HOW TO: Work with research supervisors

This page offers suggestions, advice and tips to help doctoral (PhD / DPhil) students enjoy a productive and effective relationship with their supervisors. The page includes: How the nature of supervision should develop over the period of the research programme and the importance and nature of meetings with supervisors

New students tend to expect supervisors to tell them what to do. Indeed, this may be justified for very short research projects or where the work is tied into a group project and bounded by the efficient use of expensive and heavily utilised equipment. Where this is not so, students may wait for their supervisors to tell them what to do because they think that demonstrating dependence in this way also demonstrates respect. Fortunately, good supervisors realize that they have to wean many students gradually into independence; so they may provide a well-defined task, as something on which supervisor and student can both build – perhaps a pilot project of some sort. If this is what your supervisor does, it may give you a sense of security, but things are unlikely to carry on that way. Many people would argue that they ought not to carry on that way.

At the other extreme, some supervisors toss out a multitude of ideas at the first meeting, which can be overwhelming. If this happens to you, just realize that the ideas are merely possibilities for you to consider, not tasks that you necessarily have to do. Your best course of action is probably to make a note of them and then take them away to think about, to decide which ones comprise essential groundwork and which ones are merely alternative possibilities. There is no single best way to research a topic, although there are numerous bad and non-viable ways. It is you and you alone who have to be intimately involved with what you are doing over a considerable period. So, for all but the shortest of projects, it is essential that you design it so that it appeals to you as well as being acceptable to your supervisor.

As your work progresses, supervisions should become two-way dialogues. Your supervisor will expect you to develop your own ideas – which may have to be bounded for various reasons – but will want to discuss them with you, to give advice and to warn in good time against possible dangers. It is not a sound interpretation of ‘independent work’ for students to continue along their own way, on the mistaken assumption that they do not need supervisions.

Since research means going beyond published work and developing something new, your relationship with your supervisor must accommodate the natural and inevitable fact that you will eventually come to know more about your work than your supervisor. You will need to become comfortable with this and with engaging him or her in academic debate as between equals.

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Informal meetings can also form part of the supervisory process, more so in some subject areas than in others. Supervisors may be torn in two directions as far as scheduling these is concerned, and it is helpful to understand why. On the one hand supervisors want to do what they can to be supportive, but on the other they do not want to interfere on the grounds that independent students ought to take the initiative when they need to discuss work which should, after all, be their own. This latter view is reinforced by the formal dictate of most institutions that it is the responsibility of the student to take the initiative in raising problems or difficulties, however elementary they may seem, and to agree a schedule of meetings with the supervisor.

The practical way forward is for you to take steps early on to find out how scheduling supervisions is likely to work best for the unique partnership between you and your supervisor. It is polite to wait a while, to give your supervisor time to raise the matter.

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More on this site for research students

Interacting with supervisors | Developing the research proposal | Getting into a productive routine | Writing research reports | Handling plagiarism | Transferable skills and 'Personal Development Planning' (PDP) | Succeeding as an 'overseas'/'international' student | Originality in research | Producing the thesis/dissertation | Handling the oral examination/viva | .... and more still ...