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How to Succeed in Postgraduate Study
Advice for Supervisors
by Marie desJardins
Quick Index:
| Previous: Doing Research
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In order to be a good supervisor, you have to relate to your postgraduate
students as individuals, not just as anonymous research assistants or
tickets to tenure and co-authored publications. Work with all of your
postgraduate students, not just those whom you feel most comfortable with,
or who are interested in the problems you're most excited about. Try
to get to know your students personally and professionally. Help them
to identify their strengths and weaknesses, to build on the former,
and to work on overcoming the latter. Give them honest evaluations of
their work and performance: don't just assume that they know how
they're doing and what you think of them.
Read this paper and others like it with an eye towards discovering
which aspects of the postgraduate experience your students may be having
trouble with or may not realize the importance of. Try to see the
experience from their perspective, which will be different for each
student, because each student has a different background and different
talents and goals.
The roles of a supervisor include:
- Guiding students' research: help them to select a topic,
write a research proposal, perform the research, evaluate it
critically, and write the dissertation.
- Getting them involved in the wider research community: introducing
them to colleagues, collaborating on research projects with
them, funding conference travel, encouraging them to publish
papers, nominating them for awards and prizes.
- Finding financial support: providing research assistantships
or helping them to find fellowships, and finding summer positions.
- Finding a position after graduation: helping them to find and
apply for postdoctoral positions, academic positions, and jobs
in industry; supporting their applications with strong
recommendations; and helping them to make contacts.
Although guiding your students' research is normally viewed as the
central task of a supervisor, the other roles are also critical to their
long-term success. The beginning of this article contains advice, for
students, on networking. You can help them in this process by funding
and encouraging travel to conferences and paper publication, and by
introducing them and talking about their research to colleagues.
Nigel Ward's useful tips on what not to do are included as an
appendix to this paper. A book that was suggested to me is [21], but I haven't actually seen it so
I can't recommend it personally.
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Applied
Ecology Research Group
