The current study is an exploratory study designed to examine the traits that are considered essential or important for research students, from the perspective of student advisors. The study addresses the broad question of whether and how academic faculty members select research students when seeking to maximize their own research outputs and achieving their own research goals. We employ a mixed-methods design, which incorporates content analysis based on Natural Language Processing techniques, and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to assess our model's goodness of fit. Prominent traits that faculty members used to assess research candidates are investigated and discussed.