44. Advisers can be tyrants.

The most important relationship of your graduate-school career is that between you and your adviser (or in some departments, “major professor”). “Adviser” is an understated way of describing the person who is your academic supervisor, your advocate within the department, the primary assessor of the quality of your work, the person who will decide if and when you can take your qualifying exams and/or comprehensive exams and if and when you are ready to defend your dissertation, and—if you happen to be serving as your adviser’s teaching or research assistant—your boss. Your adviser will be the principal decider of whether you pass your exams and defense, and thus whether you will ever receive a degree. Choosing an adviser is not to be taken lightly, but the choice is not entirely yours. Research interests, departmental politics, and who happens to be available and willing to "advise" you will all play a role in determining who your adviser will be.

Tolstoy wrote that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and one could say that every tyrannical adviser is tyrannical in his own way. The worst abuses may occur in the laboratory sciences, where graduate students often perform the painstaking labor that results in the papers published under their advisers’ names. Foreign students whose student visas are dependent upon successful progress toward their degrees are especially vulnerable to demanding advisers who determine what “successful progress” is. Hopefully, most advisers will never go so far as the dean at St. John’s University in New York who has recently been accused of turning undergraduate scholarship-recipients into her personal servants. Less newsworthy are the common disheartening experiences of those whose research questions or conclusions have been dictated to them by their advisers, who have had to re-write their dissertations three times for no good reason, or whose fate is in the hands of an adviser who is simply a miserably unpleasant person (see Reason 25).