Livre d'Or

I think informal just happening to see eachother in passing is very likely to meet that kind of failure mode. It's also particularly tricky for me because I have no base in Life Sciences where Minion is going to be doing most of her lab work; I'm looking into getting a temporary space where I can kind of camp out, and some of the time she's going to be in the lab within the hospital site where I have part of an office, but even in the best case scenario I'm going to be tied up in the Medical School some of the time, so we have to make a specific plan / effort to meet. But yeah, regular meetings, even or perhaps especially when things are not going so well, that seems like a really key point.

Shared supervision duties: I think Minion is going to be particularly well supplied in that department! I am her primary supervisor, de jure if you like, but she also has my collaborator, a biology professor, as second supervisor, and his lab tech to actually show her how to do experiments and where to find things in the lab, and a former post-doc of his, now a lecturer, as her "external" tutor.

I think the thing with artificially setting up a source of social support like that, is that it's a waste of time until it isn't. I had a thesis committee, of which only the chair actually bothered showing up to meetings and they kept reappointing other people in the desperate hope of finding someone vaguely conscientious. And we met once a term and ticked the box to say we'd met, and it was generally a waste of time. But when things did go wrong with the post-doc who was my de facto supervisor, and my de jure supervisor was not prepared or available to deal with that, the thesis committee chair was the person I turned to who was able to set things in motion to get stuff sorted out. Made all the difference.