How to meet with your supervisor
The key things you need to know:
- Meetings are important for your success
- Joint meetings (with other students) make learning more fun
- Help with scheduling
- Some preparation is needed
- Take notes—there should be at least one action
Meetings aid success
Postgraduate research study is unlike undergraduate study. For the undergraduate, the lecturer seems to sit in judgement of the student, ready to downgrade their estimation whenever a `dumb’ question is asked. In postgraduate study, however, the supervisor is an active member of the team, sometimes contributes to the writing or software development, and generally acts more like a coach.
The only mistake you can make is to not come to (or arrange) regular meetings. Assume your supervisor is lazy—they won’t necessarily arrange meetings if you don’t ask for them. Make sure you get the meetings you deserve!
How to find my office
My building is Innovation Village 10 (IV10), which is in Cheetah Road (small road—google should help you there). Please ring one of the numbers on the front door to get in.
Joint meetings
The prime reason for having joint meetings is to reduce the overall meeting time dedicated to supervision for the supervisor. With large numbers of PhD and Master’s level students, supervision meetings can quickly become the dominant preoccupation of a busy supervisor. Therefore, holding joint meetings (2–5 students at a time) is an effective way to reduce this load.
While this approach may seem to shortchange the student, it can actually be beneficial to all. First, questions brought up by other students may be interesting to you (e.g., how do you get numbered headings in RMarkdown?). Second, when you are behind, you may be inspired to work harder when you see other students doing well. Finally, if you are ahead, you can enhance your learning experience by helping others who are struggling. In summary, joint meetings usually benefit everyone. In the rare case where this is not working for you, make sure you let your supervisor know.
Help with scheduling
One difficulty with joint meetings is that it can make scheduling more complicated. Thus it will be really helpful if students can coordinate between themselves to work out a good time.
Note that there are no strict rules on how often you can meet with your supervisor (there may be some limits on how infrequently you meet of course!). However, it is best not to leave it too long without a meeting and I recommend scheduling a meeting at least every 2 weeks.
Preparation
At the very minimum, you should come to the meeting with your current draft. Even if you have not written a line of code or performed a single experiment, you should be able to show that you can produce a PDF of your draft dissertation from week 1. At the very least, this should have some headings that show roughly what you plan to include.
Once you have results, then make sure you can show those results. If you need to bring along your laptop to display your draft, that’s fine. Another option is to put your results onto the university’s github.
Take some notes
Sometimes going to a supervision can be like trying to drink from a fire hose. Make sure that you come with a note book, take notes of any actions and remember to look at those notes after the meeting. If you are not familiar with the idea of keeping track of a to-do list, you might find it useful to put tasks on your mobile phone (e.g., Apple Reminders or Google Keep). Try to avoid the situation where you go to the next meeting with tasks not done.
Summary
Meeting your supervisor can sometimes seem scary and intimidating but it needn’t be so. Your supervisor is there to help you produce a great project.