Working with your PhD Supervisor

hi this is shady ah tea assistant professor at leas University I would like to present to you a new topic a new presentation entitled working with your PhD supervisor well the presentation of today is related to previous presentations that are on my youtube channels I would like to invite you to look at previous videos that were done related to academic writing and how to manage your PhD or how to manage your research and in general I would like to introduce to you this sensitive topic today because doing a PhD is a big choice in your life you will stay at least 3 years or 4 years working on a topic in a close relation with a supervisor so you want to be sure that you will be this experience will be enriching and that you will be a companion with a supervisor that can support you in this sense it's very important that you from the beginning if possible select your PhD supervisor this is an important choice and you should not forget that it's both a personal and a professional four-year relationship so you have also to invest in it from your side as the other side's investment from the supervisor side so in this presentation I will try to help you with some tips give you some recommendations for how to handle this relation and at the same time I would like to say that there will be some generalization based on some personal experiences that I have so don't take everything I'm saying here as a hard science sometimes there is no one says there is differences between people so therefore I would seek your openness to agree or disagree with some of my recommendations or advice well the structure of the presentation of today is mainly why it's important to select your supervisor and why it's important to build up a relation with your supervisor how to select the supervisor what is the publication culture what should we do many PhD students they don't know what what is this publication thing should we publish how it works what can go wrong in many situations things go wrong so you need to be prepared you have to be aware about what might go in the wrong direction so that you can avoid it in any future collaboration you need also to be prepared there is a responsibilities on your side also as a PhD student and finally I will wrap up the presentation with some recommendations well let's start with this first element of our presentation today it is the title why is this so important why should I select my PhD supervisor well it's a four-year project with a big impact on your future most probably you will be in an age where you are in a transition between having a fixed contract and a long term career and between ending up your studies so it's very important to manage this period and to get out of it stronger and with better qualifications and skills so the support of your supervisor here is essential and it can help you to succeed your PhD so it's important to get support from academic staff which has a big which can make a big difference in how students feel about their their study so it's very important to make sure that you will get a supervisor time they can provide this support also your supervisor can stop your work and can stop your funding and even sometimes it can go beyond and have an influence on your career by refusing providing recommendation letters or even if somebody if a company or some expert would like to ask about your performance they can give some negative feedback so it's important to to to be balanced in this relation and from the beginning make sure that you will you will not have this issue also you have to find a balance between between your relationship because part of a PhD at the end of the there will be a personal component and a professional and definitely you need to make sure that the relation is highly professional but also on a personal level it needs some investment because at the end it's a human relation and in most cases when there is a successful relation it ends up to be a friendship relation after the PhD so make sure that you select your supplier supervisor from the beginning be careful about that component and think about it well and take your own time to evaluate and assess your supervisor well how can I select a supervisor it's not so easy this is the second topic I would like to talk about our second point well more than 70% of PhD students in the European Union and North America do get do not get the chance to select their own supervisors most of the time these are projects or open calls where the the applicant or a PhD student is not allowed to select his or her supervisor so simply it's a project and people apply for it and this is an estimation in the engineering domain so from the beginning in 70% of the channel 70% of the cases of PhD students it's even difficult to select a PhD supervisor so it's not a luxurious opportunity it's not so easy to find out to be able always to to select your supervisor but in some cases when you have your own funding or you have more freedom to propose create your own proposal then you have a choice but to be realistic I needed to share this information with you so that you know from the beginning that it's not always the the chance to select your supervisor another important information here is that only 40 to 60% of PhD students enrolled in European University continue their PhDs especially in the field of engineering this is based on Eurostat euros that statistics which means that there is a big chance of people who do not continue their PhD wideout don't continue there is many reasons but definitely one of the reasons on the list of many reasons is the relation with the supervisor so it's important to keep this in mind and make sure that going for a PhD is a challenge and you need to be prepared for this challenge also in Europe you typically choose a project before starting your PhD this is very different in the US where you typically apply to departments for your PhD first and then you define your PhD topic so you need to be aware that in the u.s. already you are not defining your project or PhD project early on you do it later after you get admitted while in Europe from day one you cannot get into doctoral school acceptance from doctoral school before having a solid proposal and a project that you work on from day one so this is very important because this makes a difference on the first year of PhD which is a transition here in the US it's more seen as a transition in every startup start to build up your research skills you prepare your literature review you deepen your research investigation on your search topic while in Europe most of the cases you should start from year one already ready working on your research topic so this is a little background just to give you an idea on the PhD landscape overall indeed engineering and architectural engineering domain well how to select your PhD supervisor preferably a supervisor with expertise who had several PhD students before this is already an indicator that this PhD supervisor he or she are able to run this process and they an experience to support their students also find any of his or her previous students and ask about them so this worse words to do if you know by chance that there are some graduates PhD students who finish their PhD with this specific supervisor why not get in contact with them and today we are highly connected you can find them on LinkedIn or other social media platforms and try to contact them just ask them okay I would like to do my PhD or my masters with this supervisor what do you think what was your experience with and this is very helpful before making your choices if your potential supervisor is young or new you can ask someone that might know this person in his or her home University you can check his background just a phone call if you know somebody there and keep in mind that anybody has a reputation especially in academic work world so once you get in contact with somebody who is on ground on this in the same institution where the supervisor works it's enough to get some impressions idea how is this person and how is relation with his students so check for the qualification check for attitude check for a potato petition and based on that you can make a conscious choice well also make sure that your supervisor is an expert in your PhD research area and this is a very important rima recommendation because in many situations believe me or not it's not always that the supervisor will say no if you are investigating a research topic that is not in his or her research area in many situation there is many professors one they are under pressure and they want to go for the ten year so they accept whoever PhD candidates within whatever domain related or close to their field while they the topic is not in their core specific specialization so you as a PhD student if you have a scholarship of you have a funding you must make sure that the person that you will work with as a supervisor is an expert in the area of your research and as I told you it happens a lot that PhD supervisor accept students with proposals that are a little bit of their field of expertise just to have this PhD as a kind of achievement for their own CV so make sure that the this the specialization it is one of the base in a mental criteria of choice make sure that your research topic matches the expertise and qualification and the research experience of the potential PhD supervisor and another important topic here is make sure that your research methodology is close to the research methodology used by supervisor so it's very important if your supervisor is working on statistics and your thesis is on statistics your methodology then this is a good match but it will be totally unacceptable that your supervisor is working a lot on statistical analysis and you are coming up with a quantitative research that is most most probably experimental or you are doing modeling work so it's very important to make sure that if your supervisor works on qualitative techniques the new status is also using qualitative techniques because you are still young to master the research and you need in this phase not to distinguish or differentiate yourself methodologically from the common methodology methodologically proaches used by your supervisor on the opposite you need to make sure that your supervisor is using methodologies that matches your interest and matches the methodology used by you in your own research and this is another crucial point that can say can distinguish or influence your decision-making well check the activation of your supervisor this is also important don't expect that every supervisor will be motivated to accept you or to supervise you take the time allow them to express themselves and ask yourself if they are really interested in your topic and if this is their main focus of research or they are just accepting you because you will be one of the numbers that will count for tenure ship so it's very important to be here critical and check that and make sure that also your supervisor on the other side is interested in your research topic okay so also make sure that your supervisor belongs to the same research community that you belong to and that you wish to belong to so imagine you don't have now specific research community you're still a young [Music] postgraduate you finished your master's thesis and you are looking forward to the your PhD and until this moment you don't know what is the research community you belong to you never attended a conference you are not aware about a journal community that you would like to publish your work with so in this sense you are still not having a specific community in this case you must make sure that once you accept working with a certain supervisor you will belong to the same community where he or she belongs to most probably you will publish in the same conferences you were publishing the same journals so make sure that if you have already this community and you know that you belong to a certain community you can use it as an indicator to compare if your supervisor belongs to the same community would like to belong to if you don't have a community and you're still young you don't know how this works at least you need to be open and understand that you most probably join the community of your supervisors so it's it's important to think like that because otherwise it will be disappointing that you discover that you you find out that your supervisor is attending a conference a lot of building phase while you are more interested into building performance simulation ending up that you must attend all building physics conferences and work in this community and adopt the logic of this community so it's very important to think about that well what are the roles of a PhD supervisor there are as many roles of them among them is to provide a healthy and comfortable working environment foster trust celebrate success or maintain motivation and this is very important as a role of a supervisor technical guidance on the research methodology on how to collect the data how to process the data how to analyze your work how to validate the work so those this is these are all technical advices or support that they can provide they also need to explain their own publication policy and expectations from the beginning many PhD supervisors they don't do that and this is frustrating for many PhD students I think from day one when supervisor start his work with his PhD student they the supervisors need to communicate what are their expectation regarding publications explicitly and clearly and even it would be nice if they do it in a written format to make sure that there is evidence and proof to come back in case there is any kind of issue also the supervisor must introduce you to engage with the PhD research community and research stakeholders so it is the role of the PhD supervisor to tell you go attend this conference or attend this symposium or join this group or even work with these stakeholders in the industry for example so these are all roles important roles of the supervisor and also the role of one one of the roles of supervisor is to highlight the need of training don't don't be angry or frustrated if your supervisor figures out that your English is poor so he or she sends you to take a professional English course or academic English course or they ask you to take a statistic course actually this is their role they need to make sure what is the skill set that you have and what is missing and what is important to make you achieve your research and based on that they will give you advices and send you to take special or intensive training to make sure that you have the skills that will allow you to perform well and do your research so this is important role and don't take it as a negative thing if your supervisors tell you you need to learn take some English courses or you need to go for for a statistics or any other technical training so this is important and this is part of the role of a supervisor also code the role of supervisor is to coach and assure your work quality and follow your planning actually you are autonomous you need to set up your own planning but in the same time who is your boss in this case who is the person who will follow up and make sure that you're respecting your planning and your schedules it is your supervisor so this is one of their roles to assure quality they are the ones that should say no this manuscript is not good enough you need to work it more give me another version improve the content and so on and so on or they tell you now it is ready to get submitted this is their role so don't expect anything else than that in the same time the role of supervisor also is to follow the planning and make sure if you are crossing the deadlines respecting the deadline zone or not the milestones are you are your deliverables respecting the deadlines or not so these are all roles of a PhD supervisor well now it is important now to switch or to the third topic the publication culture I need to talk about it because many PhD students they come from from families for the first time they did do a PhD so they don't understand what is a PhD and they don't and they never had somebody in their family who did a PhD and what I realized person in that many students who come from they are the first family PhD or they are the first PhD in their family on a large scale they are not aware about the publication culture so therefore I wanted to share this topic with you in this presentation well doing a PhD why it's important to publish well it is part of your work every university is unique and all universities have something different to offer their PhD students but they all have one thing in common they want to publish the high quality work so the work you are doing in your PhD should be published and in this sense publishing is used to select those students who stand out and separate them from the rest so that later on they can go into academia or they can go into practice or they go into into into the industry so it is an important indicator now you accept that or you don't accept it this is the rule of the game so you don't need to confront go into a confrontation from day one this is the rule of the game if you want to make a PhD you need know that you need to publish so this is the rule of the game you accepted you play the game or from the beginning you don't play the game so there is no there is no need to take this as exclude this from your scope on the opposite this is one of the basic rule of the game publishing is the qualifier for defending your PhD this is also very important I can tell you that when we come to the final stage of defending a PhD and we form a Viva or a private defense most students who get their manuscripts accepted with minor modifications are those students who published and they use their publication to feed their chapters and you know all that there is something called publication based PhDs those are PhDs that are simply grouping the publication the journal publication that PhD candidate wrote and he has to write an introduction and a conclusion and wrap it up into a manuscript that makes sense with a logical story well this is one of the option of PhD manuscripts but the most common PhD manuscript is simply the the chapters based manuscript where a PhD student will write chapters and create an extended manuscript in this case it's very important to take into account that if this manuscript is the first time that you write and you never published and most of the content is new and it was not reviewed through a reviewing process or it's not based on journal publications that are published before and reviewed before most probably you will have mentioned a request of measurement and modification of your committee therefore it's very important to use the publication as a way to guarantee a smooth transition at the end when you reach the from the moment of requiring the approval for your manuscript so this is a very important information I need to cross to make sure that we are having a coming understanding and any PhD supervisor will have this any university is expecting that from PhD students now some best practices for publishing what should we do make sure first that you are the first author if the work is your own work and you are the leading researcher and you are there is PhD students by default you should be the main author this is very important another important element is it's preferable that the first author is the corresponding author so that in case in the future there is any communication or questions or requests from readers then you will be the number one person who will get in the front and start to communicate with the audience so this is the second advice third advice sometimes supervisor can use their students and take all the credit for publications and result this is not acceptable this should not be happening at any condition most of the time when the major paper is written by the PhD student and the content is developed by the PhD student the analysis then the PhDs who needs to be the first also the corresponding author and then the supervisor can join as a second third force or even the last also if there is a chain of authorship so this is very important another thing to mention here it's very important that don't expect to publish a journal paper or a conference paper and you're a PhD student without your supervisor many young PhD students they don't understand this relation actually once you accept to be supervised by your supervisor it is logic that your supervisors become on your list of publication because he is hosting you in his lab or her lab and he is providing you with feedback and support and he is putting you on the track to belong to this research community and master the techniques and methods of this research community to prove to to create fruitful results so in this sense anything you publish during your PhD definitely in coordination with supervisor should be in coal authorship with your supervisor now you will be most probably the first author because it is your own work most of the time 80% 90% 95% and the supervisor depending on the percentage of intervention 5% 10% or more they will be following your name name so it's very important to keep this into account and today most publications are done in teams so it is not anymore like in the past that you find only one or two authors most good publications are a team work so you find at least in in a good publication at least three or four names so it's very common to play a team [Music] create a group and create create team roles and most probably if you are the main investigator you will be leading you would be the first author so it's important to keep this into account and as I said I want to repeat it's not acceptable that the supervisor take the credit for themself and take the publication for themselves you can talk to the director of research in your university or postgraduate or a post graduate about issues that might offer you structured ways forward to deal with problems so once you have some problems you feel something is not going okay just start to talk with maybe graduate a postdoc or talk with somebody from the administrative staff in your university just to make sure if something is not going on the right direction well another advice to say here when it comes to publication be patient don't seek publishing from day one many young PhDs they seek to publish from day one and I experienced that personally I had a PhD student and from day one it's not only that we discussed what will be the publication [Music] expectations and what I'm expecting from him to work on it was even from day one that he wanted to publish and I think this is very dangerous because the first year of your PhD you are it is a crucial transitional year you are still making the transition between being a professional and being a scientist and this requires that you focus and understand the content of this proper preparation here year one and even year two you are starting to enter in your field of expertise so my advice here is not to be don't push for publishing early don't waste your work because early on if you want to publish most probably you will publish with predatory publishers no impact factor and no scope was listing many situation we see that or you will go to worse less conferences that are not reputable that they are just commercial conferences and then you will end up spilling your work and wasting it totally in this sense so be patient make sure that your your dough is rising your material is rising you have more in understanding of the literature review you are mastering your methodology you have more refined results more accurate results your message that you will cross is much much solid and when you find that your work is mature enough this is most probably end of year two or beginning of year three then you should publish in any case I advise you always to communicate with you your supervisor but this was a remark to say because many young PhD students they're always eager to start early with publication while they still did not produce significant results so just take your time and don't be don't hurry with publication well now moving to another topic after talking about the publication culture another topic here is what can go wrong in my relation with my supervisor definitely it can go on the side of the supervisor sometimes it can be go going also on the students sometimes but these are some examples from my own experience I would like to share with you so many PhD students they struggle with autonomy and the ability to plan or stick to plans so it's very important to keep into account that even though that a PhD is a pure research work in the same time there is a very big component of management you need to manage yourself you need to manage your work you need to manage the expectations of your supervisor and in this sense there are some tools and methods that you be need to master and you need to use to make sure that your work is progressing I had previous presentations on how to write a research proposal your research proposal is very important because in this sense you will know what is a gun' chart and you will base your time schedules based on that you need to check the presentation on research assessment and how to do a quad chart for example how to do also the organizational chart I'm talking about quarterly action plans and this is an example for a quarterly action plans this is a plan that you should present every three months to follow with your supervisor regarding the protein of progress of your work you should show up what what are the months is on the left side what are the objectives for every month you can divide them administrative objectives publication objectives and research activities and then you break down these activities and you start to translate your objectives and activities into deliverables and these deliverables can be in the form of reports data set publications documentation models whatever certificates and then these deliverables need to have a feedback from your supervisor is it done complete accepted approved not approved and finally you say what was done and what was in progress so this quarterly action plan is mainly used when you do a PhD so that at least you have four meetings per year with your supervisor to check and follow-up the overall progress of your PhD definitely you can have weekly weekly meetings those are more for micromanagement for small details but at least you need four major meetings annually with your supervisor to make sure that your work is progressing now if you are unable to meet your supervisor it will be you who has to develop and create these quarterly action plans and respect them and stricted stick to them and one of the best learning experiences from using quarterly action plans that they make you more realistic and more pragmatic and setting goals many PhD students they are unable to estimate the load of the work so they think they can do many many many things in a short time when they put it on paper and they follow their own progress every three months they discover that they are too ambitious and sometimes they are setting a lot of goals in a short period of time so this quarterly action plan makes you more responsible make you more realistic and it's a way to you to be used to share and communicate with your supervisor on the progress of your work so I advise you to work on that and look at these planning techniques and planning methodology well what are the common problem student on the students eyes that we find in many with many PhD students many PhD students struggle with autonomy and ability to stick to plans that's what I said before and in a four or three years PhD many deadlines for key milestones seem to be flexible so actually it is the student himself or herself who do not respect their own deadline set by themselves and because the PhD is flexible you have four years there is no intermediate harsh deadlines between a year to another what this ends up leading to delay deliverables and you keep shifting shifting shifting and until you lose the time of your study so many PhD students struggled to estimate I really a realistic plan or respect the deadlines or struggle to compromise so this is very important to keep into a model into account and before you start your PhD you must be very strict on a planning diet making sure that once you promise to deliver something you will deliver it if you fail to deliver it you give yourself a certain time for extension but if after this time steady or unable you have to reconsider rethink are you going to cancel this task are you going to merge it with another task so that you are realistic and you are not just taking delays and putting them on the future plans well another issues related with students from the human student side there are human tendencies to protect ourself can get in the way so what happens these are human tendency that I'm going to explain and these are nature natural things they related to us as human beings what are these human tendency number one feeling of inferiority I don't know it happens many students feel inferior in their relation to the country where they are doing their PhD or in the relation to their supervisor and this end up getting into fight mode many students they come from they won in a fight mode or they want to prove that they are better or I don't know there are some issues here they embrace the conspiracy theory many students embraces conspiracy theory that this supervisor is doing this is trying to use me is benefiting from you and especially when we talk about publication while I said it's a culture it's a common thing and it's even written in most of the contracts some will recall the civilization clash theory once there is a PhD student coming from a non industrial country working in an industrial country they can easily interpret the cultural gap or the cultural difference into conflict at a clash and they end up trying to prove that they are better or they are not they on the same footage but this is very common to happen and we call it the inferiority problem so make sure that you're not here to prove anything then that you are a good scientist and you are productive don't don't get into this another important feeling is arrogance a lot of PhD students some of them they want they they do not want to publish with their supervisor well this is shocking there is nothing called not publishing with your supervisor technically you are here to do your PhD with this supervisor because he or she will guide you so once you accept it to be under the leadership of your supervisor it's very logic that you will publish commonly because you have regular meetings you are building up the content content you are thinking together even if the PhD if your supervisor is not fully involved in the development your own PhD but at least he is a part of your committee is he approved your proposal and you are working with this supervisor so it's a collaborative relationship it's not an enemy relationship and you don't need to prove anything in this sense so this feeling of arrogance I don't publish with my supervisor or some people even say I am better off from my supervisor these some issues we see and then we fail to understand why this is happening it shouldn't go in this direction so this is a dangerous component another important dangerous human tendency that we find that many PhD students from day one they come and start to compare their lab where they are working with other lab and they aren't always say that the grass is always greener on the other side or on the other lab so from day one they come and they start to criticize and evaluate the lab they're working on and they say you know this lab is so-and-so but in the other lab there is better thing in the other lab there is and they start to put herself in the in a comparison just again to prove that this place is not good or not qualified again try to get out of that that's not your role if you accepted to do your PhD in a certain lab you should start working in it yes if you find a major problem and it's really unable you are unable to work then you have to terminate your PhD and try to move to another lab but putting yourself in this dilemma or this kind of back and forth reflection will not be productive at all and definitely some students have a very low self-esteem they are falling under the problems of they feel that they can never finish their PhD or they are not qualified enough or they are not interested enough and this is also a psychological issue I am NOT an expert in this field but these are common problems that happen it's very important that at the end of the day you try to be aware about this tendency and you try to avoid them as much as you can and try to just build up a healthy relationship with your supervisor also one of the studies that was done in Belgium proves that PhD students were more than twice as likely to have mental health difficulties and that is the general highly educated problem compared to the highly educated population and this is very common because a PhD work is a high-pressure work it's a high quality there is a high expectations and it is common because it's an individual most of the time work you will be lucky if you are working in a team but in many situation you are working alone you are in front of your computer screen and you have contact moments with your supervisor every two weeks or something so if you are not able to push yourself and work individually you might have issues and this can give you a lot of stress and a four year or scope maybe you are unable to feel that you deserve getting this degree so many people give falling this mental pressure and it is common and it happens under influences also of other factors some people some students can get sick or some of their family members gets a they face death situation their funding gets stopped or they have problem of funding so it is very common to have some struggling moments in your PhD especially that you are a human being and you're surrounded with different factors that can influence your performance and it's not easy to go through this journey so just be aware about it and trying to check how to prepare yourself there is another slide I will talk later on how to prepare for these situations now when we talk about the supervisors it's not only on the side of students definitely also there is some issues with supervisors we should mention one of the common issues related to the performance of supervisors some supervisors want you to work under their full control so they find it difficult to trust or let go of control and they are very perfectionist and this is sometimes annoying and the counterproductive because when they are very strongly controlling the process they do not allow their PhD students to grow and take their responsibility and make their own choices and this is very dangerous and it happens a lot and this can be a reason for conflicting working styles or micromanagement and the result of that lack of flexibility and the lack of ability of compromise so many supervisors are are having this problem or this issue and it does not mean that you avoid them but it does mean that if you are aware about that you can maybe find a better way of communication and handling that another type of supervisor or common human tendency with supervisors and that they abuse the relationship so they do not respect the work-life balance of the PhD student and many researchers tell struggle to find this research balance so they end up receiving emails to do activities after work or to do activity during the weekend and this is this is not acceptable and the PhD students should make sure that this will not happen and therefore a professional and formal relationship will make sure that this is not happening also there is some behaviors related to racism sexism or bullying and this shows up humans are humans should not forget that academic work is not different from any other community we are at the end of the day human beings under pressures having issues so it's common this can happen but it's again it's up to you to be aware about this phenomena and to be aware about that if you are from the beginning able to avoid this supervisor do it if not you have to live with the supervisor but then you have to be formal and you have to put like borders to make sure that the relation you will not be in a way or another abuse so it's important to to look at that and don't think that all supervisors are angels some are poor communicators some supervisors are poor communicators by their nature they're introverts or they are not external communicators so consider you they they consider you more or some consider you more as a number they show little care or many are just too busy it depends on the face every pitch every supervisor has a phase in his life maybe you are coming in in their 10-year phase or you are coming in their big project phase and then you end up not being on the list for for coaching or for follow-up so if your supervisor has more than three PhD student you should worry and this can be also an indicator that most probably you will not receive enough time more than three supervisors three to five maximum that's already assigned that your supervisor will be very busy and most probably you will not get regular meetings with two hours meaning exchange or meetings so these are also common tendencies that happened well also the last tendency here is some will help you if you are strong and show a little interest if you are struggling and this happens a lot once the supervisor they he or she feels that you're a strong candidate they give you more time they give you more attention they will they will take you serious and once they feel that you are struggling you have difficulty with language or you have technical difficulty or your logical construct of your work is not high quality high quality so they start to invest less and they take distance and they show less interest in you this happens and this is not correct supervisors should provide equal attention to their students but this is life it happens and you need to make sure that also you must show that you are able to do your work you are productive and even if you have some weaknesses you must make sure that you can overcome them and try to find a balance with this kind of behavior and you cannot for sure also confront your supervisor and asks explicitly for extra time so I prefer in this with this problem the direct communication always try to avoid the indirect communication so by that you can try to avoid these issues now after exploring these issues what is the importance of selecting your supervisor how to select your supervisor what is the publication culture which is a basic thing in academia and what are the common issues that human tendencies we find with students always supervisor I would like to give you some tips to be prepared doing a PhD you need to be prepared what does it mean to be prepared don't allow your supervisor to ask you to do his or her laundry laundry here I'm invited any work that is out the scope of your research administrative teaching reviewing lecturing lectures preparation and so on if this task that your supervisor is not requesting is not written in your contract you should not do it some PhD contracts it is written explicitly in them that the PhD student is expected to teach ten percent of the heads or her time in this case yes you're obliged to do that but if any of these activities are not explicitly mentioned in your contract don't allow or let your supervisor ask you to do that keep in mind that supervisors are very busy and they are short on time and they don't have enough staff that support them so it's very easy that I slide and they go ask you the the PhD student to do something for them if this is not part of your work I advise you to not accept it because if you accept it once it will be a habit and later on you will end up having a pile of work to do so you might if you did it already or if you accepted once ok you do it then you have to communicate that you don't want to repeat it you can send an email if you're afraid of direct communication you can give a message whatever but you must say no and you must learn how to say no also you have to set the limits from the beginning keep in mind that from the beginning this is not loose relation this is a formal relation so from the beginning you have to be attentive you must make sure that there is a kind of contract there is expectations and you explore and discuss together these issues you can even discuss that in the beginning and say what about extra work work out of out of the scope of the work you are not having any expectations to work outside the scope of the PhD you can say you have a family or you have your own personal life your career trying to create a balance between personal life and your work and this is very important in this sense it is also principally a professional relationship so keep this in mind it's a professional relationship it's not a friendship at all and it's not a family relationship your supervisor is not your mother or your new father you know so keep it professional the supervisor he or she guides you and help you but they are not your boss this is also important it is your PhD it is your thesis it is you you will write your work they can tell you they can give you advices but at the end you are the boss of yourself regarding your work ok so this is important and keep in mind that there is also a PhD committee and all those are part of the chain in the order of hierarchy well manage the expectation discuss expectations with your supervisor very important to discuss early on the expectation what is his expectation or her expectation what do you think about publication how many publications should I do how many journal publication how many conferences do you want me to attend conferences or not near on me to attend conferences early on in my PhD or at the end and do you believe in that or not and so on so you discuss you discuss the publications you discuss extra-time work you discuss attitudes you discuss coming to the office and so on and so on it's very important everyone works differently so make sure that you know your needs and communicate your needs you know it's important to say that to to your supervisor if you have children if you have family it's important to communicate that communicate your needs to your supervisor early on so that you can work productively together it's a relationship and keep in mind believe me if you are transparent from the beginning your supervisor will be flexible and you with him or her will find a compromise the idea here is to Co find a compromise create a much mutual agreement on how to collaborate how should I communicate with you do you like me to send you emails do you like me to knock your office door do you like me to pop up and ask a question some supervisors they want you to send you emails some hate that you send them emails some pool supervisors they accept that you knock their door during a certain day of the week some if they don't accept it and you must put take an appointment via the agenda and beforehand send them a notification so it depends these are human beings styles don't come up with your own way of working that you are used to and just impose it in the context of Uri no research group try to understand what are the expectation and based on that find a mutual agreement to collaborate it's all about collaboration and intensifying the exchange with your supervisor to become productive and finish your work also some advices for planning and establishing good relationship you must schedule your workflow load I showed you the quarterly action plan can be used for example the Gantt chart should be also used plan regular meetings avoid hidings many PhD students they are trying to hide from their supervisor this is related to the human tendency one of the human tendency we talked about but if you are doing that you need therapy therapy meaning that you can confront yourself and ask yourself why I'm doing that you can ask help but definitely this is not a good practice to keep hiding every time the supervisor is trying to fetch you find an align an appointment you apologize and you don't show up you say I didn't finish my work hiding is very very dangerous because once you communicate this message that you are hiding then your supervisor will start to get less motivated and less interested in your work or the other way around they will start to become aggressive and they will increase their expectations and this can be very dangerous also set agendas for your meetings you can early on set regular agendas you say okay we meet every second Monday at nine o'clock or whatever you find a way to schedule your agenda you can arrive to the work on time this is very important many PhD students they don't know that your job as a PhD student to work from 9:00 to 5:00 this is common this is basic five days per week unless your supervisor you ask for for exception or one day you are not on office you work remotely unless this is an agreement between you and your supervisor you are expected to be daily on your office so be professional because once you are not seen in your work environment it can be seen as a negative thing also reply to all your emails this is this is the communication this is the official way to communicate so you must reply your emails on time don't be late with your emails and make sure that your priority emails are the communication or your emails related to your research work and let your supervisor see that you are reading papers you are doing a PhD whatever the progress of your research and your experiments is going on parallel you must read journal papers so show that to your supervisor to make sure that you are learning you are benefitting from your PhD time and that you a certain time will use this information to enrich your work well in case of problems my advice is simple in case of problem trying to be productive start writing your thesis so write and show your work to your supervisor as you go even if you are in a conflict with your supervisor imagine now you are in the second year or a third year and there is a conflict what to do keeping nourishing this conflict or starting working on yours this work number one on your ceases manuscript aim to publish your research because this is the only way that will make you robust and solid in front of the device in front of the examination committee so work on your publications the best thesis is a finished thesis if you are perfectionist and you're just trying to improve and improve and improve and you're still in Chapter two good luck you will not finish so make sure that you are trying to keep the quality of your work but you are distributing your work on the different chapters to make sure that your T's is getting to an end so send your drafts to your supervisor and be a determinant to B be determinant to finish very important advice here seek support from the social services if you have also a problem don't hesitate to ask the social services you can share your potential mental health issues why not talking to the whole social services any university will have social services these are people who are experts this is their job they are working every day to help students it's very good practice if you have mental issue you have a worried thought anything that you are making you blocking you from working on progressing or a fear go and talk with them they are here to help you and they can provide you with some tips some good practices so all PhD students by default they must go through this process sometimes you feel they are unable to finish you fini are not qualified you have whatever mix of fear or anger feelings those can be shared with others who are specialized and from there you try to turn and change your mood and start to improve to go back and work on your work so unfortunately in many countries it is shameful to go visit the social services but since you're educated person and you are working individually and autonomously on on your research you should be pragmatic if you are feeling any issue the social services are there try to knock the door send them an email ask them by phone and definitely they will reply and they are specialized this is the best about them so don't hesitate to that also speak out if there is a major violation or a big problem in an University should be a Ombudsman Ombudsman is sample some kind of a person who is neutral can be somebody in the administration of the university at the head of the department I don't know check if there is a home woodsman in your institution and then there is if there is a major violation from your supervisor or a big issue then definitely I advise you to go talk to the Ombudsman and you can even file a complaint but just you have to have to base it on substantial and factual things you must make sure that this and this happen and is factual it's it's evidence you have real evidence against anything that went wrong and then you can can't make a complaint against your supervisor if this is needed also get out from your comfort zone many PhD students they stay in their comfort zone and they don't want to explore things because they just afraid they are unaware they are afraid that they fail this is common trying to get out of your comfort zone because this is still a safe environment you don't know how its harsh in the real work industrial domain mistakes there cost much much more and academia still mistakes can be mitigated in a way or another so also you are here to learn you are here to explore try to get out of a comfort zone try something new test something new and in coordination with your supervisor you can take some risk and go explore also you must find a solution and find your way at the end whatever conflict you are whatever kind of problem you are in with your supervisor the idea here is not to continue feeding the conflict the idea is to end and terminate this conflict get out of it finish your si esta vez publish and leave the institution or go for your next career step so it's important to think like that many PhD students when they get in the conflict they keep trapped and they keep digging deeper and deeper in the conflict ending up that they never come out of it whatever happened whatever conflict happened at the end the aim here is to get out of it so make sure that you are on good steps and fast to get out of it if you are unable to manage the situation ask a friend ask a colleague try to get support from the social services involve others to make sure that you can have a smooth transition and then you go to the following stage now coming to the final president recommendations for my presentation to wrap up I would like to advise you number one accept the advice of your supervisor 90% of PhD students who succeeded their PhD the number one topic they mentioned and cited that helped them to have a nice PhD relationship with their with their supervisor was that they were accepting advice don't underestimate your supervisor his name or her name his supervisor this is somebody who has a wide vision and has a deep understanding in the field of knowledge where you are working and don't underestimate this person when they give you advice especially early on in the beginning don't deny them just accept them go with these advices even if they don't if you don't like them later on when you go to year two and three you will figure out that these advices were helpful so if you are unable to take advice then this is a very dangerous sign and most probably this relation will not work because accept the advice try to work on it if you have a counter advice or a counter approach you think your approach is different try to prove that your approach is different you can disagree you can totally disagree but at least in the beginning try to understand what is the supervisor asking from you try to do what they're asking from you do it and then if you don't believe in it still try your own way and prove that your own way can be more fruitful Pro can produce better results so there is a chance of disagreement but just in the beginning especially the first year listen to your supervisor and accept their advice another recommendation is the ping-pong relationship your supervisor is very my advice is here simple if you give them show them a progress they will reply to it the ping-pong relationship is a very common relationship in developing any PhD by ping-pong I mean what you write a draft you send it to your supervisor he sends you a modified draft you improve it you send it back he gives modification send it back ping pong this ping pong relation is the only way to improve any work and the ping pong relation is mainly used to develop the Caesars manuscript and to develop your publication manuscripts so many PhD students they are not aware about it what is the ping pong relation we want to write now a paper you came up with the first draft send the draft to your supervisor he will take give him time one week two weeks send you back he or she will send you back the comments work on the comments integrate all these in the new text send draft to the supervisor will send it back and you might end up in this ping pong relationship up to 20 back-and-forth communication I remember my first PhD my first publication I had with my PhD supervisor I had to write the draft I had 22 the draft number 22 so we had 22 communication back and forth until my supervisor approved it and told me it's ready now for publication and with my own PhD students in average I never found any students student who publish journal publication before having at least 15 to 20 back-and-forth communications so if you are on top of game and you are a good ping-pong player in the research field this means that you are always on top of your work you send your drafts you improve them you take the feedback and this cycle don't let it break if it breaks the confidence will get down the motivation will go down and most probably you'll be unable to publish and proceed so this is a very important advice we figure out that those who play ping pong with their supervisors when it comes to developing their manuscripts for a publication or for chapter in their sneezes they are they are building up a relation with the supervisors and they are building up a relationship to improve the content without this ping pong and back and forth your performance will be low and you will be unable to get the best of your supervisor and embedded in your manuscript and learn from it to be able later on to be independent in your research so I advice you to play this ping-pong game and don't give up don't stop it it's part of the game some general remarks try to be selected from the beginning if you have a choice to select your supervisor trust your supervisor from the beginning give them a chance in most of cases supervisors they will become lifelong friends even though I mentioned a lot of issues here 80% of cases supervisor become lifelong friends and the relation is constructive be honest with your supervisor from the beginning share everything communicate well the more honest you are the better your relation will be say everything you have if you have issues family relation that impedes you from working you must communicate if you need to travel if somebody if your family has issues you must communicate with supervisor all these issues discuss the terms and manage expectations it will be very frustrating that your supervisor is expecting from you to publish in a highly cited journal and you are expecting not to publish at all it doesn't work so many these expectations if stock speak out you must speak out with your supervisor first if you can't if you cannot find them a hearing a good ear not here not if your supervise not hearing you good but then you need to go to the next step if there is an abuse you speak out I told you home woodsmen department head ever in the faculty dean you can ask social services so it is your role to also speak up and also plan planning in a PhD is crucial milestones deliverables execute what you plan beep resistant resistance is crucial just continue believe in yourself you will make it if there is a problem take a break whatever happened wrap up recollect yourself and build on your work be flexible and be productive in any case you must be productive to make sure that you will finish your work and you will have minor modification requests at the end when you go through the examination process well by that I would like to thank you for your attention if you are interested you can subscribe to my channel and I would like to thank you for listening to this presentation on working with your PhD supervisor thank you very much

Channel: Shady Attia

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Length: 65min 0sec (3900 seconds)

Published: Wed May 22 2019