First time doing a secondary fermentation

Did your advisor give you a reason for this advice? How will this 'enhance' your beer? My advice would be to stick with what already works for you rather than experiment with a beer that you don't want to risk turning into a learning experience. There's a reason that many (most?) of the more seasoned homebrewers among us generally skip secondary that goes beyond simple laziness.

That said, an autosiphon is probably the best tool for the job.

 

Putting a beer into secondary won't enhance your beer. I'll only secondary beers for a few reasons. If I'm bulk aging I'll rack it into secondary to get it off the dead yeast(autolysis). Cold crashing, or using gelatin finings flocc out anything in suspension, for clarity purposes. Dry Hoping, Oaking, or adding any other additional adjunct to the fermentor I'll throw it into secondary. With a simple milk stout like that it should ferment out fully in a week or two so I wouldn't worry about autolysis or worrying about clarity issues since it's a dark beer.

Edit:
But if your set on doing it just sanitize the other fermentor and rack with an auto syphon as stated above. As long as your sanitation habits are good there will be no harm done. I'd wait until your primary fermentation is 100% done though.

 

My advice is to leave it on the primary. I just kegged a batch of an Irish Red straight out of the primary after sitting for 4 weeks. It was beautifully clear and there was zero signs of autolysis (aka nasty yeast flavor).

The "old school" way of thinking was to always do secondary fermentation, but lots of people almost never do the secondary (myself included). You want to do secondary when you are doing something like adding fruit or oak chips or something, but even then you don't HAVE to do it. I don't even dry hop in secondary anymore.

Hope that helps

 

You move the beer to a secondary fermenter (if you wish).

Secendary fermentation is when the yeast have used up the sugars and then start to clean up diacetyl and acetaldehyde. The secondary fermentation is done for all of my beers, often in the primary fermenter.

 

This topic comes up a lot. It's best and easiest to just leave the beer in your primary fermenter. That's what I always do unless I'm adding something extra (i.e. dry hopping, etc.) or bulk aging as mentioned above. Racking to secondary only will increase your risk or infection/ oxidation, so in general it's safer and easier to just leave your beer in primary.