Academic Mentors and Research Advisors

Graduate school is fundamentally different from undergraduate study. Like college, graduate school begins with taking courses. Graduate courses are generally more challenging, demanding and rigorous. They are focus on more advanced and specialized topics and seminars will involve more direct student-instructor interaction, for example in discussing challenging homework problems or new research directions in the area of study. But beyond taking courses, graduate study is about using your skills in an area of mathematics to produce a new contribution to science and mathematics. This creative pursuit of novel results directly leads to your doctoral thesis and your Ph.D.

At every point in your career as a graduate student at Duke, you will receive guidance for the steps in this process. On entering the program, the Director of Graduate Studies will assign to you a faculty member to serve as your academic mentor.

• Academic mentors serve as general advisors, recommending which courses which might best fit your research goals. Mentors will help you prepare for the qualifying exams. The mentor continues to offer guidance to students until they have selected a research advisor.


• Research advisors help students select a specialized area of mathematical study to focus on and a problem that ultimately serves as the basis of the student's thesis. The research advisor helps arrange the preliminary exam and the final thesis defense.