Livre d'Or

I’m just finishing up my PhD and whilst my scientific relationship with my director was great his social skills were just terrible causing a lot of not needed emotional stress on my part.

Things he did brilliantly:

1. Met with me and his other PhD students once a week for a tutorial. We presented articles we had read in turn or parts of our analyses and this was a great space for learning from each other and talking things out to make sure we understood them ourselves.
2. Consulted me in setting deadlines and always asked if I wanted to break down one big deadline into a series of smaller deadlines.
3. Pushed me to send papers to conferences and therefore to network helping me to break into our academic field and meet my colleagues.
4. Always talked about the national research scene in terms of politics, upcoming research themes, new policies etc. I feel he prepared me for a career not just to finish the thesis. For example, in France, data publication and open-access corpora are buzz words at the moment so my data is structured into a corpus to accompany my thesis and help me during my future recruitment process respond to criteria the labs will put in post profiles because that is where the funding is. He always shared his global vision of the research world and that was enriching.

Things he really needed to work on:

1.I taught full time before my PhD and went part-time in order to take on this project. Despite this, my director demanded that I was in the research lab from 9-5h30 on the four days a week I did not teach. I really appreciated the research-home divide but even if I was five minutes late he asked why or asked my colleagues where I was. At the end I even felt that I could not schedule medical appointments during those times. As a mature student who always met his deadlines I felt he needed to trust me a LOT more.
2. Going over papers I had written he would often tell me ‘no, that’s not right’ or ‘you can’t put that’. I think it would have been more positive to make me tell him first of all the problem areas I had in writing the paper, second to ask me my opinion about the sections he did not deem up to scratch and then to give me his opinion in a constructive way, before planning together the steps needed to make it better. Instead I felt like I had returned to Middle School and would find out where the problems were but never how I should go about solving them.
3. He talked about other colleagues behind their back and what he thought of their research. Not great when you have to work in collaboration with them.
He was very linear with one path from A to B. If you made it to B but by taking a different path he couldn’t cope.
4. And finally, my desk, because of his micro-management issues, became his space too. He had me rename all of the folders one day on my computer so I could find things (according to his logic which meant I couldn’t find anything) and one day screamed at me because my handbag was on my desk. He never asked why -my phone was on silent and I was expecting a call from an estate agent and didn’t want to disturb colleagues. I think the essential is for an advisor to be there to micro manage if needed but to ask the student how they want to work and if they show you that there are doing the work to trust them.