In this episode, we are focusing on one of the most complicated and crucial aspects of the PhD journey: the relationship between advisor and advisee. Advisor and advisee relationship, like any other interpersonal relationship, is unpredictable and mysterious. It is impossibly hard to predict what the future of an advisor-advisee relationship will look like or how it will develop over time. Despite the unknown nature of this relationship, many PhD students start their interaction with their advisors with ideas, hopes, expectations, dreams, idealizations, and a complexity of emotions.
Working with an advisor, in other words being an apprentice of your mentor, is an ancient tradition that goes back to early civilizations. Similar to the mentor-apprentice relationships built in other professions, craftmanship, for instance, the advisor-advisee relationship is about carrying the legacy of intellectual camps and transferring the knowledge and experience to new generations. We, the team of Just as It Sounds, do not know much about the shortcomings of the mentor-apprentice relationships that have occurred in the historical past, since we have not conducted extensive research on this topic, nor have we read memories on the topic. Maybe these apprentices suffered a lot, maybe they entered into painful conflicts with their mentors or they felt like they were exploited. However, we realize difficult it is to let go of the hope for a happy ending. Always, we wish for a happy ending! A student meets their mentor. As they are guided and prepared for their future profession and crafted by their mentor in their relationship of care and trust, they happily become the successor. But we know that these models change over time, we know that we have a tremendous capacity of remembering the past differently. Maybe we don't know much about the past experiences, but we want to learn what advising in modern times looks like in this episode.
For this reason, we talked with four PhD students who come from four different schools. In this episode, we wanted to share with you different accounts on this issue, and visit the very real and hidden spaces, the heard and unheard corners, of this relationship. We wrapped up this episode with hardship. Listening to two female students' experiences were especially difficult. We were truly happy for Ross and Ian because their cases prove that there is still hope for good practices. It is really difficult to come up with a conclusion after having heard these peculiar stories. Without condemning or glorifying advisor-advisee relationship, we wanted to show that like any other type of interpersonal relationship, this relationship is multi-layered too. It requires both the good parts about being a human, such as care and generosity, but it also requires setting boundaries.
We were able to create this episode with the incredible help and support of some people that we would like to share our gratitude with. We would like to thank Elif Sendur for providing her insight on the master-pupil relationship in Ancient Greece. We would also like to thank Kaitlyn Sirna and Hakan Doğa, who narrated the stories of Alice and Donna. Even though they did not know anything about who these two people were, they did an amazing job in presenting their stories with their own voices.

Ver todos los episodios