What do you look for in a POI?

[Yetanotherdegree]

So obviously my summer hobby is prepping for fall applications Im sorry that I keep flooding the board with my endless list of questions, but I always get good answers on here and I really appreciate them. Thank you all!

Today's topic is finding a POI. Lets assume it's a perfect world and almost anyone you want to work with would love to work with you.

How do you pick?

What characteristics do you look for in a dissertation supervisor?

Do you want someone whose research interests are very close to yours? Or do other factors outweigh research interests?

Do you want someone whose personal style will help you to succeed? Or does that not matter?

Do you go for seniority of prestige, even if it comes with a need to share your POI with other students?

Is a younger/newer academic a plus because they have time for you? Or a minus because they are perhaps inexperienced?

How many students is too many for a POI to supervise effectively in your opinion?

Any thoughts or insights for those of us who will be beginning the process of approaching POIs in the fall? And if vou managed to get into a doctoral program in religion or theology, how did the process actually work? Were you happy with how it all worked out?

Thanks for humoring me, folks. This is way more interesting than reviewing fractions for the GRE!

[AbrasaxEos]

Some thoughts of my own here:

 

Instead of trying to answer all of those questions one by one, I will throw out my thoughts on this in paragraph form.  I think the ideal advisor is someone who is the goldilocks type, right in the middle.  Not too old, not too young.  Too old and you may find yourself with a retiring advisor in your third year.  Most programs make some concessions and try to help you out on this, and typically if a prof. plans on retiring in the next year or two, they will stop taking students to prevent this from happening.  Even so, it does happen, so keep it in mind.  Too young and as you go to look for jobs you may be met mostly by blank stares when you tell them who your advisor was.  Further, without tenure, you may once again be left advisorless at the next tenure review.  This is far more common and something to really keep in mind - be sure to have at least one other senior faculty member who you could work with were this to happen.

 

You also need to meet your advisor in person and talk with them.  Feeling this out is super important, as a person may look literally perfect for you on paper/CV, but when you go to talk to them you may find that they are super awkward, intimidating, offstandish, have an annoying laugh, etc.  These may seem like odd intrapersonal elements, but you have to spend some serious time with this person, so it could be a tough few years if you show up and find that sitting in your advisor's office is something you dread.  I am a super laid-back person, which is not to say that I don't work my butt off, but I don't really allow that to seep into my personality, so I knew that if I had someone who was a bit high-strung or just high-energy that I would both be annoyed with them as well as feel like I was not nearly enthusiastic enough about the topic I was studying.  So, part of my choice was between two advisors, one embody the former, and one the latter.  It is also good to have someone who is going to be tough on you.  To be fully honest, you've probably gone through undergrad, and grad school with stellar grades and a good bit of backslapping from profs who want to encourage you in your pursuits.  Your PhD should be a time when someone tells you that your work isn't that great, that your theory isn't original, that your paper was kind of mediocre.  They should obviously also encourage you from time to time as well, but when you put your first book out and you excitedly turn to the first review only to find that the reviewer has in final evaluation decided that your book would have been better off having never been written, you don't want that to be the first time someone has ever excoriated your work.  You'll be totally deflated!

 

Additionally, be real sure of exactly how many people your advisor is advising, which is to say not just PhD students.  Some profs are appointed in divinity schools, undergraduate colleges, etc. and have folks from all of those.  Having to schedule out half-hour meetings every two months gets a bit old when you are having a crisis of confidence (which you will) and need someone to talk you down from leaving the program for a vehicle-sharing start-up.  Being able to meet with my advisor more or less whenever I wanted to, and just going to talk once a week made a huge difference in my first two years.  It wasn't even just to talk through some major problem every time, sometimes I just went to talk about good books I had just read, a new approach to some age-old problem, or just to shoot the breeze.  I think this was a really important part of developing a real, human relationship with my advisor.  If you advisor has 13 other PhD students, 45 Master's students and is the departmental coordinator or something, you may find it hard to meet, even if you are promised a good deal of focus as a prized PhD student.  The truth is that people only have so many hours in a week! I don't know if there is a magic number of 'too many students' here, but I always figure not more than 1 per year, so 4-5.

 

You want some aligned research interests, but I assume that this is a bit of a pedantic observation.  You should go for someone whose approach and methodology you generally respect, jive with, and understand.  Be sure to read through some of their publications.  People approach topics in very different ways.  Just because I am in an Ancient Christianity program doesn't mean that every person in the field would be a great advisor, even if they have perfectly aligned interests.  There are some approaches, i.e. heavy philology, historical-critical, etc. that I just find either boring, outdated, or a little bit of both.  There were a few programs with profs who seemed perfect on an 'interest-only' level, but once I read through their stuff, I totally ruled them out.  It also helps to have someone who is fairly well-known in the field, as well as more generally.  In this hellish job market, as you go to apply to your dream job at East Jesus University in Montana, it would be helpful if the scholar of Buddhism who heads the religious studies department has at least heard your advisor's name.  Now this isn't always possible, especially in the famously insular fields of theology and biblical studies, but consider it.

 

I'd say it would be good to shoot your POI an email.  Don't be an annoyance, especially in a first email.  A prof does not need to hear your entire life story, or your wonderful achievements.  Just mention your basic interests, ask them if they are taking new students, and if their current work lines up with what you have in mind.  If they seem interested in your background/etc. then you can send it along.  I'd also pass along a piece of advice I got from a professor at a certain Ivy League school with regard to visiting prior to being admitted - "No one was ever helped by a campus visit prior to being admitted, but they have been hurt by it," meaning that you'll probably be nervous, excited, and wanting to make a really impression if you do this but you might end up being remembered as that person who was slathering all over him or herself trying to impress.  So, I usually say to wait until you are admitted to visit unless you have a really compelling reason to do so.  An exception might be SBL, but remember that a thousand people have the same idea so your impression might not be all that special.  A better approach on my part was to go crash their school's reception if you are able, and talk to them there more informally (or if this seems too forward maybe after a session or something).

 

I am really happy about how it worked out.  As I mentioned I have great access to my advisor, have developed a great relationship with him, and have really enjoyed my time here.  I have found a number of other people to be mentors/other readers as well, but those were actually mostly people I found after I got here. In that I still haven't met someone who doesn't know my advisor and vice versa, I am also confident that things will bode as well as one can hope when looking for a job in a few years.

 

Hope this helps! 

[sacklunch]

^Well said! What you said about visiting scares me a bit though....I have heard so many opinions on visiting I don't know what to think anymore. I was planning on visiting some of my top choices, but perhaps this is not a great idea!? I was planning on going to SBL this year, so maybe that would be a better option....thoughts? Anyone else?

[Yetanotherdegree]

AbrasaxEos, thank you! Your answer is thorough and helpful and fantastic. For those of us who are just beginning to work our way towards doctoral applications, a lot of the information is new, a bit overwhelming, and somewhat arcane. The process of finding a POI seemed challenging, but I feel a lot better prepared for it all now. I'm in a situation where my first choice for a ThD/PhD is going to be the same institution i'll be taking a ThM at this fall. There are some significant disadvantages in not being able to move for doctoral work (due to spouse's job) but the institution itself is excellent and I do have the opportunity to get to know people and to have them get to know my work. There are several people who would be a good fit for my work, and I'm going to work on cultivating appropriate relationships that may lead towards a mentor (or a few!) So far, the person who has been most responsive, whose research interests fit well, and whose personal style of writing and research seems to line up with my own (something I would never have thought about before reading the above post) is a very new faculty member, but there are others who might be equally good. As for visiting, jdmhotness, I would think it would depend somewhat on what you need to know to find out whether or not it would be a good fit for you. Do you feel like you have a good grasp of the institution's culture and ethos? Do you want or need any contact with current doctoral students? And how familiar are you with the context? I think if you already have some real sense of what the place is like academically and how you might fit in there, together with a genuine connection with a POI, then I'm not sure that a visit will help. If, on the other hand, you have a reason for going and you don't mind spending the $ and time, then why not? I think that a lot of what you would learn during a visit can be figured out online if you research well.

[AbrasaxEos]

Visiting is a fraught question indeed - but maybe it does depend on the place.  Here are a few more of my thoughts on it.  First, I think one reason that the prof I spoke to discouraged it was because of the false hope it gave people.  Of course the faculty members you meet are probably going to be nice to you and talk with you, especially if your interests line up.  The department might give you a nice tour of the area and have some current students talk with you as well.  The issue I see here is that they are going to do the same for the 25 other people who come and visit during the fall, but they are only going to admit one of you!  So, you come away from the visit excited and aglow from the awesome conversation you had with Prof. X (not of X-men fame) and then when you don't get in you sit there and fume and think over what went wrong because your visit just seemed so super positive that you can't imagine what happened. 

 

Second, as I mentioned, a lot of people visit.  Not so many that you will get totally lost in a sea of random faces and names, but enough that you are probably not going to make such an amazing impression in one afternoon that your POI is going to immediately remember you (or if you do, it wil probably be the wrong kind of impression). A lot of adcoms are doing interviews in one form or another (Notre Dame, Emory, Yale, etc.) anyhow, so why not save yourself some money, put it towards your applications, and use the amazing invention of email to make initial contact.

 

SBL is a better route I think because most people are going to be in the same place at the same time, and it feels a little less formal than a campus visit - you are at SBL to network as well as enjoy some good papers, so you can easily just attend a session with a paper by a POI, etc. and strike up a conversation with them afterwards.  It isn't totally off-limits to email and ask if they'll be there, but I know from this past year that my own advisor was a bit haggard by day two with all the "we should grab a coffee" requests that he agreed to. Some profs even have a policy of not meeting with anyone at SBL for this reason.  So, this is why I think it is a better move to keep your eyes peeled, attend sessions strategically, and crash a reception or two.

 

Anecdote is not evidence, but it is all you have to go on during this process, so I will offer that during my application season, now almost three long years ago, no one of my cohort visited a school and we had an impressive sweep of Yale, UNC-CH, Emory, Fordham, Princeton, BC, BU, and U Chicago (this is for NT/Ancient Christianity).