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]

Thanks for contributing your experience to the discussion. Motivation and getting work done is such a huge thing for nearly every PhD student. Because it's a very long project with no clear deadlines and not really a clear idea of what exactly needs to be completed even by the ultimate deadline of the end of the project. So the onus is on the supervisor to create some kind of structure and act as a manager, which many academics don't have much experience or training to do.

I think I need to put lots of thought into how to provide motivation in a supportive way, without giving the impression I'm punishing my student for not working hard enough. I'm fairly sure we will get to a stage where she struggles to make progress, whether that's coming into the lab to do yet more experiments that don't work, or working another chapter of the thesis when it seems endless.

And yes, reading drafts and coming back with comments quickly is something I ought to be good at, thanks for mentioning that.

[(Anonymous)]

oh yes. all the time I was doing the thing I would be complaining I'd done no work, and other people would agree/say the same, and I'd be quite convinced that they didn't understand that I *really had* done no work and meant something quite different to them, and i was totally special 'done no work' cookie. but in the end - we all finished. and nearly everyone goes through a depression of some kind at some point, beaten down by the weight of the thesis.

I'm a better writer than coder and I actually recovered from mine once the end was in sight - the last four months or so of hammering the thesis together went fairly well for me. Other people (a larger proportion, I think), are more likely okay while they're experimenting and gathering results, and then get suckered by the writing up.

One useful piece of advice which I mostly failed to take but was glad where I had was to keep my bibliography file as I went along. So each paper I read I'd make an entry for and also - importantly - a quick summary of the content. Made it a lot easier to find things again! I guess that's obvious to a seasoned academic though :) In fact this whole comment may be!

I had (alongside motivation failure, etc), an inability to get out of bed in the mornings. I used to try and arrange my supervisor meetings, and also tea-n-chat with friends, for 10am or so, to force me to drag myself into the lab.