Welcome to the Department and to our Advisor Selection Website. Feel free to email me with your suggestions for improvement.
Please note that the advisors presented here are the only Course VI advisors available for your class. While we have over 120 faculty, there are about 1500 undergraduate and graduate students in the department.
Advising Style and Personality: Think about what kind of advisor you want. Some give you lots of good advice; others will leave everything to you. Do you want a young, casual advisor or an older 'grandparent'? Would you prefer to be 'pushed' a lot, a little, or not at all? Personality is probably the most important factor, and the most elusive. If you talk with upperclass and graduate students about these advisors, bear in mind the context in which the student knows the advisor. Some seem distant and demanding in class but are kind and gentle advisors. Others may be chummy with their research students but are not very involved with their advisees.
Matching Interests? Your academic advisor is normally NOT the same person as your UROP or thesis supervisor. Therefore the specific research area described need not thrill you. Since students' interests usually evolve significantly, exact matching really isn't important. But you should select someone in what you think will be your part of the department. The listings include brief descriptions of their advising style or philosophy, their research interests, their roles within the Department and at MIT, and the subjects they teach. You can always change advisors if you feel your personalities just don't work together, just by coming to talk to us in Room 38-476.
Some students think it's important where an advisor's office is or how nice his or her assistant is. Some students want a VIP for an advisor, although VIPs may not be the best advisors because their time is at a premium, and they're more likely to be in meetings a lot. Other students are hesitant to pick an advisor who is research staff instead of a professor. The staff are volunteers, while faculty can only choose whether to advise undergraduates or graduate students. In general, researchers tend to be less stressed and more likely to be available than faculty. They typically carry 12 or fewer advisees while faculty may have twice that number.
Talk to the Course VI upperclassmen in your living group, and perhaps your floor or house tutors if they're in VI. This year's M.Eng. grad students have some of the same advisors that you are selecting from (advisors cycle), so they should be able to tell you about some of them. Your freshman advisor may have some suggestions. You might talk to your Course VI TA or recitation instructor, too. But the problem with this is that we're so huge that lots of great advisors might not be known to any of your acquaintances. Being well-known is certainly not an important criterion for a good advisor -- perhaps the reverse!
If you want to talk to me, email is best, at anneh@mit.edu. Or you can come by Room 38-476, preferably in the morning, when it's quieter. I'll be glad to tell you which I consider to be strong advisors.
Most of our advisors have between 10 and 24 advisees, depending on their other commitments; some of those listed have as few as five spots for your class. This means that some popular (and popular doesn't usually mean better) advisors may be full and unavailable pretty fast. First come, first served.
To learn more about the student-advisor relationship, please click on http://www.eecs.mit.edu/ug/advising.html.