Managing up: how to communicate effectively with your PhD adviser : Civil and Environmental Engineering Communication Lab

CEE members Lluís Saló-Salgado, Angi Acocella, Ignacio Arzuaga García (Communication Fellow), Souha El Mousadik (Communication Fellow) & Augustine Zvinavashe published a Nature career advice article based on a September 2021 CEE Comm Lab panel event:

When you start a PhD, you also begin a professional relationship with your PhD adviser. This is an exciting moment: interacting with someone for whom you might well have great respect and admiration, but who might also slightly intimidate you.

They will have their own management style, but ‘managing up’ is important, so you need to identify the style that will help you to thrive academically, and communicate that to your adviser.

In September, we ran a panel discussion for new graduate students in the department of civil and environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. One focus of the panel was how to communicate effectively with your PhD adviser; we based this on skills we have developed since starting our programmes three to five years ago. Our different nationalities, genders, academic backgrounds, research fields and advisers have led to five different experiences. But we agree on the following set of guidelines…

Read the full article here in the Nature Career column.

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