When your advisor leaves
A stock photo of moving boxes. Trust me, packing up a lab is one of the most fucking depressing things you can do as a grad student. Photo: Unsplash.
It’s coming up on the season where prospective grad students are interviewing with labs, visiting campuses, and deciding where they want to go next in their career. It’s an exciting but scary time- how do you choose? What’s the most important factor to weigh?
One of the most shared pieces of advice is that it really comes down to the lab and the advisor. I’m not here to necessarily argue against that- indeed, having an advisor you work well with is absolutely essential to a positive and productive grad school experience. But I sometimes see it held up as the factor that should be the single point of decision, and it makes me shudder. Because while a good relationship with your advisor is a huge part of grad school, pinning everything on a single person, on a single lab? That can backfire, and it’s an uncomfortable fact that we try to pretend doesn’t exist.
The fact is, advisors often leave, and departments are often ill-equipped to help the students this leaves behind.
The departure of an advisor can range from relatively amicable- maybe they landed their dream job!- to incredibly hostile and nasty. A faculty member may not get tenure. They may be dismissed for disciplinary reasons. Hell, they may just find they don’t get along with other departmental members, and things fall apart spectacularly for all involved. This spectrum of outcomes, whether anyone wants to admit it, is a key part of how the students left behind may fare. Will your department rally behind you? Or will they see you as damaged goods, to be shuffled out in one way or another as quickly as possible? The story of my advisor leaving my PhD institution is not mine to tell, but the circumstances placed it firmly in the “bad blood on all sides” part of that continuum, and the ramifications of that have irrevocably shaped my path going forward in ways I’m still reckoning with.
No matter the circumstances, your options when your advisor announces their departure break down into three main families of choices. First, you can stay in your current department, likely tapping a committee member to be your new advisor. Second, you might follow them to their new position, if they have one lined up, and help set up the lab anew elsewhere. Finally, you can leave both your department and your advisor, and start over in a new program- the nuclear option, but one worth significant consideration in some situations.
You may have strong feelings about which option you prefer, and have a clear path more or less laid out for continuing. Or you may be completely adrift, with little to no guidance. How do you decide? There’s several factors to balance.
First is the department climate, as discussed above. Are there other faculty members willing and able to take you on as a student? Does your department offer any guidance to support students in your situation? I wish I could give more rosy advice here, but frankly? Most departments don’t like to think about how frequently this happens, and will often resist efforts to put protocols in place to help orphaned grad students (ask me how I know). If you get the sense that your department isn’t behind you, take that feeling seriously. You’re already in a vulnerable position with your most invested advocate likely gone, and any hint that your department isn’t going to give you the resources and support you need to finish is an absolutely eye-searingly bright red flag.
Secondly, where are you at in your degree? If you’ve just started and have no data, that’s a very different situation than being a post-comps PhD student with only writing left to finish. Be honest with yourself- how far are you? How quickly could you finish if you had to? Do you have data where you could pick everything up and start someplace with only a hard-drive, or do you have complicated experimental set-ups that will be difficult and costly to re-establish?
Okay, so with those in mind, let’s break down your potential courses of action- the whys and hows, the pros and cons, all of it:
Staying in your current department: this is logistically probably the easiest- you don’t need to pick up and move your life elsewhere, your committee can likely remain unchanged with just some reshuffling of titles, you may be able to keep all of your timeline intact.
WHY DO IT: This is a better choice if you’re close to completion, either as a masters or PhD student. You may decide to finish earlier, but it’s the path with the highest probability of stability. It’s also a good choice if you have several other faculty mentors doing similar research to your own, where you can relatively seamlessly switch labs, and if your department has good support structures in place.
WHY NOT TO DO IT: Was your advisor the only person in your department studying what you’re interested in? Is there any hint of hostility towards the lab or its members? When you seek support, are you met with replies like “well you just need to figure it out” or “why would this change any of your plans?” Get the hell out of there, especially if you’re early in your program and don’t have your research at a point where you’re pretty independent.
Following your advisor: sure, moving sucks, but if your advisor just landed a sweet gig and has all sorts of new startup, it’s often a good call to follow along. Of course, this is only a viable choice if your advisor has another job lined up in an academic setting where you can continue your degree- if you’re a PhD student and they move to a masters-only program, you’re kinda out of luck, as is the case if they switch to industry, government, or nonprofit positions.
WHY DO IT: If you have a solid working relationship with your advisor and the move will open up new opportunities, this is worth considering. You have continuity of your research, but potentially with a fresh infusion of support (depending on their startup package) and a new department that, if things haven’t been going well in your current one, might be a much-needed change of scenery.
WHY NOT TO DO IT: It’s still moving. You may need to take your comps or a significant coursework load over again, and sometimes the new institution may not want your advisor to bring their students (ahem, elitism). Visas may be an issue, either if you’re an international student or if they move internationally. You may not want or, in some cases, be safely able to move to where they go (such as if they get a position in a country where being gay is illegal, and you’re queer). Also, it can exacerbate any existing problems you have with your advisor, so if you’re already spending a lot of time butting heads with them already, think long and hard about whether you want to move someplace where they are potentially the only other human you know.
Maybe it’s time to join a new crew? Stock photo from Unsplash.
Starting over elsewhere: the scariest option, for sure. But if your advisor goes someplace you can’t follow, and your department has turned hostile, this may be the most prudent choice, even if it hurts to even think about.
WHY DO IT: This is not a choice to be made lightly, but if when you ask yourself “do I think I can continue with this program and/or advisor?”, you’re not sure, it’s time to think hard about it. Sometimes, if the situation has become toxic enough, this is the option that will in the long run be best for your health, career, and state of mind.
WHY NOT DO IT: I mean, again, moving sucks, but also this time you will almost certainly be starting over from the beginning. You may or may not be able to take your current work with you, so there’s a high probability that you may need to start from scratch- a painful prospect especially for those further in their program, whose data may have been hard-won to begin with. It’s not easy, and I was encouraged heavily against going this route by almost everyone I talked to. But the fact is that it may be the best way to go depending on your situation, and you shouldn’t discount it without seriously considering it.
Yeah, it’s not really a clear path, sorry. Stock photo by Unsplash.
So, what did I do, and how did it go? Well, some of that’s still playing out, but I ultimately chose to stay. Some of this was forced by external circumstance- right when I was ready to call it and switch programs, a little thing called “the COVID19 global pandemic” hit, which kinda threw a wrench in all of that. I had one of my other committee members take over as chair, but, again, with everyone locked down, I never really got a chance to become a part of my new lab in a meaningful way. From the time we got the news, I had planned to finish early, and with my integration into that lab halted, I focused on applying for postdocs and getting out. I defended my dissertation just over four years after I arrived in Oklahoma- earlier than I wanted, and, some would argue, before I was ready (although obviously having landed a postdoc in a well-regarded lab at Berkeley, I’d dispute that to some level). Revisions have dragged on, and the whole experience has made me bitter and anxious, perpetually afraid that once again everything will fall apart as soon as I get comfortable. It’s changed me as both a scientist- destroying my confidence in my own work and delaying the publication of papers I once was excited about- and as a person- making me cynical and untrusting in a way that I find uncomfortable.
Would I make the same decision again, if I knew what I did now? Honestly, I don’t know. The signs that it was going to be an uphill fight were there well before COVID, so maybe I would have been best served if I threw in the towel as soon as I found out my advisor would be leaving, freshly passed comps or not. Then again, COVID was just around the corner regardless, and perhaps the same forces that stymied my chances at meshing with my new lab at OU would have just played out the same way, but with the added obstacles of a new city where I had fewer connections and presumably a new project that I was much less further along with.
From where I sit now, in the office I share with wonderful supportive labmates, surrounded by notes for a project I keep pinching myself that I get to work on and with the San Francisco Bay just visible past trees buzzing with hummingbirds, it’s tempting to say it all worked out. If I had switched, I wouldn’t be here right now, after all. But litigating the maybes and coulds and shoulds is an impossible task, now that all the possible alternative choices are in the inaccessible past. My mental health has suffered immensely, and the long term career consequences still are to be seen. I made the choices I did, and despite my seeming inability to let that regret of not taking a different path go, this is the reality I now have to work with.
I do think there are two major takeaways from my experience. First, it’s more common than we like to admit, and departments frankly usually do a piss-poor job of planning for it. I pushed for the development of protocols to help students left behind as a member both of our department grad student association and our inter-departmental STEM inclusion organization, only to be told by departmental administration that they didn’t see such a thing as necessary due to its rarity. Since that time, two more faculty members have departed, leaving behind grad students who have had to figure things out for themselves. The last I heard, the faculty members with the ability to implement any sort of policies to help grad students in this situation were still maintaining that it was too rare to need planning for.
That’s a systemic change, and of not much help if you’re a student reading this trying to figure out where the hell to go from here. I hope I’ve laid out options in a helpful way. I want to stress a few things though- while there’s no simple answer for everyone, I do think leaving and starting a new program is an under-discussed option. Maybe it's a certain level of the-grass-is-always-greener thinking on my part, but few people even raised it to me as an option to seriously consider. If you do go that route, please remember that it’s not because you’re giving up or failing- you’re making a rational choice that you’ve decided is the best one for you, and anyone who questions your ability as a researcher because of it can go take a hike in some particularly mountain-lion-rich hills.
Ultimately, academia’s refusal to reckon with the realities of the grad students left behind feels rooted in the same soil as so many of the other problems that make it such hostile terrain. The inability to conceive of students as individuals hurt by structural decisions, the “I suffered so you must” mentality, the lack of scope to understand the diverse experiences of others, that certain blasé attitude that grad students can’t possibly know what’s best for themselves- these are all blossoms of the same toxic vine.
One final note: if you’re a grad student going through this and would find talking to someone else who’s been through it helpful, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. My contact info is here.