Pizza & Beer Workshop: Communicating Effectively With Your Advisor

Communicating Effectively With Your Advisor

• appreciate the goals you and your advisor share
• understand different communication styles
• learn strategies to manage meetings and communications with your advisor

Your relationship with your faculty advisor is essential part of your graduate school experience. Your advisor can teach and inspire you, just as you can teach and inspire your advisor.

Program Description

In this interactive workshop you will learn communication, management, and negotiation skills that will help you work effectively with your advisor. You will also learn about resources to help you set expectations with your advisor and get the feedback you need to succeed in grad school.

Students report that this workshop helped them significantly improve their working relationships with their advisors - and increased productivity and reduced stress. These approaches will also help you throughout your career.

Developed by the Graduate School at Michigan State University and modified by VPGE, these interactive workshops have been presented to students and faculty at universities around the country for the last decade.

About the Presenter

Helen J. Doyle is Associate Vice Provost for Graduate Education. Previously, Helen was Associate Director of Stanford’s Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources in the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. Helen has also held senior positions at the Public Library of Science, a non-profit open-access scholarly publisher, and at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. She also worked in K-12 science education reform at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Helen’s doctoral and postdoctoral research was in molecular genetics. She has a BA from Barnard College and a PhD from Columbia University in New York City, and was a postdoctoral scholar at the Max Planck Institute in Germany and at UCSF.