The last Friday workshopat University College Dublin addressed a group of twelve supervisors with presentations by an epidemiologist, a physicist, a careers and a graduate studies officer.
How to avoid common pitfalls in research supervision?
Codd, the Epidemiologist told us about the key things we needed to know as supervisors. They were three: administrative, personal and academic matters. Together, they create the host environment part of her Epidemiologic triad of a successful PhD (see figure 1 below).
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Figure 2. Epidemiologic triad of a successful PhD
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Administrative matters. We need to make these students ticking over. Know your school PhD director (she interviews all PhD applicants in some schools). Look for the policies and procedures that relate to PhD. Ask your administrators: “Could we have a workshop for the supervisors in the school – annual PhD supervisors’ workshop?” There are always issues with at least 10% of students. As a relatively new trend in Ireland, the structured PhD helps to pick up and resolve those issues.
Academic matters. What have potatoes and supervisors in common? Think about the annual cycle of potatoes – new potatoes, big thing in Ireland, if you leave them in bright place, they sprout, the old potato shrinks and dies – as the Tuber (see Figure 2). The PhDs are like your offshoots.
Are you competing with your students? The last 6 months of PhD can be especially prone to competition because of the expertise that students learned.
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Personal matters. Be hyper vigilant – watch out for early warning signs of troubles. Some student problems cluster and almost create types of students. Student types MC’s list:
Part-/full time, inter-/national, the endless, the eager beaver, the slow starter, the double jobbing one, the competent, charming disarming, manipulative, diffident/ incommunicado, demanding, insecure, dependent, impossible. Conflicts with supervisors occur and when they do it’s almost always about expectations. Share the burden – please talk with your colleagues about the pleasures and difficulties of supervision.
Dunne, the Physicist, brainstormed with us over a list of questions that we should ask our potential supervisees at interviews:
- What supports do you have?
- How they deal with crisis?
- How would you define the plagiarism?
- Overestimating what they know is a common mistake.
- Reliance on email communication is bad.
- The cultural stuff is huge, diversity is always a good thing, but you have to be more tuned in, as a supervisor. Usually the stuff that you don’t see coming creates the most problems.
How to help students through skills-needs analysis and key-skills acquisition for research & professional life?
Drs Harkin and Cunninghan explained what PhDs do after graduation and how supervisors can use an underutilised career-planning tool at the University College Dublin.
What do PhDs do after graduation? PhD is not the best option for all who start it. Those who won’t end up in academia need other skills to succeed in the big world. Ancillary activities are important – ask the students to volunteer, or enter competitions.
Which transferable skills will your doctoral students develop? Most graduate students don’t have good writing skills, administration, foreign language, basic computer skills, project management, because their programme doesn’t focus on them. We’re not there yet.
The Research & Professional Development Plan can help. The student should take the ownership of it. Try it yourself: http://www.ucd.ie/graduatestudies/currentstudents/rpdp/
This post offered my views on the fourth meeting of the new Research Support and Supervisor Development programme (RSSDP) at the University College Dublin, Ireland. This programme is targeted at new and experienced faculty who would like to refresh their knowledge in the area. The 5 last-Friday workshops are based on sharing of practices with experienced supervisors and students, case studies, open forum discussions and knowledge sharing with colleagues on policy in the research supervisory field. I covered the previous meetings in the posts about leaders, styles, and recruitment. Watch this space for my observations from these workshops.