I’ve with worked a number of professors and witnessed more during my short career as a graduate student. I have come gradually to form a set of ideals about the criteria of what a good professor should be like. Of course, just like what a good artist should be like, this is an open question, and different people will have different answers to it. Nonetheless, everybody needs to start from somewhere. In the following, I will use the 3rd-person pronoun “he/his” for brevity, but these set of criteria by no means are restricted to male professors.

1) A good professor should be extremely knowledgeable. He should have achieved an extraordinary accumulation of the knowledge in his area of specialization and a sound background knowledge of the related areas. With this knowledge, he should be able to respond to most background-related consultations from students and colleagues with satisfying answers. This thick base of knowledge should also facilitate his writing of Introduction and Discussion parts of academic papers and grant applications. A large chunk of this knowledge are the memory of past papers. This chunk of knowledge should be not only a long list of names and dates, but more importantly a systematic web of thorough understanding and critical evaluations of them. This type of eruditeness is difficult to achieve. Only those driven by a combination of keen interest and dedication will manage to keep accumulating the knowledge through continuous reading of books and papers throughout his student and post-doc years, and all the way into the professional career. With this knowledge, he should be able to establish an absolute authority knowledge-wise in his lab or group. This authority is not meant to be deterring to the lab members, but rather be a source of psychological assurance (especially when help is needed) and a role model.

2) A good professor should be hard-working. In today’s competitive academic environment, only hardworking people have a chance of survival. A good professor should not sit back and count on his students/post-docs to work hard to churn out works for the lab, because this won’t work. A professor should establish a role model of discipline in the lab. This doesn’t mean that he should do all the bench/field work or programming/data analysis. But at least he should be willing to be actively engaged in these activities with his students/colleagues whenever necessary and do so in an absolutely competent way. Nowadays, most of a professor’s time is spent on things like writing grants and administrative tasks. Only by being diligence can he quickly finish these necessary distractions in order to be able to spend more time on the more academic-related (therefore more central) things such as advising students, absorbing new knowledge and writing papers. To the degree that doesn’t interfere with his normal family life, he should utilize the evenings, nights and weekends to advance his work. Being hard-working alone is not sufficient, the professor should also be able to expose his image of diligence and discipline to the entire lab, such that an atmosphere of hard-working can be established – just as what Chinese call “covert transformation and silent influence （潜移默化）". However, there is an interest borderline here which the professor doesn’t want to cross. He doesn’t want to be perceived as a “workaholic”, because (1) this may result in damaging his colleague’s confidence in his efficiency of working, and (2) this may hurt his social image. This means that he should probably go home by 7 PM on most days, and do the rest of the work at home.

3) A good professor should be a good leader. Being a good academic leader means a few things: (1) the ability to foresee, (2) the ability to encourage, and (3) the ability to decide. Because academic work emphasizes originality, doing research always means devoting a lot of time and energy to an objective that doesn’t necessarily ensure success. This requires a good professor to be almost an prophet, an magical augur who is able to foretell whether a line of research will succeed or not. This ability is probably the most tricky aspect of an academic career, and it only comes with an massive amount of experience (both through personal successes and failures and observing others). Students and post-docs in the lab normally won’t have this kind of ability, therefore the professor should shoulder the responsibility of being the prophet.

However, even an excellent prophet won’t be right 100% on the time. Academic research is constantly filled with frustration and obstacles; the truly exciting moments are the exceptions. Therefore, encouragement is greatly required, especially by the newbie. A good professor should be able to deliver these encouragements in a timely manner. This not only involves cheer-ups when an experiment runs flat, but also words of praise/appreciation when things go really well (positive reinforcement). However, praises should not go unrestricted, because that would curtail the weight of his praises. A good professor should master the art of balancing the withholding and giving of praises. Praises and criticism are two sides of a coin. Criticism is necessary at certain moments. However, I have not had enough chance to observe what effective criticism should be like. This will probably depend on the personality of the receiver of the criticism.

Academic work is filled with constant decision making – what experiment paradigm one should use, how should one interpret a mixed result, how should one present the data in an honest yet electrifying way, and how to deal with reviewers, just to name a few. It is far too easy to be bogged down by dilemmas in such kind of decision making, which are often made more difficult by the unknowns intrinsically involved in academic research. A good professor should be a decisive person, who is able to help his students and colleagues resolve those dilemmas. Being decisive doesn’t equal hastiness. He should make have adequate rationale for every decision made, and teach the ability of decision making to his students.

4) A good professor should be student oriented. When ones career goes well, it is far too easy to be absorbed in enjoying the aura of honor. However, one should keep in mind that one’s life is limited whereas the advancement of knowledge knows no end. Therefore a good professor should highly value his students and treat them almost like his own children (in a special sense). He should have the realization that how well his students do academically is the most telling measure of how good an academic he is himself. Indeed, being able to bring up students that will themselves be productive researchers is probably the most demanding and challenging aspect of the job of a professor. It puts high demand on almost every aspect of his scholarship, including the value and sustainability of his research topic, the soundness of his knowledge, his communication skill, his ability of being a role-model and his academic integrity. He should not be stingy with his time. Weekly (or more often) meeting with the students should be mandatory. This both puts some pressure on the students to work hard and give them a feeling that what they do really matter. What kind of personal relationship a professor keeps with his students is a matter of personal taste. Some prefer to maintain a healthy distance with the students; other are good at mixing well with the students. But the commonly important thing is that the personal relationships should establish a trustworthy image of the professor himself.