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

[ptc24]

Meetings: during my PhD, a lot of supervision was done by talking informally over my desk. There were a couple of phases where there was a slump into despair, and it seemed that the way out of that was regular, formal meetings (in my supervisor's office, rather than the lab), sending in a page of A4 as a progress report the day before. That sort of arrangement persisted for two or three months until we felt that things were back on track.

The other thing that often happens is that supervision duties often get shared out; during my PhD we had a junior fellow who did most of my day-to-day supervision - I tended to think of him as my de facto supervisor, but it seems that my de jure supervisor was more dutiful in supervising me than many people's. It does seem to be useful to have an informal second supervisor; during my postdoc there was I time I seemed to be an informal third supervisor some of the time - it was one of the better parts of the job. OTOH, there was a formal mentoring scheme in the department where we each got a mentor; we ended up meeting once a term and it was a bit of a waste of time.

[liv]

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.