Sr. Olives got some tragic news today. A professor of his, who is the advisor to two of our good friends (also fellow candidates in his Ph.D. program), passed away. It was completely unexpected. Though we don’t know the cause of death, this guy couldn’t be more than forty years old. The psychology department is pretty tight-knit so the whole community is generally taking it pretty hard.
We are attending the funeral tomorrow, and I’m not really sure what to say to my friends. One of them actually transferred schools so that she could work under the tutelage of this man… he transferred not only to another school but another department, so she followed him, at great personal inconvenience to herself, essentially losing three years’ work and having to start from scratch. Both of our friends are three years into the program and nearing the dissertation phase. They have worked very closely with him and I really doubt anyone is as familiar or committed to their work as he is.
I don’t even know what happens when something like this occurs. I just know that there are few things more stressful than earning a Ph.D., and this kind of loss at such a crucial step in the process must be absolutely earth-shattering. How would a university typically handle such an event? Are there any Dopers who have experienced anything like this? Will they be forced to start from scratch, assigned a new person, or what? I just want to better understand what my friends will be facing as they deal with this.
I have helped friends deal with personal loss, and there is certainly that aspect to it, but this is also, as I understand it, a major professional loss too. The only place I really knew where to start is to attend the funeral. It’s a four hour trek for us, so I’m hoping our presence will show that we care. I’m just kind of lost beyond that.
It happened to me, about 2 years into the process. I had passed my quals already, and was doing research, but hadn’t picked out a topic yet.
What happens is one of two things. You can get a new advisor inside the department - how well one does at this depends on the topic they are interested in and their reputation - but you’ll get something. I TAed for a younger professor who was associated with our group, and I get another advisor who wasn’t. But neither of them was especially interested in what I was interested in, and the guy I got was in an area directly conflicting with the first guy, and was writing a book instead of papers, so I was skeptical of his tenure chances (and I was right.)
So I chose the second option, which was to move. An old office mate had gone to another university to teach which happened to house a guy with a lot of money who was working on exactly what I wanted to work on. It was not nearly as good a department as the world class one I came from.
Pluses: I was a big fish, which was fun. I got a lot of face time with my advisor, and there were a bunch of people working on what I was working on. I also got to do the dissertation I had really wanted to do.
Minuses: It not being such a top department, recruiters didn’t drop in. I realized that if I was going to teach I’d have to teach stupid people as well as bright ones, so I decided to go into industry. Back then getting a job was really easy, today it might be an issue. It turned out I had to take quals and orals again (no big deal) and I was stuck teaching.
All in all I’m glad I moved, but my advisor was a great guy, and I wish I had been able to do a dissertation under him.
I do know that there is often a great deal of inconvenience when a professor moves, no idea what happens when he dies. If your friends are dissertating, I suspect that the university will have to let them continue and maybe bring in an additional reader from outside the university for the panel if there is no one inside the department to help. It’s not in the university’s interest to make your friends’ hit restart on the dissertation, because completion rates are an internal and external marker for the department’s reputation. I could be wrong, but that’s my impression.
When I got my masters Something kind of similar happened. One of the other professors had a serious heart attack. He didn’t die, but was too weak to move for about a month, and it happened right at the last month of the semester.
My professor was the only other one really qualified to take overbut was already busy with his own PH.D candidates and his own masters students. They basically decided he should to concentrate on the PH.D. aspect and try to get that done for both sets. So for me and my cohorts our Masters theses presentation devolved into putting it into a manila envelope, handing it to the department secretary who threw it in a pile where I am sure it never got opened again.
I got my Masters before I left for the new school, and it was kind of the same. A professor also in the group was my Masters advisor, and when I finished she said that she’d read it before it became a departmental report. Which I doubt it ever did. On the other hand, my daughter, who is in a PhD program, just finished hers. She wrote it in under a month based on some research she had already done, and it has been more or less thrown in a file even with a living, healthy advisor.
There are worse things. My wife decided to stop with a Masters, and her thesis became the focus point of a departmental war.
I’m sorry for those out there who have had this experience.
We just got back from the funeral. I learned a lot about this guy in the last 24 hours, though I never met him, he was actually supposed to take over as the director of the clinical psych department at Rutgers this Fall. All who knew him regarded him as the one who would help elevate the department to a new level. He studied at Penn under Martin Seligman. He achieved tenure. He just settled down with his long-term partner in a new house, and he had planned to hold a party on Sunday to celebrate all the wonderful things going on in his life. He just turned 39.
The funeral was incredibly moving, and the turnout was huge. This is a man who touched many lives and had a reputation as a compassionate, brilliant psychologist and a wonderful advisor. I want to leave that kind of impression when I go. There seemed to be no regrets – his partner said that he made sure others knew how much he appreciated them. There seemed just as much joy and peace as sorrow at this service. My friends seem to be holding up well enough. Lots of tears, and the whole department is in shock. I think it’s almost impossible to predict what’s going to happen at this point.
I have, unfortunately, seen two professors die young and leave behind doctoral students. I have also seen a professor (also young) have a massive stroke that severely hampered his ability to work. In all of these cases, the doctoral students were taken in by another professor in the department/program and allowed to finish their project. It does add an extra layer of complexity, because the new advisor is unlikely to be an expert in that exact field, but it’s generally the best option available.
In the end, I don’t think it changed the career path of any of the students other than perhaps slowing them down by a year or so.