What do PhDs students do when their advisors go on sabbatical?

[gusl]

What do PhDs students do when their advisors go on sabbatical? How come I never heard about this being an issue?

Comments

[foxxydancr.livejournal.com]

my advisor was on sabbatical my first semester, so I just went on taking classes and working pretty independently. of course, it may be different in the humanities where you aren't quite so tied to one individual as seems to be the case in sciences.

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

It depends. Sometimes the advisors do not leave town for sabbatical and are available to their graduate students even though they are away. They can work with other researchers in the lab if their advisors do go away. If they have coursework left to finish, sabbatical is a good time to finish it.

[infryq]

Al Rizzi, who's on leave working for Boston Dynamics, still has a bunch of students at CMU. They bug him to get papers revised and documents signed over e- and snail-mail. It works, after a fashion, though it's obviously not as convenient as having someone local.

I'm surprised you haven't heard about the issue -- it was one of the standard horror stories I heard regarding picking a school for one particular advisor instead of choosing instead a good program with lots of advisor options. Worse is if your advisor switches schools wholesale: you'd have to choose whether to finish solo, or to follow them across the country.

[bhudson.livejournal.com]

I haven't heard about sabbatical much, since pretty much everyone can survive 6 months with rare contact -- and because CMU/SCS profs don't seem to take much in the way of sabbatical. Taking off permanently, however, is a huge problem that has felled many a grad student. There's little to do about it as a student, although having dual advisors can help reduce the probability they're both leaving (not that it's perfect).

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I know of students who were happy to follow their advisor to a better place.

Their PhD could be labeled with a better school, though I can imagine some unpleasant bureaucracy regarding class requirements, etc.

[infryq]

... but that assumes they're going somewhere better.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

...and what if the advisor is denied tenure?

[jmmorton.livejournal.com]

I see my advisor less when he's been on sabbatical, which has happened twice while I've been in graduate school, but he's still very available. But my advisor is really different in that way, for an advisor in the humanities, I see him for an hour or two every week or every other week. When he's on leave, I get to see him only about once a month, but he still checks e-mail and responds promptly. It really depends on the person.

[marymcglo.livejournal.com]

It's less of a problem because it's temporary and there's enough notice to plan around it. Many profs are considerate enough to avoid taking new students the year before the sabbatical, so they don't leave junior students unattended.

Tenured profs tend toward high-level management anyway, so cutting meetings back to once a month isn't always such a drastic change.

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

Mine has dual professorship here and at Rutgers, so he's away there every Fall quarter. I usually just try to make sure I've got something solid to work on, and email him or conference call if I need help. (Maybe that doesn't work for Sabbatical). I'm amazed that the grad student he has over at Rutgers is able to get anything done at all, as he has to rely on long-distance communication for 3/4ths of the year. (Although he did visit here for most of last year.)