Is it true that 'nice' professors fail to produce good students?
That advice from the blog says to avoid an advisor who
1. Is nice, and friendly, and available.
And never gives you the fierce criticism and the tough pushback that forces you to confront your weaknesses, take risks, stop whining, cut the excuses, get over your fears, and make hard decisions about reputation, money, and jobs.
It's the part beginning with "and never" that describes a problematic advisor, not the "nice, friendly, and available" part.
An advisor who is unwilling to criticize a student and share harsh truths when necessary is certainly problematic for many students. But I wouldn't necessarily conflate that with being "nice." For most students, an advisor who is genuinely nice is a good thing.
As for
If you’ve never cried before, during, or after a meeting with your advisor, something is amiss.
Doing a PhD is difficult and sometimes discouraging for most people. My advisor is one of the nicest people I know, and I've walked out of his office on one or two occasions and gone off somewhere to cry. Not because he isn't nice, but because what I'm doing is difficult, and sometimes we have to have some very difficult and/or discouraging conversations.
There's a grain of truth in this blog post, but generally I wouldn't consider this advise a "truisim", as it is pretty simplified:
- Not all students are the same. Some need deadline pressure, some need a "no bullshit" advisor who keeps them down to earth, some mostly need encouragement, and some students really just need an advisor that gets out of their way. Assuming that everybody needs a strict, no-bullshit guy as advisor to become the best researcher (s)he can be does not correlate with my personal experience.
- Being "nice" isn't the same as not providing helpful feedback. Giving harsh feedback isn't the same as giving helpful feedback. You don't want an advisor who holds back criticism to spare your feelings, but you certainly also don't want an advisor who puts you down even if your work is good. Most importantly, an advisor that criticises without suggesting ways to improve your work isn't overly helpful.
- The job title (associate professor or emeritus) or the gender ("lady professor") have next to nothing to do with whether a professor is more of the supporting or of the tough love type. However, the career phase may be relevant - the pressure to have each student perform is usually much higher for a tenure-track professor than for an emeritus, which may of course influence how they act.
- Seeing "unavailability" as a good thing is downright awful advice. I can understand that the line of thinking is that good profs. are necessarily busy, but I am questioning what you as a student profit from a prof. who never has time for you. Better to look for somebody who is good and has time to teach you (yes, those people exist).
If you’ve never cried before, during, or after a meeting with your advisor, something is amiss.
I have never cried before, during, or after a meeting, but I have definitely advised fellow students to get the hell out of their research group when they told me that this regularly happens to them.
If you don't believe me just go on ratemyprof dot com and see the comments for profs who are rated at the top and those at the bottom.
Don't infer how PhD student - advisor relationships work based on one-course ratings of undergraduate students. Frankly, undergrads look for pretty different things in their teachers than PhD students in their advisors.
What I suggest you really do is look at the track record of potential advisors. How many students finish? What do they publish during their PhD? What do those that finish do afterwards? This is, I think, the only metric that really counts.
The list that you link to is misleading. I hope we can all agree that students should try to stay away from '5. Steals your ideas' and '4. Is crazy-making inconsistent', but 3,2,1 are contradictory. 3. says to stay away from abusive, negative and undermining advisors, and then 1. turns around and says you should find an advisor who is sort of an asshole to 'prepare you for the REAL assholes' in the world; 2. says stay away from advisors who are never around, and then at the very end of the post we are told to stay away from advisors who do have time for you. 2. also says to stay away from the big guns -- since they are never around -- and then 1. condemns such students as 'wussy'. What is a student (or an advisor) to do!
While I understand what the list is trying to do -- pointing out that advisors who might seem safe, friendly, and comforting might not be the best advisor for you in the long run -- I don't think this has been done particularly well. In particular, students and recent graduates who are in fact nice friendly people will possibly take away from this list that they are 'just not meant to be in academia'; this is utter BS.
(For the last, consider the many advisors that you point out use this site. They are spending their time giving careful insightful advice to strangers on the internet - simply because they are sincere strangers genuinely interested in understanding things about academia. That's pretty nice of them. Look up some of their CVs. They're doing pretty well for themselves.)
Re: `nice' professors, the author of the list seems to be think that someone who is 'nice' must also be incapable of telling their students hard truths when needed. This is false. The author also seems to think that if an advisor has a lot of time for their students they are a bad advisor. This is also false. The author seems convinced that an advisor must make you cry to be a good advisor. Oh, for crying out loud!
Advisors, like all else in life, are not one size fits all. When choosing advisors, it's important not just to try and understand their advising style, but also to understand your own learning style. And to do so honestly. Ask yourself how you work. What motivates you? What keeps you going on the bad days? In short, what sort of advisor do you need to succeed?
For me, my biggest barrier was my self-confidence. I had plenty of previous success, but I just didn't see it, or discounted it easily as luck. I realized I needed someone whose judgment I could count on, who I could trust to tell me when I was screwing up, and so when they didn't say such a thing, I could infer that I wasn't. I needed someone who believed that I could succeed, and so on the bad days, they kept me going. This advisor turned out to be someone who remembered my birthday, and who gave me tons of support in every which way, but this did not detract from the fact that he would tell me when I was wrong - and I often was. Graduate school made me cry on occasion. It was challenging and progress was rarely quantifiable (see my previous question here), but my advisor was the type of person you go to when you need to cry, who helped you deal with the many issues of graduate school, as opposed to being one of the issues themselves. Am I successful? Well, I graduated with my PhD (in mathematics) last May in 5 years with 5 papers with two more on the way and am currently a postdoc in a pretty good place for me. Empirically speaking, I've been doing well so far, although who knows what the future holds.
On the other hand, perhaps you are truly independent. Can you get by with minimal supervision? Are you truly a superlative researcher already and all you need is a problem to work on and someone to eventually sign a thesis (such individuals do exist) ? Can you say this with complete conviction with much evidence to back you up? Then most likely you will succeed with any advisor whatsoever. Find the person who looks best on paper that is willing to take you and go nuts.
Others work best when being constantly challenged. There probably are individuals who would thrive with an intense advisor who pushes them constantly and think of them purely as a publication-producing machine. Again, this depends on you. Personally, I would say No Thank You, but that's just me.
It is worth noting that a particular faculty member might also employ different advising strategies for different students. They too understand that not all students are the same, that some need well-defined parameters and boundaries, while others need freedom to explore, and so on. On the other hand, students do need to manage their advisors somewhat as well (this at least is something that is mentioned in the original list that was linked to on the question). If you know that your advisor is a rambler, make sure to bring a list of questions you want to ask them to every meeting (I used to do that, because my advisor and I were both talkers). If you are worried that your advisor changes their mind very often (see 4. on the list), make sure to send written summaries of your meetings to your advisor. If you need deadlines to get yourself to do things, but your advisor does not set them for you, ask them! Advisors are not mind-readers. If they won't set deadlines, set them for yourselves.
Advising is a two-way street. Each person has a role to play. In my experience students get to choose their advisors much more so than advisors get to choose their students (although I accept that my experience may be non-standard). Figure out which advisor is best for you. This is possibly different from the advisor who is best for your roommate, your siblings, and the rest of your cohort in graduate school. And when you have an advisor, figure out how to make that relationship work for you. In the end, while the advisor has a huge role in a student's success, there is only so much an advisor can do, and ultimately, it is all about the student.
For what it's worth in the comments to the link posted by the OP, in response to a comment to her original post (from 2012), the author writes
This was an early post, one of my first (possibly my very first–i have to check!) written when I had basically a nonexistent readership. I would not write “nice always loses” now because I’m much more aware of the degree to which people read this blog as “truth.” Indeed, I am somewhat more careful with nuance now, although yes, hyperbole remains part of my schtick, in blogging and in life, as my friends and family know all too well.
Of course, she did choose to repost it 2 years later without rewriting it in any way, so take the author's comment as you will.