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

[(Anonymous)]

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.

[liv]

Thank you, this is exactly the kind of thing I need! There's probably a fine balance between helping your student to navigate all the complexities and politics of the field, and gossipping inappropriately about colleagues.

I think I am not in too much danger of being controlling and micromanaging like you describe. I regard Minion as a colleague (even though the nickname doesn't really reinforce that). So I most certainly intend to work with her to decide about deadlines, and help her to build her career as well as just doing experiments under my direction. I've already told her I'm not going to be checking up whether she gets in on the dot of nine, and that she's welcome to work from home if she is in a phase where she needs peace to get on with some intellectual work. Apart from anything else, I'm not in the lab from 9 to 5:30 every day myself. When I'm reading stuff she's written, I'm definitely not going to treat her like a lazy schoolkid; I'm reasonably confident that I can give constructive criticism on academic writing.

I am working on setting up a "journal club" for a few colleagues working on related stuff (right now there's only one PhD student, but there's also a technician and a couple of newly appointed academics, and at some point there'll be final year undergrad students doing their lab projects.) But it's good that you note that kind of regular discussion with peers as a positive thing, cos it's something I'm quite committed to.