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

[liv]

Oh wow, data management. That's a really, really good point and thank you so much for all those resources. I knew we'd need to be systematic about it, but I didn't know about those tools. I'll be delving deeply into those linked resources over the next few months. Really appreciated.

I am planning on keeping in touch regularly, definitely. I know it's going to be tough to hold the balance between making sure there's enough support to keep Minion on track, but without micromanaging her or making her feel pressured. I started in the first meeting by explaining that I'll want to see her whether or not she has achieved anything since the last meeting, so that it's not about checking up, it's about lines of communication. But I'm sure she'll have a phase when she feels horrible because things aren't going well and she'll be scared to tell me so.

And yes, we are both thinking seriously about career development, not just sitting there doing the research. Keele is a lot better than Oxford at actually providing a structure and explicitly both requiring and providing generic / transferrable skills, so I'm a lot better supported in this than someone supervising their first student at one of the more trad universities.