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Advisors

As a First Year, you will be assigned a group advisor, Ivan Sag. The job of the First Year Graduate Student Advisor is to look after you as fledgling linguists. This is the person you should turn to primarily for information and help, but you should not be shy about approaching other faculty members as well. You should not be without advising. Although the four (or so) years at Stanford may seem to stretch out endlessly before you, there is a lot that needs to get done in these four years. It is easy to end up taking the wrong course or the wrong sequences because you haven't really talked to anybody about what you want to do. One of the important goals of the first year is to prepare yourself in such a way that you are ready to start writing a QP by the Spring Quarter. So you should get advice on what to do in your first year.

After first year, it's up to you to find an advisor. You can put this decision off during your second year by just making do with your QP Committee chairperson. But sooner or later you'll have to chose someone to be your advisor. It's a tough decision. Depending on your area it can be easy to offend people while doing so. Ultimately, you have to choose the person that's best for you.

A good idea is to talk to the students of a prospective advisor.

Later on, an advisor usually mutates into being a dissertation advisor. But it is important to realize that you can always change your mind about who your main advisor is.

Additionally, there is one general Graduate Advisor, Eve Clark, who is coincidentally also Department Chair. As the overall advisor, Eve is another person you can turn to for advice, and she is particularly responsible for making sure you are meeting all the requirements and deadlines.

URL http://bhasha/~kyle/faculty.html lists the faculty members and their interests, and there is a binder in the Greenberg room which lists the publications for each faculty member, so if you are curious about what our faculty's interests are or have been, use these as a resource. Generally the faculty can be reached via email if you want to arrange a meeting.

Some students have complained about difficulty in making appointments, failure of the faculty to read papers in a timely fashion, and insufficient feedback on work in progress. The most important thing you have to know about advising is that you are entitled to it, you will have a very difficult time becoming a good linguist without it, and it is your responsibility to go out and insist on being advised. You must do the work of contacting professors and asking them about their time schedule. Most of our faculty are incredibly busy people, but they should be able to make time for students. Even if you only have a vague idea of what you want to work on, you should still go and talk to the faculty. The faculty insist that the problem with advising at Stanford is that students don't come and talk to them enough. So take them up on this---make more appointments! The faculty have a vast knowledge of what kind of literature is out there and will be able to tell you where to look for more information. It is their responsibility to give you feedback on your papers, but it may help if you harass them (diplomatically) if they do not provide it after a reasonable time. Sometimes certain faculty are happier giving oral feedback; practice your ability to present your ideas in a succinct and organized fashion, stressing what you are uncertain about, and you may get a faster and more inspiring response than the written version elicits.

Of course, since this is an academic field in which journal articles are the main method of information dissemination, you must get significant feedback on written papers as well; graduate students are not necessarily born knowing how to organize or present material in the clearest manner in their papers. For that reason, you are best served by not only harassing the faculty for significant comments, but also giving your papers to your fellow grad students to read and comment on. Often you learn as much from discussion with interested students as from meetings with faculty. Since your fellow students will one day be your academic peers before whom you will present conference papers and who will read and possibly review your journal articles, it is a good idea to get over any nervousness you have about opening up and revealing your ignorance to them. Everyone else is just as ignorant as you are.


next up previous contents
Next: Qualifying Papers Up: Academic Previous: Knocking up units