Over the last 14 years I’ve spoken to thousands of PhD students, and the single most common complaint is the lack of guidance and support they get from their supervisors.
Some supervisors are just insecure narcissists who maintain their sense of self esteem by keeping others down, but the majority, I hope, have good intentions but maybe don’t know the best way to supervise students. They become supervisors because of their research skills, but receive little to no training in how to mentor students and so often just mimic the kind of supervision they were given.
So in this video I share some thoughts on how to best supervise PhD students.
Before we get into details, the most important question to ask is, what’s the fundamental purpose of supervision? There are two basic approaches you could take.
You could see your role as being a barrier, holding your students back (or in some cases refusing to talk to them) until they meet your standards, or you could act as a facilitator, doing what you can to help your students develop their skills and ultimately succeed.
The basic argument for acting as a barrier is that it teaches students to be independent, but I don’t really buy this argument. Anybody can be a barrier. It takes no skill or effort to say, “don’t come back until you have a complete draft”, and if you’ve given your student no guidance then it’ll take very little skill or effort for you to tear it apart.
Some students might do a good job on their own, but then what did they gain from woking with you? And what could they have achieved with a bit of help?
If independence is really the desired end result, it makes much more sense to give your students more guidance at the start, to give them the foundational skills so that they need less help towards the end.
To give an analogy, imagine you were giving driving lessons… At the start they need far more guidance, but as they advance and grow in skill and confidence they need less and less.
This requires more of an investment of time early, but will save you a lot of time in the long run.
In terms of what skills to teach them, my general recommendation would be to get them working on practical research skills as early as possible.
This is the opposite of what many supervisors do, focusing first on reading and writing about the existing literature. Of course a knowledge of the literature is crucial, but I’ve spoken to countless students who’ve spent literally years reading and writing and planning, but have never practiced any actual research or analytical skills.
This means that they go into the research phase completely unprepared, and if you only look at the work once it’s a complete draft it may be too late to fix basic errors in the research design or implementation that could have been avoided with a 5-minute conversation.
But if you encourage them to practice data collection and analysis early and on a small scale, when it doesn’t matter if they make mistakes, you can give quick and easy early feedback that will make a huge difference long term.
The same applies to writing. It’s so much easier to give feedback early than to wait until there’s a full draft, because you can spot problems and give advice before those problems get any bigger.
Now some might argue that this is spoon-feeding, but I’m not talking about telling students exactly what they need to do at every step. I’m talking about showing them the basics, then encouraging them to try things and giving feedback
Key to this is reassuring them that it’s OK to make mistakes.
Throughout most of the education system, students are penalised for mistakes. But as you know, every academic gets things wrong, every academic makes mistakes, every academic has papers rejected, and every academic has gaps in their knowledge.
So it’s good to share some of your own experiences, to show that you’re human, to show that you don’t know everything and that making mistakes is a necessary and unavoidable part of research.
By sharing some of your own experiences, you can also help prepare your students for a potential career in academia. For example, you can share what you’re doing with grant applications or your own publications, so they learn what’s involved in a professional academic career.
This means going beyond the mandatory support your university asks you to give and actually talking to your students.
My personal view is that, as a PhD supervisor, your job is to help your students become the best researchers they can be in the time you have with them. More fundamentally, they should be a better researcher for having worked with you, specifically.
In the long term, this benefits you, too.
If you teach your students how to do research, you then have a trained team you can work with and publish with. The better they are, the better those publications will be, which helps the reputation of your research group and helps attract funding
Those students then go out into academia, and if they have good careers and credit you as a mentor, it only increases your own standing in the field. Everybody wins.
So that’s my view of how PhD supervision should be. As always, please do share your thoughts and comments below.
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PhD: an uncommon guide to research, writing & PhD life is your essential guide to the basic principles every PhD student needs to know.
Applicable to virtually any field of study, it covers everything from finding a research topic, getting to grips with the literature, planning and executing research and coping with the inevitable problems that arise, through to writing, submitting and successfully defending your thesis.
All the text on this site (and every word of every video script) is written by me, personally, because I enjoy writing. I enjoy the challenges of thinking deeply and finding the right words to express my ideas. I do not advocate for the use of AI in academic research and writing, except for very limited use cases.
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Severina Neingo says:
In spite of the challenges, your lectures are consistently beneficial and inspire me to continue with my academic endeavors.
James Hayton, PhD says:
Thank you!