Career advice: how to supervise a PhD student for the first time

There are numerous survival guides for doctoral students, but much less advice on how to supervise PhD candidates. Robert MacIntosh offers some tips on becoming an effective supervisor

Supervision will give you a chance to share the accumulated wisdom of your own PhD journey and anything else that has followed. However, you need to start at ground zero with each new student to help build a shared sense of what good practice looks like. 

A good first step is for both of you to take a small batch of seminal papers and agree to read them before swapping notes. This simple exercise will allow you the chance to demonstrate how to scrutinise the key ideas, assumptions, limitations and contributions that each author or authoring team makes in its paper. Doing so in the style of a collaborative, worked example will help to set a particular tone that will pay rich rewards in the months and years ahead. 

Being clear about the level of depth and the practicalities of note taking is as important as showing how you approach the basic task of getting to grips with the literature.

Give the feedback you wish you’d received
Bemoaning the failings of your supervisor represents one of the most common ways of establishing rapport among a group of doctoral students. “They’re never there”, “they don’t give detailed comments”, “they’re always in a rush” and so forth. Each new supervisory relationship, however, represents your opportunity to break the cycle.

Recall your own anxieties and needs as a PhD student and try to offer your new student the kind of supervision that you wish you had received. Draw on your own supervision experiences, whether these were of being micromanaged or of Zen-like levels of uninterest. These formative experiences probably mean that you know what you should offer to your new student. Be bold and strive to provide the right balance between nurturing and challenging. You’ll also need to balance the other demands that arise in modern academic life – maybe you’ll find yourself reflecting on the reasons that your supervisor was always in a rush.