Recently, Zou Zhendong, a professor at Xiamen University, made an impressive remark in the discussion on Weibo's topic "How important it is for graduate students to choose tutors". In his view, graduate students don't need to promise to help the tutor do anything. He also promised the students that "follow me for three years as a graduate student and I will be responsible for your life!" It's too simple.
Show students the teacher's sincere heart. Source: Screenshot of Weibo, Zou Zhendong However, the mentoring relationship in reality does not always exist in a perfect "ideal type". In the actual interaction between tutors and graduate students, there are indeed some tutors who lack guidance for graduate students and fail to effectively shoulder the responsibility of education and training; Even some tutors have the phenomenon of teachers' moral anomie.
Seriously affect students' physical and mental health and academic career development. Therefore, it is particularly important for freshmen to choose the right tutor. As far as the tutor selection mechanism is concerned, some schools require graduate students to get in touch with their tutors in advance after entering the second interview. After obtaining the consent of the tutor and passing the second interview, you can follow the selected tutor to study for a degree.
However, most schools only allow graduate students to choose their own tutors after three months or even six months of enrollment. The advantage of this model is that after several months of classroom interaction and after-class interaction, teachers and students can have a more intuitive understanding, which is more conducive to the scientific and targeted process of guiding and selecting students. The premise of choosing a good tutor is a full understanding of the tutor.
The easiest way to get to know a tutor is to search his resume in the column of official website Teachers. Or go to the department in charge of graduate education in the school, consult the enrollment brochure or training manual of that year, get to know the tutor of this major, and make a general judgment on the research direction, work and study experience and academic achievements of the tutor.
Of course, this kind of understanding may often be superficial and difficult to go deep, and the network construction of some schools is not perfect, so the information available in this way is even more limited. Secondly, searching through academic websites is also an important way to understand tutors. For newly graduated students, you can download more scientific research articles of your favorite tutor in the past five years.
Find the academic works of the target tutor in recent years, read them carefully and think deeply, so as to roughly grasp the research direction of the tutor, and have the opportunity to communicate with them and ask for advice on topics of interest to them. This way of knowing tutors is relatively in-depth based on the grasp of tutors' scientific research interests.