How to manage your supervisor — University Affairs
Four strategies to help graduate students put their needs at the top of a professor’s to-do list.
As a graduate student, I volunteered for a few days to drive conference speakers between the airport and campus. I drove to the airport with a well-known professor on Saturday morning and asked why he wasn’t staying for a much-anticipated speaker that evening. He replied that he had to be home on Sunday morning to watch his daughter’s soccer game. It had never occurred to me that professors might have duties that might be more important than academic work. In fact, I had no real idea of the complexities of a professor’s life.
30 years later I was Dean of Graduate Studies and I was trying to improve the student-advisor relationship to reduce the number of issues ending up in my office. Given the power imbalance between student and supervisor, I focused on shaping professorial behavior. I read about best practices, consulted other universities, set up a task force, revised regulations, posted advice on the website and led faculty workshops. After a while I realized I had two problems.
The first problem was that only those professors who were already good supervisors were paying attention.
Continue reading: The difficulty of defining the student-supervisor relationship in graduate school
The second problem was that my emphasis on the imbalance of power had led me to follow other deans and student leaders in proposing that the solution to supervision problems was to regulate faculty behavior. But this approach reinforces the idea that faculty members are responsible for the relationship when it’s the students who can benefit most from a great graduate school experience. I decided to empower the students by helping them understand the lives of their bosses and by encouraging them to take control of the relationship.
Remembering my naivety as a graduate student, I would open the workshop by asking students to list a professor’s responsibilities. Not unexpectedly, teaching and grading, graduate supervision, research and publication came first. Science students would address laboratory management and scholarship writing, and liberal arts students would suggest attending conferences in romantic European cities or giving public lectures. Then we would get into university administration. At some point someone would suggest that professors might need time for rest and family.
After the whiteboard was covered with lists of the professor’s responsibilities, I asked, “Why is supervising graduate students different from most other responsibilities on this long list?” doing a bad job”. That’s not a bad answer, but I’d suggest an alternative: graduate supervision is one of the few professorial assignments where there’s no penalty for missing a deadline.
Most professors get things done because we have a deadline: prepare a lecture, turn in grades, write a conference paper, send revisions to a journal editor, apply for a grant. In any case, there is a deadline that is beyond the professor’s control. However, graduate supervision is not associated with tight deadlines. Sure, universities set deadlines for completing their degrees, but it’s the students who suffer when they take a break. Unsurprisingly, when given the choice to meet an upcoming deadline and read the second draft of chapter three of a thesis, faculty members prioritize the more pressing task. And most of us have long lists of urgent tasks and tough deadlines.
The second part of the workshop discussed how PhD students could take charge of the student-supervisor relationship and put their needs at the top of the professor’s priority list. Essentially, I advised students to subvert (rather than challenge) the power imbalance by using clear communication and creating assignments with appropriate deadlines. The most effective strategies are as follows.
1. Schedule regular meetings. The schedule may vary at different stages of your program. But make sure you’re on your manager’s calendar as a regular meeting you can’t miss. Always send your manager an agenda a few days before the meeting. Don’t cancel a meeting—if you feel you have nothing to discuss, you can always add “research progress updates” or a topic you need advice on. After the meeting, send your manager a summary of what was covered and list any related action items (for both of you) with a deadline – “We have agreed that I will start Chapter 3 on March 15th 25th.”
2. Make life easier for your manager by providing them with the information they need to meet your needs. Don’t just ask for a letter of reference — provide a list of your achievements that are relevant to the scholarship program you are applying for. Don’t ask “How should I structure this chapter?” – Give your manager three options and ask which ones they recommend.
3. Get clarity on intellectual property ownership, the source of so much dispute between students and supervisors. Make sure this is in place and in writing before you start researching. What rights do you have to the data you produce? What does your supervisor expect from co-authorship when you use their ideas, data, methods, or facilities?
4. Make sure you know when your supervisor is particularly busy and/or off campus. I lost track of the number of draft dissertations that were handed to me the day before I left for vacation. Discuss with your supervisor when they are most likely to have time to read chapters or help you set up an experiment. Do this weeks or months in advance, and then ask them to agree on a date and time for the work you need to do. Send them a reminder a week or two in advance.
If you want to be successful as a graduate student, take control of your relationship with your supervisor. The power imbalance will always be there, but your manager will appreciate that you take responsibility for making the relationship work.
Jonathan Driver is part-time Professor of Archeology at Simon Fraser University. Previously, he was the dean of studies and provost at the SFU.