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]

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.