I inherited a challenging PhD student who I was supervising with a Prof.
I'm an SL but very little supervision experience (two to completion, eight currently working on projects).
Prof then left so I was supervising alone. I don't work in the area of this PhD at all. I feel confident supporting methods but absolutely not the empirical/theoretical focus. I'm humanities.
A new colleague joined our Dept who works in the empirical/theoretical area of this PhD. She's an L with no supervision experience.
After she'd been around for a few months, I asked her to co-supervise with me. She agreed so I informed the student, our PhD director and the relevant admin teams that she was doing it.
Meanwhile, she changed her mind and decided she didn't want to supervise this student because it's too challenging for her first one. I get the sentiment but we're massively short staffed and everyone is taking on extra admin, teaching and PhD supervision to keep the Dept. ticking along.
A Prof (who also doesn't work in the area of the PhD) has tentatively put himself forward to supervise with me instead of this new L colleague.
However, this new colleague is really well-placed to supervise given her expertise and I feel that to support our PhD students the best we need to match students with the necessary experts. So it's concerning me that this PhD student will end up being supervised by me and this other Prof, neither of us having knowledge of the research area while our new colleague who has relevant knowledge and could support the student, isn't involved.
The other issue is that because we are so short staffed, we all need to chip in where/how we can and, unfortunately, none of us are able to be picky on some issues. We've been short staffed for some time and when we had a flurry of people leave, I (and many of my colleagues) took on a number of PhDs that weren't in our areas or were quite challenging to help out and be collegiate. The same needs to happen now and I feel frustrated that this new colleague isn't showing the same collegiate-ness that others have/is needed.
So, now that I've told everyone this new colleague will be supervising with me. She's agreed to come to a meeting with me and the student to offer some guidance but will then, apparently, step back from the project leaving me at square one and the student with a piss-poor supervision team.
How would you handle this situation, please?
What I want out of this is for the new colleague to supervise with me because of her expertise and for her to kind of recognise that we're massively stretched and need all hands to the pump.
Academic common room
PhD supervision- how would you handle this?
BellaHadidHere · 12/10/2017 08:59
The challenges are that the student is part time and struggles to manage her job with her studies which means she is silent for months on end then will send a deluge of stuff and expect quite intense supervision before disappearing again.
You could use the new academic year/new supervisory team to lay out a new way of working for her.
You recognise she's part-time. That's fine. And she produces work when she can - that's also fine. I used to supervise someone like that who had a freelance job, so sometimes she was completely inundated with work, and then other times nothing - so that's when she worked on the PhD.
What is not fine is expecting intense supervision at random times. So could you look back over both your diaries, and look forward over the next year, and try to predict - or ask her to predict - when she thinks she'll be able to send you drafts.
Then insist that if it's an unpredictable/random time, that's OK, but you need time to read & comment, then you will have a face-to-face supervision.
Or ... take the opposite approach and insist on regular (monthly) face-to-face supervisions, and say it's OK if she has nothing much to report, but try to get her doing little bits & pieces, so there's a more regular momentum.
But she cannot expect immediate intense supervision at random times. She has to think professionally about her life & working patterns, and be a grown up & be realistic about how & when she's working on drafts. Be very matter-of-fact about this - she may feel guilty about her erratic work flow. Accept that's the way it's going to be, and be open with her about this not working for large drafts, AND your workload. And invite her to work with you in making a more productive flow in the candidature.
Tell her this is part of becoming an independent scholar - it's her degree (you've got all the degrees you need 
)
She also isn't up to the standard we should have in our PhD students
She will improve, with consistent work, and really getting the hang of a different meaning of the words "independent studies." I had one student - terribly nice & hard-working - who I thought was going to break me, he just wasn't producing writing above a really bright 3rd year UG level. But something happened in his (inevitable) 4th year, and he sailed through her viva. Something just clicked - I must ask him now what it was that caused him to step up to the level needed. His 2nd supervisor was utterly brilliant about tactful ways to say "This isn't good enough" and as 2nd supervisors at my place just come in every 6 months or so, maybe that fresh outside voice helped.
I can't recommend her texts to read and write about in a critical, reflective way.
That's her job! You could still set that as an exercise, but challenge her to find the texts which are forming the field at the moment. You could advise her that she can check this by reading the last couple of years of book reviews in her specific sub-field.
So it's excellent bibliographic training as well!
And students disregard your comments at their peril. Not much you can do, except shrug and advise her that her thesis will be sent back for major corrections.
If your department has annual formal progress reviews, with someone outside the supervisory team reading a draft chapter (that's what we do) then she'll get that feedback from other sources as well.
I'm realising as I write that although at my place we sometimes feel things are overly managed & bureaucratic at PhD level, our standard processes would really help in the sort of situation you're in. So maybe there is a point to bureaucracy sometimes 
Good luck!
Thanks for the comments. I absolutely don't want to be one of those muttering, raised eyebrow people. That's why I'm going to see my Director of Graduate Studies about it. He's brilliant and, if necessary, will liaise with the HoD about workload issues.
I find it unbelievable that a new, junior colleague has decided to dip out of part of her job because she thinks it's too hard!
She was also actually complaining that the admin role that she's been given isn't appropriate for her. I can see where she's coming from because her admin role is about a programme she doesn't teach on but we were told last month that we'd all have to take on extra admin burden so people might end up with two or three admin roles and roles that they're not necessarily perfectly suited to.
I'm going to tell DoGS that this student does have very legitimate grounds for complaint as she's been pushed around supervisors a bit then has been told a new (very appropriate) supervisor is coming on board who's then said "actually no".
There's definitely the possibility of a three-way supervision team which is what I'm going to suggest. So I stay on because I've been involved for a while, the new colleague comes in as the person with expertise in the area and the Prof comes on to support us as we're both relatively inexperienced. Sounds fine to me, what do you think?
When she told me the other day that she'd changed her mind, I was completely dumbfounded and I really regret that I wasn't more forceful in expressing my frustration and disappointment. I don't mean have a massive go at her but I just kind of went 
"Oh okay, well let's have a meeting with the student and see where we go from there". It was only after she left my office that I wondered why on earth I didn't say "Well actually, you already agreed to this. Why didn't you just say "no" in the first place? We can't be picky because we're short staffed. I'll need to discuss this with DoGS" yadda yadda.
Instead, I stood there like an idiot so now I'm worried that she thinks it's all resolved (i.e. that she won't be involved in supervision) and me going to DoGS about this might be perceived as me going behind her back or dobbing her in. I don't want to sour relations with a new (and seemingly well-liked, certainly very well-protected) colleague but OTOH, I do think she's being unreasonable.
So I stay on because I've been involved for a while, the new colleague comes in as the person with expertise in the area and the Prof comes on to support us as we're both relatively inexperienced. Sounds fine to me, what do you think?
Excellent. Sounds watertight from all sorts of angles, and really appropriate for this student.
I'm sure you're not as wanting as you think you are as a supervisor for this candidate Look, most of us can read something scholarly outside of our own area and make a pretty good case for its efficacy and cogency.
Furry That's really interesting. I'm not in a management role so I don't get to see people's patterns of saying "no". I think it's a good thing that ECRS (esp. women) are able to balance their work well and have the confidence to do so. However, it can go too far as with my colleague and your tutorial-dodger
I think it's a good thing that ECRS (esp. women) are able to balance their work well and have the confidence to do so. However, it can go too far as with my colleague and your tutorial-dodger
I agree really, especially for women. We’re far too apt to people please and say yes while our male colleagues say no/just don’t do it and get away with it.
I just wish I’d had the gumption to do it myself
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