Occasionally I see the strangest things posted publicly onto social media by professors. Perhaps one of the stranger things goes something like this:
“This goes out to XXXX professor, who told me in graduate school that I’ve never make it. Well look at me now!!”
“Just thinking about my advisor who said my dissertation topic was too narrow to land me a job as I accept this big fancy award!”
The response is almost always a bunch of other professors saying something along the lines of:
“clap clap clap clap clap. Bravo!”
“Oooh that makes me so mad. How dare they? You’re amazing"!”
Not always, but normally, these types of statements get a lot of attention, as measured by the typical metrics of social media: people liking things, people retweeting things, people responding.
Typically I just find ways to remove those who engage in these kinds of things from my internet experience and move on with my life. But I stew on these moments, because I think they are potentially quite damaging.
These are professors making these statements. Which means that they are in roles, either formally or informally, of authority over graduate students. Now, many graduate students are shrewd and can easily identify errors and BS when they encounter them. But others are more trusting and for whatever reason hold professors in high regard. I worry that the latter category may get the wrong impression from the valorization they see around these publicly stated messages by professors. So this is my attempt to push back to help anybody out who might be listening.
Dress for success
Let me begin by asking a silly question. Why are billionaires successful? In the early 2000s, there was a little energy around the clothing choices of Steve Jobs. He simplified his life by just wearing black turtlenecks and jeans so that he could focus on the bigger picture issues of Apple. So for a very brief moment in time, there were suckers who thought, “I might be successful if I wear a black turtleneck and jeans.” More sophisticated suckers moved beyond this initial point, thinking, “Maybe it doesn’t HAVE to be a black turtleneck. But I should just buy one set of clothing so I can be successful too.” Obviously, Steve Jobs is not successful because he wore turtlenecks. More to the point, it’s wrong to focus on people who are successful, identify a trait they have in common, and argue in favor of that trait causing success. It is better to study those who wear turtlenecks and those who do not and compare the rate of success. Probably won’t find much of an effect of dress simplification in the probability of billionaire status.
What you’re seeing, both among the above professor’s tweets and among the interrogating of a billionaire’s clothing decision is a classic case of survivorship bias.
Why are you reading Professor <redacted>’s triumphant declaration of overcoming their advisor’s critiques? Because that professor is successful and made it. You’re probably not following graduate students who ignored their professor’s advice and are now happily plugged into the private sector somewhere.
I would bet good money that there are many, many more people who do not listen to their advisor’s advice about their dissertation research who do not make it. I’d bet there are more people who DID listen to their advisor’s advice, that their dissertation topic was too narrow or terrible for some other reason, adjusted, then made it.
For a particular person who rejected their advisor’s advice and eventually found success, I see three possible reasons for their success.
Their advisor was wrong
Something else happened that resulted in success
They misunderstood the interaction
Their advisor was wrong. It happens. Our gig is built around the idea that it is good to explicitly state what you believe to be true so that it can be held up to scrutiny and judge its veracity. Hopefully Professor <redacted>’s advisors would be very happy that, despite their assumptions that things wouldn’t work out, that they did! Hopefully, they would update their priors about how the labor market operates.
Something else happened that resulted in success. Maybe their advisor was correct, but other factors combined to result in a happy outcome. The academic job market is full of randomness. Other factors beyond one’s dissertation topic that matter for job outcomes, in no particular order: (i) social connections (ii) internal department politics and preferences (iii) the performance of other flyout candidates (iv) whether other flyout candidates chosen ahead of you received offers from other departments (v) idiosyncratic / niche calls for idiosyncratic / niche administrative and bureaucratic reasons at particular universities (vi) department preferences for teaching certain courses, for things other than mainstream publishing expectations. A dissertation topic is something that can be controlled by advisor and candidate. Many of these other factors cannot. I’d assume that an advisor watches a bunch of job market candidates take swings at the job market and think, “Net of the randomness I cannot control, those with dissertation topics tackling core sociological questions have higher probabilities of job hits than those with more niche topics.” Key point: net of the randomness I cannot control. Related: I tell my three year old not to lick things in public spaces because it will make him. Sometimes he nevertheless does, but sometimes when he does he doesn’t get sick. Ha ha, Joke’s on me, right?
They misunderstood the interaction. I cannot overemphasize this point enough. Unless you know all parties involved, it is very, very dangerous for your own understanding of a situation to accept as true one party’s interpretation, particularly the loudest and most online party. I don’t often have involvement with academic social media drama. But occasionally I have been around people who kicked up drama online or else made strong arguments. And my interpretation has always been… “That’s not exactly what happened.” Not “wrong” but “…that’s one way to interpret things.” Graduate students are rightly anxious and insecure, because it’s really fucking hard to be a graduate student. But that condition can mean that conversations are misinterpreted. Or the relative weight of importance of multiple comments is misunderstood. Interpersonal communication is hard, right? Exhibit A: all of the literature written by people in the last two millennia.
So what am I saying? Don’t be a sucker and purely conform. But don’t discount the advice of your advisors who may know a thing or two more about this line of work. When you read loud and prominent statements by professors online, assume that it’s gone through multiple layers of selection bias (including this blog post). You’ve got to simultaneously be open and skeptical, fall in line from folks who know better and gather perspectives from multiple parties. Hard work, but I don’t really see any other alternative. Good luck!