Livre d'Or

Thank you for this, it's really helpful. I am definitely starting out with regular meetings, weekly to start with and then we'll play it by ear. I have emphasised that the meetings are meant to be discussions, not a way for me to "check up" that Minion is doing enough work.

Giving positive feedback is something I have in mind as a goal, but it's also something I'm still learning to do well. I've got it wrong with my undergrad students sometimes, either putting more emphasis on the criticism (because I am over-keen to help them fix stuff) or being too generic in my praise so they don't find it helpful.

Any supervisor ought to be setting expectations and goals! I am nervous about this one because I have never in fact run a project of this size myself, and I don't always have a clear grasp on what's realistic in terms of time-scales etc. I'll be consulting with my co-supervisor / mentor a whole lot about this one, but good to be reminded that I need to make sure I include my student in planning at this level.

As for personal life and especially health stuff, this is one of the areas I'm most wary about, because even with good will it's easy to get horribly wrong. I hope I'll be approachable and my student will feel comfortable talking about general personal stuff in normal conversation. And that if there's anything that's affecting her work she'll be able to tell me about it and I'll be supportive and helpful rather than punitive. But I am aware that I have rather a lot of power over someone who's doing a PhD with me, and I most certainly don't want to pressure her to disclose things she'd rather keep private. Nor make her uncomfortable by revealing too much about my own personal stuff because however much I may like her, I don't want to presume we're friends.

Talking to her about how she works seems like a really good idea, and it's likely to be an ongoing thing, not just a one-off conversation. She may well not know yet, because she's had relatively little experience of related situations herself.