Livre d'Or

I second what's been said above about regular meetings, or at least contact. I went through a sticky patch in the third year of my DPhil where I essentially didn't get any research done for about six months (chiefly because my funding had expired and I was suddenly having to try to earn enough money to live on), and neither of my supervisors got in touch to ask what was happening or why they hadn't heard from me. (To be fair to them, having two co-supervisors was a factor here: I think they both assumed I was working with the other one.) This resulted in a bit of a guilt spiral: because I hadn't been in touch for so long, I wanted to have something really impressive to show them when I did get in touch, but as I am the sort of person who is motivated by regular deadlines, achieving that was unlikely without having agreed a deadline with one of them... While the ultimate responsibility for getting the work done was (obviously) mine, a friendly enquiring email after a few weeks might just have provided the nudge I needed to actually start getting stuff done again, rather than perpetuating the spiral and allowing me to give in to the temptation just to keep my head down, because no one seemed to have noticed that I hadn't done any work recently.

More generally, the thing I would really have appreciated during the course of my doctorate was more advice on the things graduate students are supposed to do that aren't actually an official part of the degree. At no point during my time as a graduate student do I remember anyone ever encouraging me to go to conferences, or to think about submitting things for publication. It was at a fairly late stage in my DPhil (when it was really too late to do much about it) that I realized that a lot of other students had been doing far more on this front than I had - something which I'm certain had a substantial impact on my job prospects. It's fine to expect students to be proactive and take the initiative themselves, but even the most motivated students need some pointers in terms of what they ought to be being proactive about! It's also helpful to have some idea of what the general expectations are - what sort of publication/presentation record future employers are likely to be looking for, for example.

Finally, as someone involved in a project designed to promote good research data management, I should really put my work hat on and say something about that. Our experience suggests this is something it's really worth thinking about near the beginning of a project, as getting things right from the start often saves a lot of time and effort later on! There are some useful resources about various aspects of data management (organizing information, documenting data, secure storage and back-up, preparing data for archiving and/or sharing, etc.) here (the PrePARe Project training materials, linked to from that page, provide some of the best brief introductions to the topic that I've seen). The Digital Curation Centre also provide some helpful advice about data management planning, though as their name suggests, their focus is more on how you ensure data is preserved after the end of a project, rather than how you deal with it during it.