Minion

[liv]

I have a PhD student! She started yesterday, and she is brill, I am so looking forward to working with her. I'm also a bit nervous, because I've never done this before, and I'm in very large part responsible for her career and quite possibly her happiness.

The PhD system is really weird in how heavily it depends on the relationship between supervisor and student. Modern academia is just starting to put safeguards in place to salvage the situation if the relationship goes wrong, but it's still essentially like a Mediaeval apprenticeship: your supervisor all but owns you and has almost unlimited power over whether you get your PhD, which is the essential and almost the only entry route into an academic career.

So I'm taking a leaf from rachelmanija's book: if you've ever been a PhD student, tell me stories! Tell me something your supervisor did that made things better for you. Tell me something they did that made the soul-killing struggle of getting through a PhD even worse than it should have been. (Like rachelmanija, I don't really need to know about obviously disastrously wrong things like sexually harassing students or completely ignoring them or stealing their work, because I already know I'm not going to do that. But hey, if it's cathartic for you to tell the internet how your supervisor was an evil crook who exploited you, go ahead!)

I have no problem if you want to give me general advice that doesn't come from direct personal experiences, or if you want to chime in with stories about a similar relationship that wasn't specifically a PhD. Also feel free to comment if I don't know you, if you found this by chance eg via Latest Things or Network. Anon comments are allowed but you may have to fill in a Captcha.

Comments

[rochvelleth]

Firstly, congratulations! It's just wonderful, and you must be so excited about it.

Now, my experiences:

My PhD supervisor bogged off to Germany for two of my three years on extended sabbatical/personal leave. Saying that, he was the best supervisor ever. I think part of it is that we're alike in our approaches to material (especially in how cautiously to treat linguistic/epigraphic data) - and he's a complete perfectionist and a total worrier, like me, and also is very responsible and kind and prepared to stick up for you if needed and extremely knowledgeable. Now that I have the BA fellowship, he's agreed to be my mentor, so we get another three years of a similar sort of relationship (but obviously different in various ways). And that's even though he is again off to Germany for a whole year in the middle :)

But the personality experiment is something you can't control of course - I was just very lucky to end up with someone that I ended up adoring. More practically, he was always very receptive but honest when I suggested something he just didn't buy; he kept in touch by email all the time and read through my drafts fastidiously whenever I asked him; he made sure we met up at least once a month or so, even when he was away; he was incredibly sympathetic when I was going through a rough time healthwise; he never put pressure on me or gave me deadlines (maybe in part because he knew how much pressure I was putting on myself - a different type of student would obviously require a different approach); and above all he was generous with his time and ideas, and that's something I think every PhD student needs.

I hope that helps!

[liv]

Wow, that's really lovely to hear, it's so rare for someone to have such a massively positive experience of their relationship with their supervisor. I agree that geographically absent doesn't necessarily have to be a problem; my main PhD supervisor disappeared to Singapore while I was still studying under him and even before that he was fantastically busy being famous and rarely actually in the lab, but he was really helpful remotely.

Personality I agree you can't really control, and you so often end up matched to the person you're working closely with for several years based on little more than a half hour interview. I really like my minion; she's a bit quieter than me, but otherwise as far as I can tell so far we're pretty compatible.

That's a really useful thought about dealing with disagreements. In some ways I have more experience than the minion, but I also intend to take her ideas and suggestions seriously. very receptive but honest is definitely something to strive for. Keeping in touch regularly is very much my plan, and luckily I pretty much live on email, so there should be few issues of minion not being able to get hold of me when she needs to. I've set a weekly meeting for the time being, with the idea that we may reduce the frequency later on once she finds her feet.

Pressure and deadlines is a really tricky one. I don't want to be a slave-driver or cause unnecessary stress, and it does look like I've picked up a student who already has a strong work ethic of her own. But I know when I was a student I somewhat needed a bit of a push from my supervisors. As you say, it does depend on the type of student.