Vlog 9 How to upset your supervisor

greetings superstars and welcome to vlog 9 and the title of the vlog this week is how to upset your supervisor and the more positive render would be how to enhance the relationship with your supervisor or how to make your supervisor happy but there is no doubt that the supervisory relationship is complicated because it's not just about you it's not just about your principle supervisor or your associate supervisor there are many working parts in this relationship and the reason why we're doing this topic this week is I've just about finished the new training package for new supervisors at Flinders University so I'm teaching them to care for you to listen to you to ensure there are regular meetings to read your written work and basically to focus on our duty of care to you but it seemed only fair that really I should have a matching friend for the portfolio of staff that I've put in place for our supervisors so today is really telling you some truths some really tough truths about the supervisory relationship from the perspective of the supervisor ooh so honesty does matter Trust matters truth matters but there's no doubt in supervision over a three-year period there are certain truths that we rarely tell our students every supervisory relationship has those Jack Nicholson moments now it's Jack Nicholson from a few good men rather than from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but every now and again a supervisor wants to say to you you can't handle maybe you can maybe you can't but there is a duty of care in our relationship so today's vlog is the truth teller there's going to be some uncomfortable moments in this blog you may recognize some of your behavior here and that's okay that's great this is about starting a conversation with your supervisor but also understanding your supervisor after those meetings where you say hmm something went wrong there I wonder what happened well today might help you understand that but first to the shoutouts and all yes it's been a big week so many people to say hello to Belinda say hello to wonderful Vicky hi Vicky Kemal Jennifer Michael and oh my lord I saw Katherine this with Katherine I have talked her on the phone so often I get so many emails from her and she magically arrived in my office this week so I was so thrilled to see you all and Katherine you are as amazing as I knew you would be you are absolutely fabulous hope you know that and you're a dear and very special person okay so there the shout out let's get serious let's talk about how you can really upset your supervisor and I'm going to start with a true story this really happened to me and it gets me quite upset so if the voice breaks I apologize but you need to hear the emotion in this story and doctoral students can be incredibly cruel to their supervisors and I've used cruel intentionally there I once took over the supervision of a student where the former supervisor had taken out a restraining order on that student the student was not allowed within 500 feet of that former supervisor there was also some legal action in place it was all getting a bit messy the student had five months left on their visa and as the senior academic in the field and with legal action in play if I didn't take over that supervision then nobody could and there were certain issues in terms of duty of care from the university I was employed in at the time so I took over the supervision this student was two and a half years in and had produced 30,000 words so I thought well this is a complete disaster but then I started to read the 30,000 words and it was absolute nonsense it was drivel so I had five months to do three years work so I gave her three one-hour meetings a day sorry three one-hour meetings a week on Monday Wednesday and Friday and we aim to produce between one and two chapters every single week it was a deeply unpleasant experience the student was upset was crying but she was sighing all the time whatever happened she'd have a sigh and even with those three hours of meetings that were held every single week she would sit next to the lift on the floor of my office every single day at the end of the day waiting for me to leave and go on the train so she'd be sitting there next to the left sighing and crying and blocking me from getting onto the train now for this particular job I was in I was in the United Kingdom the train left at 457 there's only one train an hour that was a direct train 457 557 657 and 757 they were the trains and the only way for me to get onto those trains was to leave my office and either go down the lift or go down the stairs it was a sixth-floor office and she was blocking me getting down either so for five months this student had me trapped I'd be trying to get out of the Train she would be crying she would be signed she would be shouting at me she would stop me getting on the train and I'll have to get on the one the hour later now I did get her through that thesis she was passed with minor Corrections in those five months but required every little bit of patience in my body to not get upset to not get aggressive to not just say please we can let me home from work I never said that - I remain calm and she never grasped or perhaps she did or maybe she just didn't care what she was doing to me she didn't care that she was abusing me she was really impacting on me and my life my husband's life my household my family life and guys I've been at work since 7 o'clock in the morning in those days and I was so shattered after seeing her at the end of these long days that I can't remember those train trips home from Moscow to export I can't remember the train trips I'm so exhausted I can't remember walking from the Eastbourne train station to my house that is how shattered I was so maybe you can understand why the other supervisor took out that restraining order so guys what often happens is when supervisors are upset or they're disappointed they don't express it outwardly they express it inward ly they get a bit passive they get a bit upset they get a bit quiet and often you feel it as a disconnection from students when students are unhappy they send an email to half of South Australia okay everybody knows they're unhappy when the supervisors are unhappy they internalize a lot of that disappointment so don't judge your supervisors too strongly here and this is the moment where I tell you a truth that perhaps you haven't heard before and that is supervisors worry about you a lot they're fearful for you a lot and yes supervisors are disappointed a lot and here are the ten ways that you can disappoint and you can upset your supervisor are you ready let's get into this so one here we go the student does little or no reading so their opinion substitutes for reading research and knowledge these students are incredibly frustrating so guys bond line reading is the determinant of a successful HD if you don't like reading you shouldn't be at university reading is the oxygen for a PhD so reading is everything but in some disciplines perhaps more than others opinion tends to substitute for research so students talk rather than read and think so personal views start to become a little bit complicated and confused with the original contribution to knowledge so what we do in these meetings is we spend the hour or the half an hour begging our students to read we're wanting to talk to you about the really big ideas we bring in people you're a brilliant person we want to talk about the fabulous crunching big powerful stuff that's what we want and instead the student keeps returning to their opinion to their view bit of a problem number two how to upset your supervisor students do know writing there is nothing for us to assess or evaluate in terms of your scholarly level now I think this problem is a leftover from the old days of supervisory methods they often break based on the Oxbridge tutorial if you will so up to about the early 1990s guys one of the models of supervision was that the student and the supervisor would talk and read and discuss for about two and a half years and then the final six months the student would write up the PhD but as I said that was discredited really from about the early 1990s and the reason it was discredited is that it's flawed on so many levels bottom line we learn to write by writing we learn to write by writing our writing improves by writing every single day so the idea that a student could do an honours degree or dual master's degree and then read for two and a half years and then magically write at a doctoral level after those two and a half years is delusional also without seeing writing it's very hard for us as supervisors to as is your current level of expertise now remember when I'm saying writing this is not necessarily writing chapters some disciplines that's quite hard to do this could be writing annotated bibliographies so you've read something you write a couple of paragraphs about it it could be what I've often used as a discussion papers or points that you're teasing out and teasing through or also could be and I love these bits of crunchy work where you've just got an ethics clearance and you start to talk about how that ethics clearance impacts on the methods of scholarship that you'll choose in the research so all these sorts of interesting bits of writing can emerge the key to recognize is that writing improves through writing and but also focuses the discussion in our PhD meetings so supervision is at its best when it is focused on key questions from the student or on a discussion paper on some writing the general discussions waste time and yes they waste candidature three students do not draft their writing they present week after week after week unreferenced and unravel for supervisors to read now look many weeks supervisors are simply happy to read something if you had a hard week particularly for our part-timers and you just want to slam an idea down and look you go for it and we're absolutely cool with that and that's great for one week or two or three but if we every week start to see these sort of general pretty sloppy sloppy pretty clumsy pieces of work put together we start to panic we start to worry because remember the whole point of supervision is to lift your ability so we can get you to an examination standard remember doctoral examination that low the doctor can't insure is based on an arc where you finish is never ever where you start so if students keep presenting us with the same basic level of reading and write we do start to worry we are looking for a continual lift in your abilities so please show us that here comes my big one for students our students do not embed Corrections from a previous draft before they present the next draft this is my living hell to be honest with you so what happens is this guys and think about how this feels how you would feel if this happens to you okay we've just spent six hours reading a chapter two chapters we spent two and a half days reading an entire PhD draft and then when I open the file and look at the next draft I see that none of the errors or the floors or the mistakes or the corrections that I've made none of them have been embedded in that draft now this makes me very unhappy and what often happens and thankfully with my wonderful students now this very rarely happens in the early days it happened a lot when it used to happen I used to become so inflamed that I would close my office door and I would do the full Malcolm Tucker at the computer screen no one else is in the room I'm just do it to the computer and then I would use a word like Omni shambles and I would have a glass of water take a breath and then I would read the draft again making the same Corrections boom so of course I start to lose the will to live this is caused by many things I think perhaps it's laziness in the student you can tell me when you send me an email after this vlog what would make a student open a document and not make the corrections made by the supervisor laziness a disrespect for the supervisor and also where I think the disrespect gets me upset is it's showing me that you have no respect for my time like I spent all this time with you I've given it to free and you've just gone zero interest not bothered I mean bother really bother so this is the big one guys if supervisors ask you to make changes they're doing it for a reason so respect their expertise and please respect our time and if you don't want to use their advice that's absolutely cool use the comment box inward and explain why you are not making those Corrections I'll give you a great example my wonderful current student Ram does on his drafts it's fantastic we're within six weeks I think of submitting that thesis for our Graham terribly proud of him but at this point it's getting crunchy ok these are big Corrections this is heavy lifting that we're both doing right and what Graham does is what I'm making a big correction he says look tower and this is in a box inward look tower I've added a couple of paragraphs here I know I need copy three or four pages but can you just check those few paragraphs am I on the right track before I actually complete the full correction as always my wonderful students teach me Graham's taught me maybe he's taught you something as well engage with the corrections don't agree with them but at least address them five oh yeah students do not implement a crucial deal breaking bit of commentary about content or approach supervisors keep reminding you please address this issue students ignore it supervisors say please address this supervisor students continue to ignore it so this is a complete nightmare so as you can see nightmare five comes from nightmare four students don't make corrections right now mostly most of the corrections we offer you they're not deal breakers so if you don't do it the examiner will pick it up and you'll get a major correction you might get restructuring you might need more data it's got to slow you down but it won't fail you unfortunately there are crucial Corrections that supervisors raise every single week where it might be about the scale of the reading so your reading is pitched too low or there's not enough reading your bibliography is too thin the depth of your analysis is not there or this is a crucial one particularly in my field the continual presentation of a scholar or an idea that has been long discredited so these are deal breaking Corrections of you don't address these that's when you will fail your thesis right so in my field to give you one example at the field I work in if anybody mentions the phrase digital natives then anybody who knows anything about that field goes that person has nothing to say to me right so Marc Prensky was wrong when he invented the phrase digital natives in 2001 and the American Pew in Internet - the great sets study of puny Internet in American life through all their longitudinal studies they discredited that for the last decade and a half so this idea is flawed so if a student in a PhD mentions Prensky or mentions digital natives then the examiner immediately goes this person has no idea what they're talking about so that's when I keep saying dude remove that reference the examiner will pick it up and you will fail that thesis every discipline has these types of terms and ideas that are basic and are discredited and if a PhD student uses it the examiners will switch off so these days guys I've learned to be really Evert with my students so in the old days you say well maybe can you remove that reference for me it's it's not helping you can you remove and of course that would still stay there and the students perhaps weren't realizing how serious the situation is so these days as an old lady I simply say dude if you leave that reference in you are going to fail this PhD take the reference out okay so when a supervisor says something to you is overtly is that really do really do believe them remember we are trying to protect you we are called supervisors supervisors because we have super vision this is your first PhD we have supervised 10 20 30 40 50 women examined 10 20 forty fifty a hundred we've not only done our own we had expertise in supervision so our job is to make your single PhD a much more pleasant experience so when we tell you a dealbreaker correction please listen and please believe us six our students miss meetings now most academics these days are run by their Microsoft Outlook calendar as you can see I do these videos very early in the morning so I'm not interrupted and you see I haven't got my computer on yet because the moment I turn my computer on the Microsoft calendar comes to life and starts to organize every minute of every day so my Microsoft calendar runs my life I am anchored to it and by the way it's not a very pleasant way to live guys but therefore it's very tough for me to schedule supervisory meetings into my calendar I see my students weekly and I have scheduled those meetings from now right the way through until Christmas so that we're not interrupted and unless HR my boss the DB CR or the Big Boss the vice-chancellor wants to see me I will immediately stop everything I'm doing and going and seeing them but anybody else I will respect my supervisory time and I will see my students because guys it is incredibly hard for supervisors these days to carve out time for our students we do make you the priority I promise you but the trouble is when you miss a meeting it's very hard for us to catch that meeting up okay it's not like the old days where you miss Alice is true the old days this was true 15 years ago if you missed a meeting on the Thursday we'd have the time to make you a cup of coffee on Friday and catch that meeting up guys those days have now gone so we understand what you have to miss a meeting if there's a family issue or medical or all that sort of stuff absolutely fine but please if you can get to the meeting do get there and get there on time because we've probably got a meeting just before and a meeting just after so one other that might help you when you're thinking about your supervisor and there have been agitated and there being run by their calendar is these days guys academics 90% of our time is organized by other people okay 90% of our time is organized by other people we have about 10 percent of our time left and we give that to you freely but please make good use of it ok 7 students stop working they go on holiday they be crass tonight they develop whole other interests so the students that sort of drift away from us this one really frightens us guys because we know what it takes to get a student through in three years we really really know how to do that and it's tough and we panic we worry when a student starts to do other things or miss meetings or not present written work or not do their readings just sort of discover another life we know that they're not going to finish that PhD and we've hanok we worry for you which fear for you and the problem is this sometimes may be expressed as anger and that's not right but it is understandable supervisors are not trying to ruin your life I promise you but they just want to make sure that the PhD has a place in your life and while you're doing the doctorate it's got to be an important place so we help you the best way that we can but if you develop other priorities it's very hard for us to do our job so just remember that 8 the students who complain about everything I call them the students who wins the whingers we're going to the winners well this is a really difficult group to supervise because the whinging wastes so much time so we've all had students who arrive at a meeting and instead of using this great time to talk with a scholar about high-level scholarship and ideas and abstract theories and how really generate this original contribution to knowledge and make you famous instead of using this time fantastically instead they use the time to winch about supervisors about other students about the University about their partner about their brother about their dog they which now whinging wastes time what I want you to remember guys is the time with your supervisor is so precious guys it's so rare in life that any of us get an opportunity to spend time with a really clever person who cares for you and wants to make you even cleverer than you are so please use that time for scholarship not for ouija ok 9 where students are unpredictable students are emotionally volatile now three years is a long time it's a lot of life guys and bad stuff happens in three years of anybody's life someone dies someone gets sick money gets tight bad stuff happens okay and that's one of the reasons I focus so strongly on getting a PhD through in three years because the longer a doctorate goes but more likely something bad is going to happen so at least I can predict in three years we can manage this time that I know we can get the students through but the problem we have as supervisors is when we have really unpredictable students so the dream and I've been incredibly lucky through my career is we have students who are committed and focused and robust and interesting and brilliant and by the way that's one of the reasons when I decide to take on a student my number one priority really is motivation I want to know I can teach you the theory I can teach you methods I can teach them just about anything that's fine but I can't teach them to be motivated so I need excited students coming in so motivation matters to me because it stops this sort of aberrant behavior so when students are not emotionally even then the supervision becomes quite tough so what happens the students come into meetings and they start crying or they start shouting or they start slamming doors and then it gets very very hard to supervise because what we need is we need you sentient we need you even so you're able to read and write the best scholarship than you can do and if you're slamming doors and crying you're not focusing on the high level scholarship that you need to do now we all go through really bad times I really get that but you've got to ask yourself how are you helping your supervisor and indeed how are you helping your supervisor help you if you're slamming doors in his or her face how is that helping anybody how's that helping your project the best of scholarship is disciplined so start to focus on that physical emotional and intellectual control and also I suppose try to understand it from the supervisors perspective guys I know it's hard but we have a weekly meeting with you and if we know that you could cry or you could shout at us or you could get aggressive we start to get nervous and just to give you a sense of how this feels as a supervisor I've had one of these students and I got him through no worries at all but for three years whenever I used to hear his footsteps coming along the corridor to my office my stomach would start tuning and I'd feel a bit sick I start to get a bit frightened and I didn't know how he would be but behaving on that day so guys just be aware your behavior has incredible impact on supervisors we got that lad through but it was very frightening and it was very upsetting and as I said imagine once a week for three years your supervisors stomach doing that because of your behavior try and avoid it if you can't all we want is the best for you and ten students are silent and students and moody so what happens is these students sit in meetings like their Yoko Ono in the let it be sessions so they don't speak this group is incredibly difficult to manage guys in fact they're the exact opposite of the Windsors because the winters over emote they tell us everything that's going on in there and what happens is our yoga auto students say nothing so we have supervisors try to do everything we can we probably over talk to just try and work out how are you feeling what's occurring you know let us know what can I do to help you and of course they're not telling us what we can do to help you so please use communication engage with your supervisor tell them tell us tell us what's going on and we can find ways to help you don't be silent they're very hard students to supervise so guys think about it in your own life if you've ever done these things have you ever arrived at a meeting where the supervisors are a bit moody or a bit aggro or have you ever produced a few weeks maybe a few months of under referenced work or unreferenced work stuff it's at a pretty basic level are you not taking on board the important Corrections that your supervisor is asking you to do or are you making us panic because it's clear that you're not reading and you're not writing enough each week have you done any of that doesn't matter if you have just acknowledged it in yourself and will come up with strategies to address it going forward that's the important bit so guys that is why some supervisors appear to emotionally withdraw from the process when you think what my supervisors thinking they're not expressing their emotion because they're just trying to make remain solid and stable for you remember I always focus on the supervisor in the student relationship as a professional relationship yes it can be quite personally close but for me that's not really the focus when I'm training supervisors or I'm talking to you today what I want you to remember is the university is a workplace and your supervisor is a worker in that workplace so remember when you come in and you have a shower you get cross it as you know you can leave so you come in and this happens in this office as well as the day students come in have a shout have a complain and then you guys can go home and that's great I'm glad you've got it out it's important you get it out but you can go home I stay here and I come back the next day and the next day and the next day because this is my workplace this is my livelihood so just remember your supervisor is also a worker in a workplace so show them some decency and respect because you can go home they have to come back here the next day and every day until they retire so it is important to remember our supervisors are people we are flesh we are blood we are bone we will always be professional and caring with you and remember when I trained supervisors I focus on integrity and respect and kindness every single day all we want from you this is the deep truth all we want from you is that you act in your own best interests so that you read you write you think you create you become the best scholar than you can be that's what we want for you the key is to manage the disappointment between both parties the supervisor and the student and the way you do that is to keep the lines of communication open so don't express what you're feeling with excessive emotion just tell us what's going on and together we can come up with a solution that is effective supervision also please always remember to listen to what your supervisor is saying to you and when I train supervisors I always say listen to what your student is telling you because guys listening not talking is the bedrock of scholarship when we listen we learn something I hope this has been a useful session for you understand something about supervision and understand how this incredibly complicated dance between supervisor and student is constituted and reconstituted every single week and every single year until you finish so I hope you have a wonderful week and I hope your supervisors have a wonderful week and I'd love to hear from you as always send me an email let me know what you let me know what you feel and as always I wish you love light and peace TL I got

Channel: Office of Graduate Research Flinders University

Views: 30,003

Rating: 4.8835516 out of 5

Keywords: Tara Brabazon, Office of Graduate Research, Flinders University, PhD, Doctor of Philosophy, Supervisor and Student relationship

Id: ROLwP09Ar-0

Length: 32min 15sec (1935 seconds)

Published: Wed May 25 2016