🎙️ Podcast Link 🎙️

🎓 Did you know there are (at least) four ways to combine supervisors and PhD students for your regular meetings — and that each serves a different purpose?

That’s the topic of today’s 𝐇𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐜𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐚 video – and meeting type number three is a doozy: super useful and rarely done.

👇 Here are the four types:

1) 🧑‍🏫👩‍🎓 𝐀𝐥𝐥 𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐫𝐬 + 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭

Your classic setup. Everyone’s in the room, alignment is clear, but don’t overdo it. Alternate weeks works well – or try a 𝟑-𝟏 structure, with three solo (meeting type 2 below) meetings and one all-in meeting per month.

2) 🧑‍🏫👩‍🎓 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐫 + 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭

Lets the less experienced supervisor lead solo. Builds confidence and gives them the space to grow as an independent mentor.

3) 🧑‍🏫🤝🧑‍🏫 𝐒𝐞𝐧𝐢𝐨𝐫 𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐫 + 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐫 (𝐍𝐨 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭)

The underrated gem. A private space to speak frankly, mentor behind the scenes, and stay aligned on how best to support the student.

4) 👩‍🎓🧑‍🏫 𝐒𝐞𝐧𝐢𝐨𝐫 𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐫 + 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭 (𝐍𝐨 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐫)

Use sparingly and thoughtfully – but it has 𝐭𝐰𝐨 valuable modes:

One is a circuit-breaker meeting to address specific issues or enable the student to confide in a safe space.

The other is higher-level mentoring: sharing experience, career advice, and helping the student think longer-term about their trajectory.

📌 𝐓𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲:

Get your meeting mix right, and everyone wins – the student, the supervisors, and the broader mentoring relationship.

#HackingAcademia #PhDLife #PhDSupervision #AcademicMentoring #GradSchoolTips #ResearchCulture #HigherEd #AcademiaUnpacked #PhDChat

Full Video Notes

The supervisor–student dynamic is one of the key components of research in academia and at universities. Students do the bulk of research in most university systems, but they are guided and mentored and nurtured and sponsored by their supervisors.

One of the things that does not get talked about a lot is the fact that you will hopefully be having regular meetings between supervisors and students, but not a lot is said about the types and variety of meetings that can occur and what different uses they have. That is the topic of today’s Hacking Academia video.

For the purposes of this video, I am going to use a very typical example in many academic systems, which is that a student has at least two supervisors. One of those supervisors is their primary or principal supervisor and is often relatively junior and perhaps a little bit inexperienced. They also have an associate or secondary supervisor who is often much more experienced, and who as well as supervising the student is also doing a lot of mentoring and nurturing of that junior academic.

The first type of meeting is the one that is probably most familiar to most people, and this is the everyone-in meeting. You have the PhD student in the meeting and you have both supervisors present. You go through what the student was trying to do in the last week, what happened, what problems they ran into, what interesting insights they discovered, and then talk about what they want to do over the coming week.

This is a very stock standard meeting. One of the things you have to be careful of is that the supervisors outnumber the student, and to make sure that especially as a student matures, they lead as much of the meeting as possible rather than the supervisors completely dominating the conversation. There will be circumstances where supervisors need to provide extra scaffolding and guidance, but that should not be the norm.

I usually like to keep this meeting as one that does not occur every week. I think it is important for the junior, more inexperienced supervisor to spend quite a bit of time with the student by themselves. One way this can work is by alternating these meetings.

You might have fortnightly meetings where all the supervisors are involved, and then on the alternating week you have just the junior supervisor and the student present. You could also do this on a monthly basis, for example three weeks of one-on-one meetings with the principal junior supervisor and one week in that month where all the supervisors are present.

The second type of meeting is where you just have the junior principal or primary supervisor present with the student. The senior supervisor is nowhere to be seen. I recommend that at least half of the meetings, and perhaps the majority of meetings, are in this format.

This gives the junior supervisor a lot of chance to explore and grow their supervisory experience. It means they are having supervisory meetings without the backup of the senior mentor in the room at all times, but also without the restrictions and constraints that can sometimes occur when you have a senior person in the room.

The third type of meeting is one that I do not think a lot of people do, but one that I think is particularly important and may sound a little bit strange. This is a meeting where the senior supervisor and the junior supervisor meet entirely to talk about the student, but without the student present.

That might seem strange, but it is actually a very high return-on-investment meeting. You can have all sorts of conversations about how supervision is going, concerns about the student, concerns the junior supervisor has about themselves, and perhaps concerns or observations that the senior supervisor has. You can also provide constructive criticism in a way that is much faster and much less constrained than if the student were in the room.

Having a meeting without the student, entirely about the student, especially where a senior supervisor is mentoring a junior supervisor, is incredibly useful. I recommend having these meetings periodically, and definitely on demand when a particular challenge or opportunity arises.

The last meeting, and if you have been following along you can probably work out its composition, is just the senior supervisor and the PhD student. There is no principal junior supervisor in the room.

There are two primary reasons for running this meeting. The first is when there are some significant issues. This type of meeting gives the student an opportunity to disclose concerns, frustrations, or self-doubt that they may not feel comfortable sharing with their principal supervisor, who they meet with most regularly.

Sometimes students are more comfortable confiding in a very senior, wise, older supervisor. That is just how dynamics work. These meetings can be a reset, an assessment of the situation, and an alternative to simply persisting with meetings that may have hit a brick wall.

The other reason for having these meetings, and by far the more enjoyable one, is that they allow for a higher-level conversation. You might talk less about day-to-day research and more about career aspirations, how the student’s expectations have matched the reality of doing a PhD, and draw on the senior supervisor’s experience.

These meetings do not have to be frequent. They might occur once every six months or once every three months, for example. They are a great way to enrich the overall student–supervisor relationship.

The ideal combination and frequency of meetings will vary depending on your lab, discipline, and supervisory style. These are four common meeting structures in a situation where you have a student with one junior and one senior supervisor. There are obviously many other combinations that can exist.

I do want to emphasize that the meeting where the senior supervisor meets with the junior supervisor without the student present, entirely to talk about supervising the student, is underappreciated and not as widely done as it should be. It is a really effective way to fast-track the experience and capabilities of the junior supervisor in a way that is not possible when the student is always in the room.

Beyond the specifics of these meeting types, another thing to remember is that two supervisors, within limits, is almost always better than one for practical reasons. One supervisor may be sick, on sabbatical, or otherwise unavailable.

It is also better for relationship reasons. One supervisor might be going through a tough patch or be particularly cynical for a period of time. Having two supervisors helps even things out and provides alternative sources of advice and supervision.

With only a single supervisor, you have a single point of failure. Two supervisors reduce that risk.

There are many ways to run meetings, and I hope this video has given you some ideas for how you can structure meetings with your students.