Ph.D. Advisors with Many Students

[orchidnora]

Hi, everyone. I'm supposed to be making lists of potential advisors at schools I'll be visiting. Some of the professors with whom I have the best research fit seem to be very busy people. Some have 10 or more students and postdocs. Does anybody have experience with or insights on working with very busy advisors? Thanks! 

[Stat Assistant Professor]

My PhD advisor didn't have an overwhelming number of students (my department was smaller when I was a student there) but he was a Distinguished Professor who traveled a lot, had a lot of collaborations, and sat on a lot of PhD committees (nearly every PhD committee in our department and the external committee member for a fair number of students in other departments, e.g. CS and Biostatistics). Nevertheless, I still completed my PhD in just under 4 years. 

If you want to work with a very busy/distinguished professor, my suggestion would be to make sure to be persistent about meeting with them and to make sure that *every* meeting you have with him/her is productive and moving you forward. I personally would type up a "progress report" in Latex before every single meeting I had with him outlining what papers I had read, what questions I had, and what my thoughts and ideas were -- even if I hadn't made any progress on my research topic or even if I had to completely abandon an unpromising research direction, I still wrote up what I had done for that week.   We would then go through that every meeting and decide on the next steps.

Once I began generating my own ideas more successfully, I would write summaries of them, write out the technical details thoroughly, and type up any theorems and proofs for him to review. When I began writing my own papers, I would email him revisions/new drafts at least four days before our scheduled meeting so he would have time to read the draft and give me feedback in our next meeting. In my experience, this helped a lot.

Finally, don't be afraid to chat with the other PhD students of your advisor. Chances are that you will learn just as much or more from talking with them about research than from completing a problem set or trying to make sense of a very difficult paper. Sometimes you have a general, vague idea of what is going on, but you just need that "a-ha!" moment, and chatting with more senior students can give you exactly that to make things click.

[orchidnora]

Thanks @Stat PhD Now Postdoc! That is very good advice and reassuring. About your last point, many of the professors I'm looking at have big research groups, so hopefully the other Ph.D. students and even postdocs would be available for a chat sometimes. How often would you meet with your advisor on average? I think I would be fine, as long as my advisor can meet (or Skype) about once every 1-2 weeks.

[Stat Assistant Professor]

20 minutes ago, orchidnora said:

Thanks @Stat PhD Now Postdoc! That is very good advice and reassuring. About your last point, many of the professors I'm looking at have big research groups, so hopefully the other Ph.D. students and even postdocs would be available for a chat sometimes. How often would you meet with your advisor on average? I think I would be fine, as long as my advisor can meet (or Skype) about once every 1-2 weeks.

I typically met with him once a week, unless he was traveling (then once every 2-4 weeks). He traveled more during the summer and winter breaks when I was also traveling a bit though, so it's understandable that I met with him less during those times than during the fall and spring semesters.

Once a week is pretty standard -- I don't think there is much value in meeting more than that, since less than a week doesn't give the advisee much time to make noticeable progress (even if the progress is as minor as rereading a paper and understanding the contents more clearly). If you are looking to submit some papers to computer science/stat conferences which have hard deadlines for paper submissions, then you might need to meet with the advisor more frequently right before the submission deadline.