grad school proverb: don’t burn your bridges

One thing I tell students is that grad school is something like an apprenticeship.  Most students know this, of course; they are focused on selecting their mentor.  But they often forget that the apprentice provides something to the mentor in exchange for the training and mentoring.  So I often say that nothing comes for free.  The trick about grad school is getting someone to care for you – someone to invest and train you.  The flip side of this is not to burn bridges. I know of a student who switched mentors.  This student had published with the first mentor (that is, the mentor invested in this student), but then had dropped this person entirely.  The mentor was not on the diss committee (I think the mentor was a reasonable person to include, btw), but the new mentor did not exactly make the student a high priority.  So the student, in my opinion, entered the job market without strong advocates and lacked strong investment.  No placement.