Credit for advising grad students

[waterboy]

So, we are beginning a conversation on our somewhat floundering grad programs. One faculty complaint is that we don't get "credit" for advising grad students. Personally, I always felt that activity fell under research and scholarship and I never looked to get a course release or anything like that.  How does the fora view this sort of thing? Am I an outlier?

[Puget]

There started to be some discussion here (before the pandemic took over all discussions) about credit for mentoring (undergrad and grad)-- maybe having every n mentored students = 1 course release, where n would be some fairly high number. As someone who spends a lot of time mentoring, I'd obviously like this, and I think it acknowledges how unevenly spread mentoring is.

The PhD students are nearly always net positives in terms of research productivity (eventually, with unfortunate exceptions ) though they still take a ton of time. The MA and honors thesis students, while they do contribute to research, definitely take more time then they produce research product, at least if you mentor them right.

[mamselle]

This may be field-specific; most humanities topics do not have labs that can be staffed by grad students who produce publishable results.

I believe I heard, while in school myself, that professors in the arts and humanities were expected to take up to 5 grad students at a time, but some of the more super-starish strains had had it written into their contracts when they arrived that they did not have to work with any if they chose not to.

M.

[polly_mer]

What does mentoring mean in terms of effort required?

How much value to the professor comes from the mentoring and how much is mostly value to the student?

At undergrad-only institutions, I've seen formal student mentoring listed under expected service for things like academic advising and general life coaching.  Thus, no course release is likely because this is how most faculty check some of the required service boxes.  The expectation is that one spends an hour or so a month with each student and thus even 10 advisees is pretty reasonable.

At places with graduate student mentoring in my fields, everything generally ties to the professor's research.  Faculty work out teaching and service loads that allow for significant research productivity and that includes mentoring the graduate students doing the research.

The primary times I've seen undergraduate mentoring as equivalent to a course release was when those undergrads were doing individual or very small group theses, projects, or other independent studies.  I've seen various numbers of the equivalent depending on how common those projects are and whether those projects are required for graduation. 

Places that have very few of those projects tend to set a higher number for course equivalent to the faculty, but may pay a few hundred bucks to encourage faculty to do them for the handful of advanced students.

Places that require a senior thesis may have numbers that match up to what a similar type elective would have.  I remember one forumite who reported having 70 of those theses to mentor one spectacularly hard year.  Other numbers I've seen are more like 10-20.

[doc700]

I'm in the sciences so I need grad students in my group to do the research.

But we list all the undergrads, grads and postdocs we mentor on our yearly activity report. That report is nominally tied to our annual raise although there obviously isn't a one-to-one mapping of advisees to raise.  There are bonuses for people who do a lot of service so if you had a ton of undergrads in the group you might qualify for one of those. 

I do have undergrads in my lab -- those tend to be more net neutral at best or net negative in terms of time in to research output.  I do enjoy mentoring them and including them in the group.  That said, in a science lab these undergrads need to pay user fees for equipment or use consumable supplies.  While a graduate student might be working on the same project, most undergrads would work slower so it might be 2 hours of user fees for what a grad student could do in 1 hour.  So advising them not only takes me time, it is a net negative on my research finances.  That part is difficult to swallow and is not subsidized by the university.

[polly_mer]

most undergrads would work slower so it might be 2 hours of user fees for what a grad student could do in 1 hour.  So advising them not only takes me time, it is a net negative on my research finances.  That part is difficult to swallow and is not subsidized by the university.

As an employer of those undergrads, I thank you for investing in undergrad research so that we have less education to do upon hire.  That additional expense sometimes can be part of the proposal that indicates supporting education in addition to the research.

[traductio]

I teach in communication, which straddles social sciences and humanities. I'm more on the humanities side, but my colleagues (and the department as a whole) tend toward the social sciences.

In our faculty (we're a large research-intensive university divided into faculties, rather than colleges, as was the case when I was in the States, but the principle's the same) -- anyway, our contract stipulates that we teach 15 credit hours per year, effectively a 2-3 load. But was can trade advising of grad students against teaching-credit hours. It's an exceptionally complicated system that everyone hates (for instance, the number of credits depends on whether your student is a master's student or PhD student, what type of thesis they're writing, etc., and you don't get credit until a year or two after you've done the work), but no one wants to switch to a straight 2-2 without explicit credit for grad advising because they're afraid if we give up that, the administration will want concessions on other forms of course release. (I'm all for the 2-2. The number of students I supervise wouldn't change, but my schedule would be predictable.)

As for undergrad mentoring, that's actually one of my favorite things. I do it rarely, and I'm super picky about which students, but in every case, we've published real peer-reviewed work together, often on projects I wanted to investigate but lacked the time for. Plus, the students leave with a sense of the messiness of research. As a teacher, that's about the most satisfying feeling.

[Parasaurolophus]

At my doctoral institution, promotion to full required a record of graduating grads. That seemed like credit enough to me.

The hidden "credit" is that TAs do your marking for you. I'd kill for that, right about now.

[traductio]

The hidden "credit" is that TAs do your marking for you. I'd kill for that, right about now.

At my school, those roles aren't necessarily connected -- only once have I had a TA who was also someone I was advising.

Although having my TA grade for me this semester has been nice!

[Parasaurolophus]

At my school, those roles aren't necessarily connected -- only once have I had a TA who was also someone I was advising.

Although having my TA grade for me this semester has been nice!

True! I just meant that if you're advising grad students then you're in a department with access to TAs, who substantially reduce your workload. (Although running a TA is a kind of advisory position, too!)

[Kron3007]

I am in a lab based STEM field, which seems to be relevant for this discussion.

Where I am they tried to formalize this and theoretically count each grad student as 2% teaching DOE, but it is capped at 5.  So, if you have 5 or more grad students, this would count as 10% of your DOE.  I say theoretically because I have never had it come up or impact my teaching load.  However, I think it could be useful to help negotiate teaching loads, especially if the chair is trying to add a course or discussing TA support.

As for undergraduate supervision, I don't think this really counts, even though we have a fourth year thesis course.  While this dosnt seem to count toward teaching load, I imagine that doing it could help when negotiating teaching as above.  What bothers me about the fourth year research projects here is that they don't even offer a budget to cover any costs even though it is a formal course with tuition.

[JCu16]

I'm in the sciences so I need grad students in my group to do the research.

But we list all the undergrads, grads and postdocs we mentor on our yearly activity report. That report is nominally tied to our annual raise although there obviously isn't a one-to-one mapping of advisees to raise.  There are bonuses for people who do a lot of service so if you had a ton of undergrads in the group you might qualify for one of those. 

I do have undergrads in my lab -- those tend to be more net neutral at best or net negative in terms of time in to research output.  I do enjoy mentoring them and including them in the group.  That said, in a science lab these undergrads need to pay user fees for equipment or use consumable supplies.  While a graduate student might be working on the same project, most undergrads would work slower so it might be 2 hours of user fees for what a grad student could do in 1 hour.  So advising them not only takes me time, it is a net negative on my research finances.  That part is difficult to swallow and is not subsidized by the university.

Also in the sciences - I maintain a group of 2-3 grad students and 4-5 undergraduates. Undergraduate mentoring for research is expected of us as part of our teaching (primarily an undergraduate institution with higher teaching loads 3-3 is standard). We don't receive a release for it, but I enjoy the experience of instructing undergraduates and introducing them to research to get a taste. I'm usually pretty selective and require a student to really want to try research and put in a decent effort, and will typically provide a few little challenges (literature with a how to read guide, a step by through code notebook or two) to see how they handle it and if they are likely to progress. I don't have costs associated with students pursuing research unless they are being paid on a grant, so that's an advantage. I've had the whole gamut of students, from those that are not going to progress far (I've gradually got better at spotting these), to ones that would put many graduate students to shame even as freshmen (inspired to do Bayesian modeling was pretty impressive, and he had the talent to match). I tend to spend a lot of time on the mentoring and helping these students find their direction and interests, and while it consumes a bunch of my time I find it valuable.

My institution doesn't value the graduate level students as much (I only have Ph.D. level opportunities), so I find this tough, but generally only for a semester or two until the student starts to find their feet. We also don't have graduate TAs, so this doesn't help with the workload.  But I tend to err on the side of making sure that the student is well positioned so spending that extra time - and its yielded well - my first student graduated having published 5 lead author papers and won a prestigious postdoc, and my current is already sprinting along, so I view it as a long term investment of my time.

[traductio]

At my school, those roles aren't necessarily connected -- only once have I had a TA who was also someone I was advising.

Although having my TA grade for me this semester has been nice!

True! I just meant that if you're advising grad students then you're in a department with access to TAs, who substantially reduce your workload. (Although running a TA is a kind of advisory position, too!)

That is certainly true. I know I learned as much about teaching as about the subject matter itself when I was a TA (more than a dozen years ago -- yikes). I try to do the same for my TAs, with varying degrees of success.

[doc700]

I first and foremost do it since I enjoy it.  I've really enjoyed getting to know the students and have them contribute to our group.  I also of course myself benefited from undergrad research experiences and feel its part of my duty to pay it forward. 

5 years ago my institution had a policy where the undergrads could use the shared facilities for free.  They pulled back that policy.  I am happy to supervise undergrads and for NSF funding can get an additional stipend.  Other agencies in my field at least don't specifically give you extra money for undergrads.  I just wish my institution had continued the policy of allowing them to use the facilities for free or gave us some small consumable budget.  I'll keep doing it regardless, but 10-20K/semester in undergrad user fees does add up, particularly for a junior faculty trying to get funding settled.

most undergrads would work slower so it might be 2 hours of user fees for what a grad student could do in 1 hour.  So advising them not only takes me time, it is a net negative on my research finances.  That part is difficult to swallow and is not subsidized by the university.

As an employer of those undergrads, I thank you for investing in undergrad research so that we have less education to do upon hire.  That additional expense sometimes can be part of the proposal that indicates supporting education in addition to the research.

[doc700]

Right.  Many of the undergrads in my group are also taking research as 1 of their 4 courses that semester.  It costs me 5K/student in fees for their research and the student is also paying tuition dollars yet those never tuition dollars never make it back to the lab.  I am not concerned about my time but just wish I didn't need to pay for the privilege of doing this service.

I am in a lab based STEM field, which seems to be relevant for this discussion.

Where I am they tried to formalize this and theoretically count each grad student as 2% teaching DOE, but it is capped at 5.  So, if you have 5 or more grad students, this would count as 10% of your DOE.  I say theoretically because I have never had it come up or impact my teaching load.  However, I think it could be useful to help negotiate teaching loads, especially if the chair is trying to add a course or discussing TA support.

As for undergraduate supervision, I don't think this really counts, even though we have a fourth year thesis course.  While this dosnt seem to count toward teaching load, I imagine that doing it could help when negotiating teaching as above.  What bothers me about the fourth year research projects here is that they don't even offer a budget to cover any costs even though it is a formal course with tuition.