PhD to postdoc no sweat, or posthoc regret?

I work a lot with stuck and panicking PhD researchers near the end of their time here, and from them I have some intel to share. Bear in mind then that what follows doesn’t represent an ever so typical experience, but it does represent an important and keenly felt negative experience. One we can all …

coaching myths and coaching legends

I teach professional practices in coaching and mentoring* in an education context and have developed some short workshops for academic supervisors and principal investigators that focus on the relational aspects of research leadership and use coaching techniques as the basis for conversations that help people develop their thinking and understanding. Coaching as a style of supervision, is about …

spoon-feeding PhD students – extending the metaphor for supervisory practice

Every so often someone opens their mouth in a meeting and out tumbles “but we mustn’t ‘spoon-feed’ our PhD students – they have to be independent.” Recently, I’ve been wondering in some detail what’s behind this reaction, and how, in my role, I can interpret what this means for researcher and supervisor development. So if we …

how supervisors accept uncertainly, vulnerability and insecurity

This is a part 2 of 2, looking at what uncertainty and vulnerability might look like from a supervisor perspective. Part 1, the student angle is here. In this post I am again considering how trust may be a marker of a ‘good quality’ supervision relationship. ‘Trust’ as a phenomenon can be understood as “willingness to …

a willingness to accept uncertainty and make oneself vulnerable in the face of insecurity

Trust is often mentioned as an important part of ‘good’ supervision relationships but the literature is fairly vague on what we mean by ’trust’. I like to work with this definition of Trust: “Willingness to accept uncertainly and make oneself vulnerable in the face of insecurity” (Hope-Hailey et al., 2012) because I feel it describes a dynamic of experiencing challenge and seeking support, and …