🎙️ Podcast Link 🎙️

Finding 🔎 a great #PhD supervisor is just as much about finding the *right* PhD supervisor for *you*, given your interests, working style and support requirements.

The right supervisor fit for you could be completely different to the right supervisor fit for someone else.

In this video I go through some of the key concepts 💡 you should keep in mind when searching for a PhD supervisor, from the mundane but important, like their meeting frequency preferences, to the environmental, like the other PhD students and postdocs in their group.

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Complete topic list and timestamps:

📌 (0:00) Finding the Right PhD Supervisor For You
📌 (0:11) An Investment That Will Pay Off Many Times Over
📌 (0:25) A Personal Choice Based On You as an Individual
📌 (0:45) Your Ideal Supervisor Can Be Different to Others
📌 (0:53) Don’t Overthink It
📌 (1:18) A Supervisor Who Mostly Matches Expectations
📌 (1:38) Technical Mastery In Your Research Area
📌 (2:07) Technical Mastery Has Multiple Components
📌 (2:40) Any Mastery Can Be Helpful
📌 (2:52) Many Supervisors Aren’t Technical Masters
📌 (3:07) Other Attributes Become Especially Important
📌 (3:17) Experienced and Inexperienced Supervisors
📌 (3:46) Hands On Versus Hands Off Supervisory Style
📌 (4:09) Can They Step In When Things Get Tough?
📌 (4:43) Know Your Preferred Supervisory Style
📌 (5:03) Some Alignment in Professional Beliefs Helps
📌 (5:39) Logistics: Meeting Frequency, Disruptions
📌 (6:15) Organizational Capability
📌 (7:04) Due Diligence On You is a Good Sign
📌 (7:52) Technical Mastery Can Be Achieved Quickly
📌 (8:12) Soft Skills Take Longer for Supervisors to Master
📌 (8:46) Can They Give You The Support You Need?
📌 (9:41) The Associate / Secondary Supervisor Can Be Vital
📌 (10:42) You May Learn More from Lab PhDs and Postdocs
📌 (11:23) The Broader Environment Counts Too
📌 (11:34) Talk to Past PhDs and Postdocs
📌 (11:51) Talk to PhDs Who’ve Dropped Out
📌 (12:09) Assess the Financial Health of the Lab
📌 (12:48) A Well-Funded Lab Provides Extra Opportunities
📌 (13:07) A Connected Supervisor Provides Opportunities
📌 (14:01) Supervisor Connectivity Vital When Isolated
📌 (14:25) Not Everything is Within Your Control
📌 (15:26) A Great Supervisor is a Great Start to Your Career

Full Video Notes

Due diligence is worth it: do it before settling on a supervisor pays off greatly later on. Invest time and effort early!
The right supervisor for you is highly personal: there are really three types of supervisors: a) the right one for you b) the right ones for others and c) supervisors who are unlikely to be good for anyone! What’s right for you can be very different to what’s right for someone else.
You don’t know exactly what you want: especially for young PhD applicants, only time will tell whether what parts of your initial estimate of what you’re looking for in a supervisor end up being correct.
Checking supervisor fit – many but not all: a great supervisor is likely to tick many but not all of the boxes for what you think you’re after. Here are some of those boxes:
World Class Technical mastery in your discipline area: not all supervisors are deep domain experts in the areas of their PhD students, but it can help. A technical master is a supervisor who could, if they dropped everything else, do your entire PhD very quickly, drawing on both their deep technical expertise and all their other experience and skills.
Technical mastery has multiple components: supervisor may be across some but not all components: for example, mapping and localization systems in robotics. An older supervisor may be a master of the specific domain, but not as experienced with regards to recent new tools like modern machine learning methods.
Not all supervisors are amazing technically: A substantial fraction of PhD students have supervisors who would not be considered world class technical masters. This isn’t a deal breaker, but it puts more emphasis on assessing their other supervisor capabilities, which brings us to…
Amount of supervisory experience: would you be their first PhD student, or their fiftieth? Senior or junior supervisor? Pros and cons for both.
Supervisory Style: hands on micromanagement or hands off let you find your path? Giving you independence is generally a good thing, but having a supervisor who can step in at times and guide you closely is also useful for some, as long as they’re not too stifling. If they’re not highly competent in your technical field, this will be harder for them to do in detail.
Supervisor idealogy: harder to define, but do they generally gel with you in terms of principles, research beliefs, interests. Differences are fine (and expected) but if they are universal, there could be problems.
Supervisory Style: organized, regular, regimented, or flexible and lightly structured – what suits you?
Supervisory Logistics: weekly meetings? One meeting every 6 months? Do they travel a lot? Are they disappearing to industry every 18 months? Do they keep up meetings with PhD students through all of this?
Supervisor organization: you can have a great PhD with a completely disorganized, chaotic supervisor, but all other things being equal, check whether they have their act together? Are they responding to your e-mails? Are they losing track of initial meetings with you? Don’t assume that “things will get better” if you officially become a PhD student with them… (general principle don’t assume things will magically get better).
Supervisor due diligence on you: extensive due diligence on you as a potential PhD student is a good sign. If they have a brief email exchange with you and are willing to take you on as a PhD – be cautious. They may have done little due diligence with others in their group, and may be now dealing with the consequences of managing lots of problematic students.
Supervisor Soft Skills and Experience: an inexperienced supervisor can attain world class mastery relatively quickly. But wisdom, emotional intelligence, substantive experience supervising a diverse range of students in terms of educational background, family background, cultural background can only be picked up with experience.
Experience supervisors build up a library of experiences dealing with challenging circumstances. For example, dealing with students who have medical or mental health challenges is utterly exhausting and confronting the first few times for a junior supervisor (it never gets easy) – but they get better at it over time.
Your Special Needs or Requirements: if you have special needs or considerations, you may want to bias your search towards more experienced supervisors – but note that doesn’t guarantee anything! And it’s not absolute – a junior but empathetic supervisor may be able to devote the time that an more senior prof couldn’t.
Associate Supervisor: Role can be very passive to highly involved. They’re your backup – minor things like primary supervisor being on leave, to primary supervisor leaving (frequent occurrence in hot fields like computer science).
Supervisor’s group and environment: in many research groups, the PhD will end up learning as much if not more from the other PhDs, postdocs and members of the lab group. Turnover is frequent, but look at the junior researchers in the lab as indicative of the type of people who will be “around” you. Larger centre / department / school / faculty: same thing, you’ll interact here, what is it like?
Talk to past and current PhD students. Read their PhD acknowledgements sections. Also talk to PhD students who’ve dropped out of their PhD – you’ll often learn more from them than any others.
Supervisor lab health: are they well funded with medium term security, or just about to drop out of academia at any moment (distracted)? Funding important for scholarships, top ups to scholarships, support for research equipment, conference travel, publication costs, development opportunities etc… But if they’re drowning in money and projects, that can also be chaotic too.
Supervisor profile and network: a well connected supervisor can provide lots of opportunities for collaboration, lab visits, interesting people visiting your lab, industry connections and internships, post PhD jobs (remember your supervisor will write your job references and recommendations). Especially important consideration if you’re in an isolated region of the world in a research discipline that’s really global.
Minor anecdote: PhD students graduating from famous PI labs can sometimes face the extra challenge of making it clear what they led intellectually – but a good problem to have.
But Don’t Overthink It: you can’t guarantee you’ve made the right choice, only time will tell. You should be fairly confident starting your PhD that based on everything you’ve discovered, you think it’s likely you’re making a good choice. A lot can unpredictably change over your PhD in terms of a) you b) your supervisor c) the general external environment at university, the research discipline. One way to think about it is if things do go bad you are surprised.

Summary: a PhD supervisor is in many cases one of the most the pivotal professional relationships you’ll ever have, and finding the right supervisor for you can put you on the best possible path forwards in your career.