Print This PostI’m so pleased that this week I got to do one of my personalised subtitles. I thought it up after a conversation I shall get into later and figured it would make an excellent title for a blog post but then immediately realised the dragon overlord wants things to be understandable. So ‘Supervising PhD Students’ it is. Sadly that’s so self-explanatory I don’t even get to give you a nice waffly intro on what we’re going to talk about.
Instead, I’ll leap straight into the background to the subtitle. I have breakfast meetings every now and then with a friend where we discuss some science, throw some experimental ideas back and forth and generally fix the world’s problems. Over today’s fruit toast and tea we were discussing supervising PhD students – what was required and what it took. He mentioned he’d been on a supervision course fully prepared for it to be dull as ditch water and was pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be informative and entertaining.
One of the first things that was described to the group were the two ends of the spectrum of supervisors which were the Lighthouse and the Drone. As you can imagine, the Drone hovers silently above the student all the time, eyeballing every aspect of their existence. The Lighthouse sweeps in every month dazzling everything only to disappear again soon after.
Now….after eyeballing more parenting websites than I was frankly comfortable with I’ve established that the Lighthouse definition is slightly wrong. A lighthouse parent is supposed to be one who steadily guides and supports development by shining a light on potential dangers. Which sounds great. In terms of the supervision-parenting analogy we’re working on here I suspect the opposite of a Drone is actually a Free Range supervisor, where you just let your student run free and pay little to no attention to them but ‘In Between the Lighthouse and the Free Ranger’ is not as good a subtitle.
So let’s discuss some of the approaches that can be taken to PhD students and why some might be easier than others and what impact they might have on you and the student.
Drone or Helicopter supervision: I’m going to stick with the parenting analogy here because PhD students are so much like scientific children. They’re excited to be out and about in the world and looking at things and learning things but they’re blissfully unaware that if you grab that hot pan handle, you’ll get covered in boiling water. Drone supervision is basically micromanaging. Now another colleague of mine said that micromanaging can be fine because some students ‘need’ micromanaging. And this is a statement I both agree and disagree with. Some students definitely need a bit more chivvying but micromanaging is not a good thing and nobody should ‘need’ it.
It’s surprisingly challenging to find management literature although I suspect there’s a lot out there. But the consensus seems to be that “research has consistently demonstrated that micromanagement can actually hinder productivity and stifle creativity, leading to disengagement and demotivation”. If you switch back to parenting, the literature is a bit more abundant and I found a great paper on ‘coming of age’ adults by Joshua LeBlanc and Sean Lyons. They found that those who had experienced helicopter parenting were less adaptable, less resilient and less exploratory. They specifically said this style of parenting was bad because the parents “act in developmentally inappropriate ways via protection from daily stressors and disappointments”.
Recognise that each student has unique strengths, weaknesses, and learning styles. Engage in regular, open communication to understand their preferences, concerns, and professional aspirations.
In a scientific context you can see how this can get out of hand pretty quickly. You’re worried that in a seminar your student couldn’t answer a question so you leap in and answer it for them. They look relieved, you feel great that you saved them and of course, don’t you look smart? But over time the student learns that they don’t really have to think because you’ll do it for them, they don’t have to understand because you’ll always be there, hovering with an explanation. Yes, if they can’t answer it will be embarrassing, for them and for you, but they’ll realise for next time that they need to know stuff. If you don’t occasionally burn yourself you’re not going to truly know that hot things burn.
Snowplough supervision: I came across this style somewhere and thought it was an excellent intermediate, not necessarily as bad as being a Drone. In fact it can be worse. One website described it as follows: where the Helicopter parent hovers over the child whilst they do their homework, the Snowplough does their homework for them. Whilst I think this is probably relatively rare in science there are definitely supervisors whose aim is to do their students thinking for them. Who answer for them in seminars and make them lists of things to do. In the same way as Drone’s, whilst this (in theory) is going to make all the experiments work because everything that could have gone wrong has been cleared out of the way, it’s going to ruin their future. If they never learn how to cope with adversity and be adaptable then when they no longer work for you they’re not going to be great employees or great thinkers.
In academia this one is a challenge to avoid, especially if you’re an early career researcher. Chances are you have a pot of money for a small project and you want that small project to go well, you know how all the techniques work and you don’t want them screwed up so you swoop in, making the student lists, sending them emails to check on progress, getting them to show you data, analysing it yourself. And the only thing this benefits is the project. The data are likely to be great because you micromanaged the hell out of them, but you’ll be exhausted and irritated because you basically could have done it yourself in that time (or quicker) and your student hasn’t learned anything and is starting to resent you because you email them fourteen times a day.
Free-range supervision: This is what I had and it is kind of fun but you have to be the right kind of person for it to work well with (more on that later). The free-range supervisor, and the free-range parent, lets their offspring/student have the freedom to explore the consequences of their behaviour. Or in the scientific sense, the free-range supervisor lets the student explore the scientific questions that occur to them without significant intervention. There’s actually a real balance that needs to be worked at here and, in my opinion, free-range supervision only works well for a handful of students. The permissive environment is often very easy for the supervisor, minimal input is required. But when this results in minimal output as well then free-range can border on neglect. Free-range chickens without fences somewhere on your property is anarchy waiting to happen.
Lighthouse supervision: This is what you’re ultimately aiming for. You want to point out the rocks, but you don’t want to stop them from crashing into them. Because fundamentally, if they crash into the rocks it teaches them to pay a little more attention to the Lighthouse. The Lighthouse knows the lay of the land because they’ve been there for a very long time, but they’re not going to leap out and push you straight if you veer off course.
I mentioned that I enjoyed free-range supervision, as did one of my best friends. We loved being left alone to experiment and figure things out. But we also intuitively ‘got’ how to plan a decent experiment, what good controls were and what interesting questions were. Not everyone does.
And for that reason your supervision style (like your management style, see my previous blog on the subject) needs to be adapted to the needs of the student. A more anxious student might need a little bit of Drone at first, but you must know when to back it off. A student running up against failure after failure might need you to be a Snowplough for a little while, but you must have talked with them about their failures before you clear the way for their success. An over-confident student might be taught a bit of humility with some free-range supervision. They might, of course, turn out to be a genius with well-earned confidence but you’re not going to know that Droning it over them. But all of this requires you to know your students. To have taken a bit of time to chat to them, figure out how they like to work, when they like to work, what they enjoy doing. To encourage them in the things they’re passionate about and good at, but to also encourage them to work on the things they don’t enjoy but have to do. We cannot take PhD students for granted, they’re not just free labour put into the lab to optimise the Western blots, they’re young and inexperienced minds that need careful shaping. Supervision is hard work, people.
So, I’ll end this with some advice. When you get your first students remember to adjust your style to suit their needs and remember to keep your own sanity in mind. If you Drone through the whole of someone’s PhD you’re going to do nothing but wear out your own batteries and if you Free-Range it all the way then you’re going to have unruly chickens all over your lab.
Dr Yvonne Couch
Author
Dr Yvonne Couch is an Alzheimer’s Research UK Fellow at the University of Oxford. Yvonne studies the role of extracellular vesicles and their role in changing the function of the vasculature after stroke, aiming to discover why the prevalence of dementia after stroke is three times higher than the average. It is her passion for problem solving and love of science that drives her, in advancing our knowledge of disease. Yvonne shares her opinions, talks about science and explores different careers topics in her monthly blogs – she does a great job of narrating too.
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