neighbors without concern that I may accidentally venture into Thou Shalt Not Mention areas. Can one be happy in this environment?

Yes, I believe one can. But it takes some self-awareness and action. Self-awareness means that I must become aware when slipping from my calm self into my chaotic self. When I catch myself feeling anger, fear, or anxiety, I pause, breathe, and identify where in my body I feel the emotion. This conscious awareness and breath calm me down. The negative emotions dissipate when I sense where they reside in my body and breathe into them. This gives me enough awareness and attention to be more objective, and I feel better afterward.

This addresses my emotional reactions; however, the situation that caused them remains. But I am not powerless. I can become active. I can do something. I have discovered that doing something, unlike nothing, makes me feel better. So, I make calls, go to rallies, write postcards, talk to like-minded people, and occasionally put on some Motown and dance in my living room.  And you know what it feels like?

Recess.

That beautiful space between happy and a #@% wreck.