How to Avoid Being Exploited by Your Advisor

As I’ve mentioned earlier, often a student chooses a topic based on his own interests, but other times a student wishes to work with a particular professor who suggests a topic to the student. Professors tend to follow two different crite­ria when suggesting a topic: a professor can recommend a familiar topic on which he can easily advise the student, or a professor can recommend an unfamiliar topic on which he would like to know more.

Contrary as it may seem, the second criterion is the more honest and generous. The professor believes that his ability to effectively judge and assist the candidate will require him to devote himself to something new, and thus the professor will expand his horizons. When the professor chooses this second path, it is because he trusts the candidate, and he usually tells the candidate explicitly that the topic is new and interesting to him. Even though universities currently require professors to advise many students, and therefore incline professors to cater to students’ interests, some pro­fessors still refuse to advise a thesis on a banal topic.

There are also specific cases in which a professor is con­ducting a wide-ranging research project that requires vast amounts of data, and he decides to engage graduating stu­dents as members of a team. In other words, he orients the students’ work in a specific direction for a certain number of years. He will assign topics that work together to establish a complete picture of his research question. This approach is not only legitimate but also scientifically useful, as each thesis contributes to a larger project that is more important for the collective interest. This approach is also useful from a teaching perspective, because each candidate will benefit from the advice of a professor who is well informed on the question, and each student can use as background and com­parative material the theses that other students have already written on related topics. If the candidate does good work, he can hope to publish the results, at least as part of a larger collective work.

However, this approach does pose some possible risks:

1. The professor is absorbed by his own topic to such an extent that he imposes it on a candidate who has no interest in the subject. The student becomes a lackey who wearily gathers material for others to interpret. Although the student will have written a modest thesis, he risks not being credited for his work. When the professor writes the final research project, he will perhaps fish out some parts of the student’s work from the material he has gath­ered, but he may use them without citing the student, if only because the student’s specific contribution to the final product is difficult to delineate.
2. The professor is dishonest, requires the student to work on his project, approves the thesis, and then unscru­pulously uses the work as if it were his own. Sometimes this dishonesty is almost in good faith; the professor may have followed the thesis with passion and suggested many ideas, but over time he loses the ability to distinguish his students’ ideas from his own, in the same way that, after a passionate group discussion on a certain topic, we are unable to discern the ideas we introduced from those inspired by others.

How can you avoid these risks? Before approaching the professor, you should assess the professor’s honesty from the opinions of friends and the experiences of graduates whom the professor advised. You should read his books, and pay particular attention to citations of his collaborators.

This investigation will take you so far, but you must also intuitively feel some sense of trust and respect toward the professor.

On the other hand, you should not become so paranoid that you believe you have been plagiarized every time a pro­fessor or another student addresses a topic related to your thesis. For example, if you did a thesis on the relationship of Darwinism and Lamarckism, your research would show that many scholars have treated the same topic, and have shared many common ideas. Therefore, you should not feel like a defrauded genius if the professor, one of his teaching assistants, or one of your classmates writes on the same topic. The actual theft of scientific work means something different altogether: using specific data from your exper­iments, appropriating your original transcriptions of rare manuscripts, using statistical data that you were the first to collect, or using your original translations of texts that were either never translated or translated differently by others.

These constitute theft only if you have not been cited as a source, because once you publish your thesis, others have the right to cite it.

So, without slipping into paranoia, consider your willing­ness to join a collective project, and consider whether the risks are worth it.

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.