How much does the future career of a PhD student matter to the advisor?

Question

I am struggling with my Post-PhD career. I am still looking for positions and I getting zero response. My advisor is giving me no leads and I don't know if she's even bothered about my career prospects. She has offered me a one year postdoc position in my current lab. Apart from that, there's no further help.

I don't know if a PhD advisor even cares for their students. I feel so unsupported and lost.

Edit: The problem is I work on a modeling technique and research area that's not in her expertise. I started the entire work and now she has other PhD students working on the topic due to the multiple papers I published. I have already staying around 6 years with her. My PhD went so long due to my own faults. Now I am absolutely lost and disillusioned.

Answer 1

Your last sentence makes me think that the question you ask in the title may not be the question you're really interested in. If you feel lost, talk to people. Friends, family, professionals, whichever you feel most comfortable with, but get help.

How much does the future career of a PhD student matter to the advisor? The subsequent careers of the collective PhD graduates influence the attractiveness of the advisor to future PhD students. So it matters, but if the advisor has many successful PhD graduates on their resume, it is a matter of diminishing returns.

Beyond that, a good PhD advisor would feel a moral obligation to ensure their former students land somewhere nice. However, the current Covid situation makes the job market really rather difficult right now, so this is not entirely within the grasp of the advisor. Offering a postdoc is something that the advisor can control, so I can understand why this would seem like a reasonable solution to them.

Answer 2

Supervisor A always has 20 or more PhD students in their group, and time only for those who deliver stuff that can be published in a top-notch journal.

Supervisor B usually has less than 5, a door that is always open, and all the students have at least three manuscripts published in good journals by the time they defend their thesis.

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Which do you think cares more about their students' futures?

Bonus question: which do you think prospective students will flock to? (The answer may surprise you.)

Answer 3

It seems that your advisor has not done a great job mentoring you in your post-PhD job search. It's typical for advisors to at least forward on job announcements to students on the hunt, and these tend to be pretty widely circulated. I'm a postdoc and I get emails like this asking me to forward on to good candidates, so even junior professors should have some leads.

I'm also concerned that you feel she doesn't seem bothered at all. That's a breakdown in either communication or in actual mentorship. Your advisor should care about you career (even if caring means telling you she doesn't think you should continue in academia). Doing nothing there is in my opinion not doing a good job.

She did offer you a postdoc, which is something, but you need some mentorship. I'd try talking to her about this to see if her lack of interest in your job search is intentional or just something she isn't on top of.

Sadly, while my opinion is advisors do have this obligation to their students, the academy has very little structure to hold advisors accountable to these standards (and in fact what standards apply to advisors are not talked about often and there is little widespread consensus).

There is vague incentive to treat graduate students well in order to attract talent to your group, but this is hardly enough to guarantee advisors will follow through (as many questions on this site demonstrate). Beyond that there's not much to ensure your advisor cares.