Chemistry doctoral programs shape the quantity, quality and diversity of Ph.D. chemists throughout the workforce by being the primary contributor to students’ professional development. The primary component of chemistry Ph.D. experiences in graduate school buildss upon the research group, where advisors are regarded as ‘‘bosses’’ who have the potential to profoundly affect a student’s professional development and career path. However, the communication between advisees and their research advisors has been reported in current literature, which will directly affect the advisor-advisee relationship as well as students’ academic and research performance. Until recently, limited research has focused on this topic of communication between advisor and advisee. Thus, this project aims to examine advisor-advisee communication in chemistry graduate school and explore the factors that impact students' communicative behaviors with advisors. We designed two scenarios that pose potentially conflict-causing events that commonly arise between chemistry doctoral students and their advisors. These two real life situations prompted participating graduate students to respond in whatever way they saw fit and justify why they would respond in that fashion. After analyzing the situational interview data from 18 chemistry doctoral students, we found that although most of participants desired to openly communicate with advisors to resolve these potentially conflict-causing situations, some participants looked for help from others just to avoid direct contact with advisors. In addition, courtesy and appreciation were emphasized by most of participants when exemplifying what they would say to their advisors. From participants’ explanations, we categorized factors that affect how students will interact with their advisors (e.g., power imbalance, advisors’ personality, advisors’ availability, advisors’ accountability, advisor-advisee relationships). These factors can play an important role in understanding the advisor-advisee relationship for the betterment of these relationships in chemistry doctoral education.

Situational interview based investigation of advisor-advisee communication in U.S. chemistry graduate education

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.