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eli_sennesh comments on Deliberate Grad School - Less Wrong
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Yes... but is it about mentorship, or connections? Anyway, one problem is that powerful and wise mentors don't have anything to say to you until you've got a dissertation topic, and the curriculum is structured so that this seldom happens before someone's third year in grad school.
My experience at the U. of Buffalo was that there were 2 kinds of student-advisor relationships: The exploitative kind, where the "mentor" gets the student to do gruntwork on the advisor's project, and write a whole bunch of code for him, and keeps them around, ungraduated, as long as they can; and the pro-forma kind, where the advisor cheers the student on in whatever the student is doing, then puts his or her name on the resulting papers. The idea that a dissertation advisor teaches something did not correspond to the reality I observed.
My experience having an advisor wasn't quite either of those.
I was certainly working on his research, but he wasn't trying to keep me around as long as possible. He also didn't want me gone as soon as possible.
He seemed to have something he was trying to teach me, and I dare say I learned a few things, but I'm still not sure if they were the things he intended me to learn. He would often directly articulate things, but they weren't learnable or understandable principles, just sort of... mottoes. Things like, "Look. At. The data."
The whole thing taught me the most about how many ways there are for noise and human error to creep into an experiment, and how very much prior knowledge and information you actually need just to be sure that your data is at all real in the first place. It also combined with my exposure to LW-y stuff to spark an interest in machine learning and statistics. Oh, and I learned a lot about the importance of using very nice Latex to make papers look properly professional.
Adviser's mission accomplished? Fuck if I know, but I did still manage to pass a thesis defense (on what I think was sheer politics: my manuscript was quite unpolished, but nobody wanted to speak the impolitic fact that I should have had more guidance in certain aspects before submitting, so I passed with an entirely acceptable grade nonetheless).