Enabling Supervision

Set ground rules at the start

Ground rules for you

• Meet regularly
• Public praise, private criticism
• Rapid turnaround for drafts
• Be part of the team, not just the boss
• Allow recording

Ground rules for the student

• Organise, run meetings, write minutes
• Criticise supervisor privately first
• Rapid turnaround for drafts
• Show up (like a normal job)
• Take ownership of the PhD
• Understand and obey the Vancouver protocol
• Understand and avoid plagiarism
• Learn the tools
• Backup your work
• Yes—you can buy stuff
• Be part of the team

Here is the ground rules document that I use

https://tinyurl.com/phdgroundrules

Meetings

How to run a meeting (advice for student)

• Send documents in advance
• Don't expect technical feedback on something just presented in the meeting
• If you get feedback, act, and show that you acted
• If there is nothing to discuss, don't take an hour
• Write minutes on the same day

Possible agenda

• Review previous minutes, including plan
• What you actually did
• Issues, problems
• Plan for next period

Why the supervisor needs an agenda

Project management

Use a gantt chart, right?

Wrong!

• To produce a nice looking gantt chart, you'll need hours with project management software (or a spreadsheet)
• Everyone uses different software anyway
• Either too high-level or too low-level
• Too hard to update (so it won't be updated!)
• It doesn't necessarily keep your project on track
• Research is lumpy
  • hard to estimate how long something will take
  • new tasks appear frequently

Alternative – use Scrum

• Scrum is designed about a product backlog or list of features
• A backlog is not about doing things on time but more about rate of progress
• Supervisor and student agree on a priority order for the backlog
• Group features into a sprint (these 3 items will be done by the next meeting)

Example backlog

Can also add a difficulty estimate (story points)

Burn chart

Also consider word count trackers

• e.g., https://wordgoal.app https://www.pacemaker.press
• For an overview https://writersatelier.com/where-else-to-track-chart-your-daily-word-count-free-spreadsheet/

Match your approach to the student

Give flexibility to stronger students

• They get to choose the topic more
• Meet when they have a result
• Meeting agenda flexes to what they think is most important
• Attendance not as important as progress

Give discipline to weaker ones

• 10am latest starting time
• Always review with them the previous minutes to pick up what they are avoiding
• Bring them back to the agenda when they go off on a tangent
• Give them a topic that you know will work and produce a viable thesis
• Keep in mind:
  • you are not punishing for poor performance—just adjusting your style to their needs

Engender self-respect and ownership

Good students care about every aspect of the quality of their work

• Software should have unit-tests
• Experiments should be reproducible
• Outputs, graphs, tables well-proportioned, graceful, aesthetically pleasing, informative
• Written work should be readable by a lay audience

How do we get there?

• Have high standards and diligently point out issues
• Make sure it is not just about the supervisor—enable other feedback too
  • journal / conference reviewers
  • wider community (e.g., stackoverflow, open source developers)
  • personal reward systems (e.g., chocolate 😋)
• Show them great examples
• Also see Writing for Computer Science (Zobel)

Viva preparation

Student must own the material

• It's better for the student to own the material early on
• "My supervisor told me to do it" 🫣
• Ownership can mean less control—but that's ok!

Prepare a presentation that is the right length

• The material needs to fit in about 10 minutes
• It should be clear, crisp, and correct

Usually 2 mocks

• Allows a chance for revision if the presentation has errors
• Well prepared students seem to do better in the viva

Sample questions

• There are plenty of samples on the Internet
• Consider these key ones:
  • Can you explain the graph in Figure X?
  • What is the most important chapter and why?
  • Where is the answer to research question X and is the question comprehensively answered?

Examiner selection

• I always encourage the student to propose possible examiners
  • But I don't allow them to take control of the process
• When examiners are selected, the student should make sure their work is covered

During the examination

• I always take copious notes during the examination (hand written)
• I reassure the student that I will do this too
• They need to have a copy of their thesis to hand—must be the same version as the examiners.

Final words

• It's not about the supervisor …
  • … it's about the student
• If you are asking "what do I get out of it?", you are doing it wrong
• Best success measure: how did they grow in your care?

Further reading

• Zobel Writing for Computer Science
• The Thesis Whisperer