Graduate Student Advisory Committees

By agreeing to serve on your committee, I am committing myself to be available to you for advice ranging from specific experiments to long-term career plans. Ask me to serve on your committee if you and your advisor think I can provide useful input into your project during the course of your research.

In general, I enjoy learning about the research being done by graduate students and I learn a lot from serving on committees. However, I hate being on committees where I have to be the "bad cop". I hope I can avoid this in the future by asking students, before they ask me to serve on their committees, to read this description of my general philosophy about committees and specific things that I would like that may be different from other professors.

Committee meetings

• You are responsible for scheduling committee meetings at least as often as the frequency required by their department. For Biochemistry students, this means at least once per year. Waiting for the result of one more experiment is not a good reason to postpone your committee meetings. Advice from your committee is often more useful before you've spent months obtaining flawed preliminary data.

• Like most faculty, I am often generally disorganized and over committed. For this reason, don't assume that I am committed to a meeting until the time and place have been confirmed and it is on my calendar.

• I won't schedule committee meetings earlier than 9 AM.

• Please send me an email and/or phone reminder of the meeting 24 hours before it is supposed to happen.

• If the committee is expected to sign off on whether or not the student is making adequate progress toward their degree (i.e. Biochemistry or Biology students), I would like a short written summary of you've been doing since the last committee meeting.

• You should be able to describe your experiments in enough detail so that we can understand and discuss the interpretation, the limitations, and whether or not there are better ways to do things. The committee is there to give you advice. We can't advise you if you don't tell us enough to let us think about what you are doing.

• You are responsible for obtaining any forms required by his or her department or the Graduate College, and making sure that exams, degree plans etc. have the appropriate approvals. Your advisor already has a Ph.D.

Prelims

• I don't waive written exams.

• I want the written proposal at least a week before I am scheduled to give you your written prelim, but I would rather have a polished document a little late than a rough draft earlier.

Proposals

• Your proposal should be written as if it is an NIH or NSF grant, with specific aims based on attempting to answer specific scientific questions and descriptions of what experiments will be done, what kinds of results might be obtained and how different possible results will be interpreted.

• While you are responsible for writing the proposal, I expect that the you and your advisor to go over the proposal and polish it for organization, style, clarity, rigor, grammar, syntax and spelling before it is handed out to the committee. I don't expect it to be completely free of typos, but I want a sense that the document represents your best effort.

• I encourage you to use lots of figures in your proposal.

• I won't read your proposal if it doesn't have page numbers.

• Learn the difference between "which" and "that" and between "effect" and "affect" before you write your proposal.

Dissertations and Defenses

• I expect at least the same thoroughness in the preparation of the thesis and the scheduling of the defense as described above for the prelims and proposals. Having to pay another semester of tuition or if you delaying your starting date at a job or postdoc that you "have to" start by a certain date are not acceptable justifications for handing out an unfinished or rough draft version of your dissertation

• I expect the copy of the dissertation that you hand out to be complete - including the table of contents, references, figure legends etc. and to have publication quality figures, not photocopies of the original figures. It should be of the quality you would use to submit a manuscript to a journal. This means that you should not be sending me amended versions of things after I get it.

• Deciding whether or not the student has completed a body of scholarly work sufficient in extent and quality for the award of a Ph.D. is the central function of the committee. You can have them discuss this for the first time at your dissertation defense if you want, but I strongly recommend that you meet with your committee before you start writing your thesis to obtain a consensus about what constitutes an acceptable body of work. This can help to avoid unpleasant and embarrassing surprises.

• I encourage you to use published work as the basis for thesis chapters, but...just because you can get something published somewhere does not absolve you of the responsibility for accuracy and scientific rigor in your dissertation. Your dissertation is the place where you demonstrate that you can present a careful, thorough and scholarly description of your work and its place in the field without concern for page limits or charges, or about submitting before you get scooped.

Masters Degrees

• I expect a Masters thesis to contain a body of work that demonstrates mastery of the field. While can be much less of a complete "story" than in a Ph.D. dissertation, I don't believe that students who are unable to complete a Ph.D. have an automatic right to an M.S. based on the number of years they have spent in the graduate program without accomplishing anything.

Most of what I wrote above should be self-evident. However, with the pressures and time constraints on both students and faculty, it is often easy to let some of these things slip. I try very hard to be fair to every student whose committee I serve on, but always remember that treating you fairly is not the same as letting you pass if you equal the worst performance I ever let slide by in a moment of weakness. Holding students to high standards of scholarship important to meaning of our graduate degrees for all of our students.