Your Rights & Responsibilities
The right to regular and open communication with your advisor
Communication is one of the most important facets of your working relationship. Your advisor should clearly communicate their availability, thoughts, and expectations to you, and should be open and honest about their opinion of your progress and plans. Your advisor should meet with you regularly and actively consider your ideas during meetings. While advisors usually have multiple students and projects and may need to be reminded of project status and details, they should be engaged with and knowledgeable about your work.
If your advisor is not communicative about these or other topics that are important to your research, you should approach them for clarification. Communication can become complicated if your advisor works part time in industry or during internships or summers, when meetings may be more infrequent. However, you have the right to expect that they will make time for meeting, provide you with feedback, etc., and you should communicate this need to them if it is not being met.
The right to tailored research advising
You can expect your advisor to know your research goals and provide research direction according to your level of independence and experience with relevant topics/skills. This includes helping you overcome technical problems. Your advisor should provide honest but constructive feedback that helps you progress on your research. They should communicate with you about which venues and publication frequency is appropriate for your research and long-term professional goals. Over the longer term, advisors should also communicate their thoughts on program milestones, what they think is an appropriate timeline to complete them, and their perception of your progress towards meeting your career goals. They should be very clear about your funding status and help you find alternate sources such as a fellowship or a TA position if an RA is not available.
The right to mentorship from your advisor, beyond day-to-day research guidance
You can expect your advisor to help you choose an overall research direction, educational trajectory, and career direction based on your interests. They should understand your educational, cultural, and employment background in their approach to mentorship. Once goals are defined, your advisor should help you find opportunities that will further those goals, such as teaching opportunities or work on service committees. They should also help you develop skills such as: communicating your research and ideas effectively in writing and presentations, writing research proposals and grants, and mentoring junior students. Your advisor should support you in networking by advocating for you (e.g., in PhD milestone evaluations), introducing you to their contacts as appropriate, leveraging their professional networks during job searches, and nominating/supporting you for fellowships and awards suited to your research stage and career aspirations.
The right to safety
You can expect your advisor to be respectful of you and your ideas and to be open to feedback from you. You should not feel bullied, harassed, manipulated, or discriminated against in any way. Your advisor should be cognizant of the power dynamics of the advisor-student relationship and should have your interests and steady progress in mind when advising (e.g., determining workload, how to give credit, when to encourage you to reach PhD milestones).
If you feel that your advisor has acted inappropriately or if you do not feel safe in your working relationship, reach out immediately to any member of the grad advising team who can help you navigate your options.
In addition, be aware of the fact that your employment contract has strong protections against harassment and discrimination, enumerated in Article 20, including the right to “continue learning and working in an environment free from discrimination.” You have strong health and safety protections in Article 9, including that you should “not be required to work in conditions that pose an imminent threat to health and safety”. Contact your UAW 4121 Stewards in CSE or the UAW 4121 contract enforcement I bet heat any time to discuss any and all questions about health and safety, as well as harassment and discrimination from your advisor or anybody else in your workplace.
Your union protected rights
When it comes to academic job appointments and job security, your rights are enumerated in Article 4 and Article 16 of your UAW 4121 contract. For additional information on this topic, see the funding page.
You can find a summary of some of the most important rights on the UAW 4121 Know Your Rights webpage, by reading your contract, or by talking to one of your UAW 4121 Stewards in CSE or the UAW 4121 contract enforcement team.
If your rights are not met
If you feel like your rights are not being met, options for seeking support include reaching out to the grad advising team or taking advantage of the Allen School resources for community feedback. Also, see the section entitled Elevate the Issue.
Note that some situations are not clear cut. But even if you are not sure, it is better to voice your concerns. The grad advising team is there to help you.
Your responsibilities as a grad student
The responsibility to put your best effort into your work
Your advisor has committed to spending at least five years supporting you in your PhD. They will expect that you actually want that PhD: that you take research seriously, meet co-created goals, and make progress. An important aspect of effort is showing initiative by suggesting and owning your ideas and keeping up-to-date on relevant research.
All advisors expect their students to work hard and be productive. Remember, though, that your progress will be measured in terms of accomplishments, not number of hours worked. It can be useful to periodically reflect on how you are spending your time and ask your advisor for their thoughts in case you feel stuck. Ask them what they suggest you prioritize, how long something should take you based on their experience with the problem/task, when to move on or ask for help, etc.
This is especially true in your early years, when you must balance coursework, research, and/or teaching while also getting used to a new place and role. Find a workflow that works for you, and, importantly, don’t expect it to look exactly like anybody else’s. If it isn’t working, ask yourself why and correct it, with the help of others.
The responsibility to advocate for yourself as needed within a mutually respectful advising relationship
As a graduate student, you are in charge of shaping your own career. While advisors should consider your well-being and workload over the course of advising, they have their own obligations with respect to funding, incentives to publish, and personal life events. You should make your circumstances clear (e.g., personal obligations, workload in courses) so that expectations about progress and suitable workload are appropriately set. You should communicate your interest level in your work over time and whether you and your advisor should decide on alternate research directions for you. More generally, just as you have the right to regular and open communication from your advisor, you have the responsibility to communicate regularly and openly with them.
It is especially important to meet and communicate with your advisor when you are struggling, stuck, or are feeling unproductive or unmotivated. Students are often tempted to cancel meetings when they have these kinds of negative feelings. Don’t do it! Your advisor may be able to help you get back on track if you communicate openly and honestly (and they certainly can’t help if you don’t communicate with them). If you ever feel the urge to avoid your advisor, that is a big red flag that you should understand and overcome.
The responsibility to be open to constructive feedback
You are in grad school to learn and improve, and feedback is essential to that process.
You must acknowledge when your ideas, strategies or research habits could be improved. Indeed, scholarship demands an unrestricted flow and counterflow of ideas, of benefits and drawbacks. On occasion, being open to feedback can be challenging, especially when it may seem negative or disruptive to existing plans, or when it is taken personally as a reflection of your value or ability. This is almost never the intention of the person providing feedback. Rather, their goal is to help you to achieve your full potential (even if they may not always communicate their feedback in the best possible way).
Practical tips for responding to feedback include reminding yourself why feedback is needed and why feedback is helpful, listening and asking questions to understand, and asking for time to process input if you are feeling overwhelmed or unprepared to respond. If you respond best to a particular type of feedback, it is your responsibility to communicate that to your advisor.
The responsibility to be a conscientious community member
This means participating in lab meetings, supporting your labmates (e.g., brainstorming sessions or paper swaps), and maintaining the labspace and lab resources, such as software and hardware. It also means TAing, sometimes for niche subjects. Further, you should be willing to mentor junior students, review papers, and perform service work. When engaging in these activities, make sure that your behavior is creating a supportive and respectful environment for your research group and the broader Allen School community. One way to learn more about this is to take EPIC training.
The responsibility to be honest, both in terms of intellectual contributions and in terms of how you spend your time
You should be transparent about where your ideas are coming from and give due credit where appropriate, whether you are in a conversation with your advisor, giving a presentation, or writing a paper. The more generous you are in acknowledging and crediting others and the more helpful you are to others, the more generous and helpful they will be with you. In collaborations, you should communicate early and be upfront about decisions related to distribution of workload, use of material resources, and authorship. With respect to how you spend your time, you should clearly communicate to your advisor about if/when you are working on projects not covered by your RA (if you are funded by an RA).
Also, see the COE academic integrity and misconduct policies.
If your responsibilities are not met
If you are not doing your job, you probably know it: you may be making poor progress, avoiding hard discussions, or just not having fun. You and your advisor may both be reluctant to bring up these concerns. But if you do not do so, both of you have failed in your common goal of making you a success.
Just as Allen School faculty have the responsibility to let a student know if they are not meeting expectations and help them come up with a plan to improve, if you are at all unsure about this, initiate a conversation with your advisor(s). It goes without saying that this will be part of your yearly Review of Progress meeting, but do not wait until the ROP meeting if things are not right.