Careers, Podcasts

Podcast – PhD Supervisors – The good, the great and the rest

Hosted by Adam Smith

Reading Time: 44 minutes

Your Supervisor will play a vital role in your PhD, supporting you from starting out to submission (and beyond). But what does ‘supervision’ actually mean in practice? What sort of support and assistance can you expect your supervisor to provide?

In this podcast Adam Smith talks with three researchers about their relationships with their PhD Supervisors. Getting underneath what good looks like and how you can influence this. We also discuss what can go wrong, and what that relationship is broken, and strategies to deal that, and still ensure success.

This week’s guests are:

  • Dr Prerana Sabnis, Cognitive Neuropsychologist with an interest in language comprehension. Currently blogging for Dementia Researcher having completed her studies at University of Trento, Italy and Macquarie University, Australia.
  • Dr Claire Lancaster, Research Fellow at University of Sussex working on early detection of Alzheimer’s Disease and lifespan risk reduction, with a particular focus on the ApoE gene.
  • Dr Barbara Ann Bush, Tenure Track Professor from Big Bend Community College in Moses Lake, WA. Barbara doesn’t focus on dementia, but lectures on Nationalism, nostalgia, identity, and memory and her focus is on Communications.

While this podcast is more likely to be listened to by PhD Students…. We realise that some of you may be Supervisors yourself. If you are, we hope you’re brilliant. Here is the supervisors guide from UCL, which is always worth revisiting: https://bit.ly/3pFYFy2


Click here to read a full transcript of this podcast

Voice Over:

Welcome to the NIHR Dementia Researcher podcast brought to you by dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk in association with Alzheimer’s Research UK and Alzheimer’s Society, supporting early career dementia researchers across the world.

Adam Smith:

Hello. Welcome to another podcast, brought to you by the Dementia Researcher website. I’m Adam Smith and I’m delighted to host this podcast this week discussing the very important topic of PhD supervision. So this week show is called and it’s a snappy title I came up with myself, how to get the super in supervisor and what to do when they aren’t. The last time we recorded a podcast about PhD supervisors was back in 2018. And the panelists from that show all reported that they had great supervisors who were supportive and available and caring and professional and passionate and compassionate. And in this show, we are going to discuss what it is like when that relationship is less than perfect and also hopefully give you some tips on what you can do about it.

Adam Smith:

Dr Prerana Sabnis who completed her PhD at the University of Trento in Italy and Macquarie University in Australia, spread out somewhat there. Prerana is a cognitive neuropsychologist who’s research is focused on language comprehension. She also is passionate about de-stigmatizing mental health conditions, particularly in dementia and is on the hunt for a job right now, so if anybody’s looking for somebody to work in science communications, you know where to look. Details of Prerana’s profile will be available on our website. Our next guest has been on the show a couple of times before, so welcome back to Dr. Claire Lancaster. Claire is an Alzheimer’s Society research fellow at the University of Sussex and Claire’s research investigates the cognitive consequences of brain overactivity in healthy carriers of the APOE 4G. Hello, Claire.

Dr Claire Lancaster:

Hello.

Adam Smith:

And finally we have Barbara. Hello, Barbara.

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

Hello.

Adam Smith:

Thank you very much for finding time to join us. We have most of the world covered here and time zones are tricky. So Barbara, because I didn’t write an introduction because you joined our panel late today, could I ask you to introduce yourself?

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

I’m Dr Barbara Bush. My research interests have been in nationalism, specifically the relationship between materiality and nationalism and the way that people personalize the identity of a nation-state through materiality, nostalgia memory, but primarily through materiality. But right now I am at Big Bend Community College in the little town of Moses Lake Washington, where I am a tenure track professor and I’m also the head of the communication studies department.

Adam Smith:

And it’s fantastic to have somebody who isn’t necessarily working in dementia on the show, because I think particularly with this topic, that some of the issues that dementia researchers will face are the same no matter what your chosen area of research. Thank you very much for joining us Barbara, Claire, and Prerana. It’s great to have you on the show. I’m rubbish at keeping podcasts to time, and this is a rather big topic so I’m going to go skip the usual introductions and dive right into the questions. Without going into details at this stage I’m just going to ask each of you, did you have good relationships with your supervisors? Claire, you go first.

Dr Claire Lancaster:

Yeah. I had a really, really good relationship with my supervisors so I think their kind of support really complimented each other and it’s probably one of the reasons I’m still in academia now, I’m positive.

Adam Smith:

What about you, Prerana?

Dr Prerana Sabnis:

Yeah I had a really good relationship with one of my supervisors and I had an almost good relationship with my other supervisor. So overall it was good experience, but there were definitely some bumps along the way.

Adam Smith:

Thank you very much. Barbara?

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

The relationship with my advisor was, shall we say, very complicated. Personally I’ve absolutely been able to maintain a relationship that is friendly, but professionally it was a disaster. I won’t say toxic because it wasn’t even that close. But it wasn’t much. There was no super in supervisor. There was no super.

Adam Smith:

No. Well, I think this is a good representative panel then, because we’ve got obviously Claire, who’s had a good experience and Prerana, you’re kind of somewhere in the middle and Barbara, you seem to be perhaps toward the other end of the spectrum there and it’s good. We always like to have a balanced view. So I thought we’d maybe start by trying to determine what good looks like, because I think particularly when you’re doing a PhD you don’t necessarily know your supervisor although of course, many people progress with the same supervisor from their MSc and it’s somebody they know who goes on, but often they don’t. And I think also as well, you don’t necessarily know that your relationship isn’t great or they aren’t the best of supervisors because you don’t know what others are like. So what makes a great PhD supervisor? I think this is important. You don’t always know what they’re like. So Claire maybe if I could come to you first, you said yours was good, so what made supervisor good? Why are you still in academia inspired by them? No names, of course.

Dr Claire Lancaster:

So I spent a bit of time thinking about this, because it’s really kind of difficult to pin down what makes somebody a good supervisor and I think one of the most important things is time. And so when your supervisor has time for you and actually kind of listens to your ideas, even if you kind of go to them and you’re like, “This is a really stupid idea and I’m not sure it will work.” If they actually take the time to kind of listen to you I think that’s really important for helping you develop your research. And I think having a comfortable relationship. So it’s not just kind of always work based, like if they actually take an interest in your kind of wellbeing and make sure… So for example, I have a really bad habit of emailing people at 5:00 in the morning and sometimes my supervisor would message back and be like, “Get some rest.” Sort of thing. I think that makes a big difference as well.

Dr Claire Lancaster:

Yeah, and I think it’s good if they have a genuine interest in your research area. So rather than it kind of being like a side project and they’re just paid to supervise you because they have to, if it’s actually something they’re really interested in and they’re interested in your outcomes and your methods, I think that’s really good for them being able to give you good solid advice.

Adam Smith:

Thank you. Yeah, I think all important points. So mix time, somebody you feel comfortable with, somebody who is interested in you in the round kind of and your wellbeing as well. What about you Prerana?

Dr Prerana Sabnis:

Yeah, I think I agree with everything Claire said. I think two of the things that would be most important to me would be my supervisor’s time and how willing they are to be actually present and in listening to and discussing ideas. Secondly, how… I guess how attentive they are to you as just people and not necessarily your bosses or your academic supervisors, so how attentive they are to your, I guess, mental health or physical health in general. And I think the third thing that I found was really important to me in my supervisors were also to some extent how proactive they were. I mean, there were some times when I would go into meetings and it would just be me talking about, “Oh, hey, you know what? I read this, I read this, I read this.” With not a lot of feedback.

Dr Prerana Sabnis:

But there were other meetings when I would have my supervisor who’s sort of given it some thought beforehand and we’ve had a chance to sort of actually make something… to actually get something productive out of the meeting rather than it being like, I’m just going to use you as a board where I come and throw stuff at, and then I go back without any interest or feedback from you. So yeah, I think the proactivity, proactiveness. Basically a proactive supervisor is really helpful.

Adam Smith:

Yeah, I would agree. And I guess that partly comes down to perhaps how many other people they supervise, what their own day job is like, I guess [crosstalk 00:09:24]. I guess there’s different dynamics here, as opposed to somebody who’s doing their PhD that’s aligned to their supervisor’s own research or whether they are purely supervising alongside of the teaching responsibilities and things like that as to how much interest they take in you. What about you Barbara? Obviously, I mean, I know you mentioned that yours was a particularly difficult relationship, but were there some stand out parts of that that were good or did you make a transition and see what was going on elsewhere? What was it you didn’t get that for relationship that would have made it better? I guess.

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

So I’ll transition from the good to the bad, since we’ve been talking about the good. I think the good for me in the standout part of the relationship was that I learned to be compassionate towards my supervisor. I became hyper aware of all of his other commitments, which he did have a lot because he was popular in the department, he’s a fairly well known. And I think he was aware I was sensitive to that so maybe… just in small short conversations about that. So that’s maybe the standout part for me, that’s an awareness, not necessarily anything that really made our relationship better, but something that was good for me to notice. I’ve had good supervisors and good advisors in my master’s program. I went to a terminal master’s program and then got my PhD elsewhere. So I do know what a good committee chair or advisor looks like. I had that in my master’s.

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

What wasn’t good was his lack of interest and what I would say is part of it is he was brand new to the department. He came in as a shining star and didn’t have any advisees. I was automatically assigned to him and I didn’t think it was important… I actually did try to separate myself from him because I thought our research was too different and he sounded very eager to keep me. Looking back now, I realize that’s because he didn’t really have anybody yet. So what didn’t stand out it was… What stood out was his lack of interest. As Claire has mentioned you really want somebody who’s interested in what you do, interested in your methods and so forth. And he really wasn’t. He wasn’t interested in what I had to do and… Yes.

Adam Smith:

Well, and I suppose actually this kind of makes the point is that somebody who is a good supervisor for one person might not be the best supervisor for somebody else, although a good supervisor would probably recognize that and talk about it and compensate, or suggest a colleague or taking on a second supervisor rather than kind of double down on-

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

Keeping me.

Adam Smith:

They would recognize the issue themselves without you needing to do it.

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

Right. And I think that… And then in addition to that, a bad supervisor has a big ego, which we know in academia exists, but a temperament and an ego that if you let that person go, which other people had let him go cause them a lot of turmoil in the department because of the relationships among the faculty themselves. So that person told me do not kick him off your committee you’ll be sorry.

Adam Smith:

Okay, let’s come back. Because we’re going to go into some-

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

Yeah, yeah. Sure.

Adam Smith:

… of the problems behind once we have first of all-

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

Okay. I was thinking bad supervisor. Okay. Sorry about that.

Adam Smith:

What makes a good one?

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

Okay. Sorry, sorry.

Adam Smith:

So we said somebody who makes time-

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

Yes.

Adam Smith:

… Somebody who is comfortable, easy to get on with, takes an interest in you and your wellbeing, takes time to also provide proper well thought through feedback.

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

Feedback.

Adam Smith:

We’ve all seen that, haven’t we? Those kinds of documents where you can tell somebody’s not even necessarily read them after you’ve given your chapter in for a look. The Discovery PhD website defined a good PhD supervisor as someone with a track record of supervising PhD students through to completion as a strong publication record and is active in their research field, has sufficient time to provide adequate supervision and he’s genuinely interested in your subject and can provide you with mentorship and has a supportive personality. I don’t disagree with that, but I think it is a rather simplistic view. I think first-time supervisor isn’t necessarily a bad one for example. So if they don’t necessarily have a track record of seeing somebody through to supervision, I think a first time supervisor could be great because they could be working really hard and want to make a success of it. So I think that is a bit of a simplistic view.

Adam Smith:

But sometimes you’ll apply for a ready-made PhD funding post and the supervisor of the PhD are part of the deal and you don’t really get to choose. I think this differs perhaps from country to country and other times you’ll bring your funding and you’ll search for the person you want. That means you don’t always get a choice and it means you have a better opportunity if you’re bringing your funding to them to think who would be the best person who work for you. So that kind of definition if you like of what makes a good supervisor, it’s a tricky one because if you’re applying for ready-made job and you’ve read that description, how you really not going to apply or quite often, you won’t know until it’s too late and you’ve already had the offer and quite tricky turn down a PhD offer if you’re just slightly uncertain about the supervisor, once you’ve got to that point I think, but that’s what the definition of a good supervisor is according to the internet and the real websites I did some reading around on.

Adam Smith:

Next, I want to move into talking a bit more detail about your own experiences and discuss some of the problems that you faced, because I think one of the real… When I put something out on social media to say we’re going to be talking about this topic, what I was rather saddened to read was the number of messages I got back from people talking about their problems, but who didn’t want to talk about them publicly, didn’t want to share their names, but they did want to share their issues. And so I think it’s important that if we have problems, we do talk about them in this kind of safe way to make others out there who are listening to this realize that they’re not alone in some of the challenges that they might be facing. And maybe we can suggest a few strategies that you all devised to help manage the situations and go through some of those problems that we face.

Adam Smith:

So maybe Barbara, we started on this with you, so could you maybe talk a bit about your difficulties and where you turned to when you faced these problems?

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

Yeah. So I want to reiterate what you said, you’re not alone if you’re listening to this and you’re having difficulties with a PI or an advisor. I had some really great fellow grad students who were super supportive. So they were my supers. I would turn to them for feedback. Again, sometimes I would get feedback from my advisor, but again, that sort of very cursory feedback that clearly didn’t do anything substantive for what I was trying to write about. And my fellow grad students really did that. Of course, this puts a burden on fellow grad students because they’re doing their own research, but I happen to be able to spread out that burden a little bit among friends. So I did turn to them. I also think the difficulty was just in having meaningless meetings with advisor when I could pin him down. Sometimes I wouldn’t hear back from him for four months, which really lengthens the time you get your PhD done.

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

And here in the United States, I know in the UK, for example, it takes a lot less time, but here I was in my PhD program from 2008 to 2017 in part, because of the lack of responsiveness from my advisor, because I didn’t know what to do when he wouldn’t respond time and time again. So what I ended up doing towards the end, I really just pushed myself is I wrote a lot on my own and realized that at the end of the day that this is what I needed to do and just get it done. So there’s that independence having that sort of self-reliance. Now granted I’d done a master’s, so I’d written a thesis so I kind of knew the drill as far as writing a longer paper that this was substantively longer than the other paper. So I would just force myself to write, and then I had one other outside committee member.

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

This was another thing. It was a built-in strategy. It’s not what I thought of myself. I don’t know how other universities do it. We had to have one outside member from our department and mine was in history because mine was including the history of Switzerland and nationalism. And he was helpful, not as helpful as my supervisor might be, but he was helpful. So I was able to lean on him a little bit though you do need to be careful with that. So those were my strategies and just kept my head down and kept writing and finding those resources among my fellow grad students.

Adam Smith:

So what is the main problem you face there? Was it purely down to having… Because again, I mentioned before but was this an absence, was this their kind of disinterest towards you and your work and an absence and neither responding or was there something underlying that do you think?

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

I think it’s a combination of things. There was an absence, there was a lack of interest and in part the absence had to do with his own… From the time that I had acquired him as an assigned supervisor to the time that I was in the depths of working on my dissertation, he had become quite popular so he also had a lot of advisees. And I think there was some kind of underlying issue that I had never put a finger on because he, after I graduated, has never stopped contacting me. I’ve heard more from him since I’ve graduated than I ever did during the PhD program.

Adam Smith:

The irony of that is kind of frustrating.

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

It’s so frustrating.

Adam Smith:

Absence is a common one. In fact, it’s on my list of things to talk about later on to say, how do you deal with that? Absent supervisor? I was talking to somebody offline a couple of weeks ago that had exactly the same experience where they’d send something in and they wouldn’t get responses back. And then trying to understand where the absence… Why that was. And I think in that particular instance, the supervisor was, as we mentioned earlier, was new to the post, but that’s never an excuse for just not replying to emails. They were busy, but they were new to the post. This was the first person they’d ever supervised. I don’t know if that meant… I can never quite understand why somebody wouldn’t at least respond.

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

Or well, what I was going to add is, and I did attempt actually twice. I meant to mention that. I attempted twice to change him. Initially in the beginning, just because I thought my research wasn’t… it just didn’t seem to match up with what he would be interested in and he convinced me otherwise. But then the second time when I was a little bit further along, I attempted that again and I remember very clearly I was in his office. He said, why are you turning an anthill into a mountain or whatever he’s little saying was, and I just… I said, well, I just want to make… And I didn’t know what to do because I had this other grad student who had gotten rid of him and said, don’t do this. I saw his temper, his sort of resistance flare up and I just stopped. I said, “Okay, well, as long as we’re okay and as long as you’re interested in, you think we should keep moving forward that’s fine, but I can get another chair for the committee.”

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

And I tried to co-chair. Some people do co-chair that’s as well. I was told that’s an absolute no-go from both him and the person who I wanted to have as a co-chair. She said I won’t co-chair with him. He’s not responsive.

Adam Smith:

So I wonder then why somebody would be absent, I guess it’s either because they’re busy or they’re perhaps not very interested in what you’re doing or just have a general lack of respect, perhaps, which isn’t a very nice thing to do. Why else? I don’t know, Prerana. What reasons could we ever think of there? Because of course, I think if you’re going to work out how to address it, you’ve got to understand what the underlying causes of.

Dr Prerana Sabnis:

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the big things that could possibly be responsible for absences is just bad time management. I think a lot of PhD students feel excited to work with supervisors who are extremely experienced or high up in the ranks and are the biggest people in their field, but often what that coincides with is the supervisors being on multiple committees, multiple editorial boards, multiple teaching responsibilities and administrative tasks. And I think the one common theme that I’ve noticed with my peers, my friends, people who’ve done PhDs before me, after me has been that a lot of times priorities change for supervisors and I think the actual supervision of a student takes a back seat at some point, because they’re too busy either reviewing of papers or trying to figure out how to get new funding for their lab. And I think your papers and your thesis and your meetings just sort of get stuck very low in the pile. So maybe it could be that, maybe-

Adam Smith:

So time management. What do you think Claire?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

I think it kind of feeds into that. I’d say if the student isn’t perhaps as high up their priority list and if they’re really stressed, I think from an outsider it’s like easy to say your students should be one of your kind of top priorities, but when you’ve got all these other pressures coming in, I can imagine it would be easy to just kind of say, “Oh, I’ll meet them next week or I’ll meet them next week.”

Adam Smith:

So strategies to deal with this then. I mean, this is straight out of the textbook. I mean this first issue of absence is usually one of the biggest complaints of PhD students or supervisors is that kind of lack of response, no apparent interest in their work, I guess, strategies to deal with this. The common ones that you’d take out of the book are from the outset to have a regular meeting in the diary, right? From the get go, whether that’s at a frequency that you both think is agreeable to you, being as flexible as you can maybe in terms of if they work in the mornings or they work later in the evenings. This isn’t to say, oh, you should work every night because they work until 10 o’clock and that the only time they can see you because there’s got to be flexibility on both sides, but I think showing some flexibility, regular meeting in the diary but in deadlines on things, I know it sounds awful.

Adam Smith:

And then if things have been allowed to lapse, if they have an assistant, maybe you can go via them. Is there something to be said for just literally turning up and knocking on their door? I mean, are we just too afraid to do that? Do we door stop them and just kind of go stand outside, knock and say, “Hi, I need to talk to you about something.”?

Dr Prerana Sabnis:

I mean, do you know what, Adam? In my PhD, I’ve been kind of fortunate in that I’ve worked in many different cultural setups. And I think one of the differences I noticed was that some cultures in general are more open to having open doors where they’re okay with students just going in and knocking on their doors and saying, hey, I just need to chat with you for like literally a quick minute. But in other places you have to schedule meetings beforehand and it’s not very, maybe not polite, but maybe it’s just not acceptable. Maybe it’s not the professional way of doing things. And it’s a very thin line to cross and detour around. But also I think there needs to be a bit of systemic change. There needs to be some sort of accountability. I think one of my universities had a requirement that the university has to… the student has to meet with their supervisor a minimum of, I don’t, 25 times in three years or something like that.

Dr Prerana Sabnis:

And if you are not sort of keeping up with that, so if you’re not having say about seven, eight meetings a year, you actually have the chance to bring it up with the external bodies and say, hey, you know what? I’m actually writing to my supervisor every week, but they just don’t have any time for me, how do we address it? So I don’t think all the responsibility can just be with the supervisor or with the student. There needs to be a bit more cohesion and a bit more effort from the system as well.

Adam Smith:

I think there is something here about the reverence thing, isn’t it? Because you’re right about that kind of, oh, you cannot see them without a meeting or I never just turn up and knock on their door. And I think that is so personal. I think it depends on the individual and how they perceive themselves and their relationship with students. And they are one of those kind of people, I think there are… And also as well it depends on the PhD student, are you the kind of person that will face this head on when you have things have lapsed and you have got to a point where you’re not talking, do you just put your head down and try to ignore it and talk to other people instead and just work around it or do you try and tackle it? And I think it depends on the person you’re supervised by.

Adam Smith:

If they were going to tackle it, Claire, how would you go about it? So let me give you a scenario, PhD student end of your first year, you’ve only spoken to your supervisor five, six times over the course of the year. They always take two weeks to reply to emails. And when they do, they’re not very helpful. What would you do in that situation do you think?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

I think in an ideal situation it would be good to kind of have a frank conversation with your supervisor and say like, this is kind of what I expect from you, these are kind of the problems I think we’re having, what can we do about it? And I wouldn’t like, kind of say, you’re letting me down because you’re doing this, this and this and I don’t like it. I try and make it more like a team effort. I know it can be really difficult if your supervisor is scary or you’re a shy kind of person, he doesn’t like confrontation. And I think another thing I’d personally do would be think about, is there a kind of a second person you can go to, that you feel comfortable talking to about it? Like I know when I did my PhD, we had kind of somebody who was in the same research area who checked in once a year, we could talk to. And we also had the head of the doctoral school we could go to and they were both super approachable.

Dr Claire Lancaster:

And I think making sure, if universities can make sure they have people like this and these people are clearly signposted I think that helps.

Adam Smith:

I spoke to somebody the other week that had this same problem when we were talking about strategies to try and deal with this. And we did talk about finding another reason to kind of try to kick off a conversation. So in this instance, it was good time… this time of year. It’s a good time to say, “Hey, we’re going into 2021, I realized we’ve not had a lot of time to work together this year. I’d like to kick off the new year with a good start. Could we put in a regular meeting in the diary?” And if somebody doesn’t… I may be [inaudible 00:30:42] somebody else into slightly shame them into replying, perhaps. I think in this instance, we talked about going on a long time and we talked about the potential workarounds, which I think we’ll come to in some of the other issues we’re going to talk around about taking on a second… subjecting a second supervisor, for example. But I think it depends on circumstances.

Adam Smith:

So maybe in an excuse to contact them, talking about resetting, not blaming them, if they haven’t been responding, but kind of instead just talking about the situation rather than saying, you’ve not responded to me recently, the careful use of language because I think that could also get them defensive and then they just don’t reply. Can we move on to some of the other issues? Because I’m conscious of time. Prerana, I’m going to come to you because you said you had a great relationship with one supervisor and not so much with the other one. What were the problems with your second supervisor?

Dr Prerana Sabnis:

Well, I think when things started out they’re all Hunky-Dory and our working styles matched and everything was great, but along the way I had… my PhD slowed down quite a bit because of a lot of personal issues. And initially my supervisor responded with a lot of support, but as time went on, I think I started feeling a sense of… How do I put this? I started being made to feel like I was taking him from granted, not doing things, asking him to do all the work for me, even though I was actually literally going off of whatever resources he had given me or whatever information he had given me and keep in mind I don’t mean I was slow in writing a paper because I didn’t know how to do an analysis, I’m talking about moving continents like I mentioned with my PhD multiple… My mum was terminally ill at that point and there were a whole bunch of mental health issues at play.

Dr Prerana Sabnis:

And at some point my supervisor said to me, you know what? I’ve done so much for you, if any other student knew how much I had done for you, they would kill me. And I was like, “Hold on. This is not my responsibility or my fault if you have at any point felt like I’m not doing enough as a student or that you’re giving me too much of a leeway. This is something that you should have asked an experienced supervisor brought up with me earlier on. You don’t get to blame me saying I’m not doing things even when I’m following the timeline that you and I agreed upon.” There were, I mean, from a person who would respond to me in a matter of 24 hours, he went to someone who wouldn’t respond for three months. So at some point when I was trying to complete-

Adam Smith:

Like they were almost punishing… Like this was your punishment somehow, they were blaming you-

Dr Prerana Sabnis:

Yeah. And I wasn’t sure if it was an intentional thing or an unintentional thing, but I realized that the way I could get around it with luckily I had another supervisor who was extremely supportive with whom I could have a frank conversation, who kind of acted as the mediator between us when things weren’t going great. And I think if any PhD student has similar issues with their supervisor and they have the opportunity of finding an external person in the department, or an oversight committee member, whatever the equivalent is at the university, then bringing in a third person, an outsider who might be able to mediate that gap or bridge that gap might be a good solution.

Adam Smith:

I think there are two issues there that you raised. I think the first of all is how a supervisor responds when you do have problems elsewhere in your life and how they respond to being supportive and helping you and encouraging you still. And I think I know people who don’t take days off sick and kind of, clearly hold a grudge to people who do or think, “Oh, you’re slackers if you ever have a day off with a cold.” So I think there’s how somebody support you during crisis or during other periods of difficulty in life. And then there’s that second one about somebody who feels like they’re doing too much for you. But for me that is probably… They’re the bad supervisor for not supporting you to enable you to do the work rather than… And that brings up a separate issue we’ll come to about being overbearing. I mean, in hindsight, what would you do? Would you do anything differently? I mean, you got through your… you finished.

Dr Prerana Sabnis:

Do you know what? I actually don’t know if I would do too many things differently because I think the one thing that I was told right at the beginning when I started my PhD by people who had done their PhDs before, was that if there is an issue, bring it up immediately as soon as you can. And I think at every step of the way I’ve brought up issues as and when they’ve come up. And I think the thing with supervisors as well is that they’re not all black and white. This particular supervisor, my relationship with him in the beginning was great, in the middle it got bumpy. And then we have someone else mediate for us. And then he was more understanding of issues and more understanding of realistic timelines. And we weren’t best friends, but we knew how to work together well enough for me to get done with my PhD.

Dr Prerana Sabnis:

I think the only thing I might want to sort of tell myself, tell the version of me that was writing my PhD is to kind of learn how to draw that boundary between myself and my supervisor as just professional colleagues and that I don’t need… It’s not my responsibility to sort of keep him happy and impress that person on every other front when everything else in my life is kind of falling apart.

Adam Smith:

Yeah. That’s a tricky one, isn’t it? And I think it comes back to something that’s always in the guidance as well is about having plans, which are written down, documented with dates alongside these things so you can raise these. So if you’re not falling behind, this is a perception rather than a reality, or if you need a week to go away and do something, you can show on your plan that it’s not going to affect you. This is how things are going. Barbara, what do you think, what would be your view on that situation?

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

Like Prerana I think I wouldn’t honestly, there’s not much I could… I’ve gone over this and over this in my head prior to this podcast, I don’t know what I could’ve done differently. I too brought up the issues with the actual person who I had the issues with and with other people. And I think if I had gone a more severe route, I would have lost the teaching opportunities that I did have at that university that he ultimately had to sign off on. And those teaching opportunities looked really good on my CV. So I don’t know. I had to sacrifice one area to support another area of my professional development in this scenario and I wasn’t going to give up supporting my development as a teacher and as an academic colleague in a department that has a very insular kind of quality to it. So I don’t know there’s a lot that I would have done differently.

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

I agree with also with Prerana drawing those boundaries and realizing it’s a professional relationship. And also to remember that you are in a PhD program for a reason, you were picked for a reason, you get rid of that imposter syndrome, which gets accentuated and exacerbated by these kinds of situations because you think, why is this person not interested in me? Is there something about the quality of my writing? English is my second language, at some point that even came up in one of the meetings which really threw me back on my heels a little bit. So remember, you’re in that program for a reason, and you do have the resources within yourself to write that dissertation and do that research and do that analysis, or you wouldn’t be there. So trust that and dig in and find the process.

Adam Smith:

And Claire, just thinking about both the situations here, what… I mean, you were quite fortunate that you didn’t have that. I’m sure everything wasn’t always perfect all the time. You must have had some kind of highs and lows along the way, but what would you do in that situation do you think where somebody is kind of not being particularly helpful, but they are talking to you, but what they’re saying to you isn’t necessarily always positive? They’re mostly going to giving you this negative view and you’re finding it quite hard to impress them.

Dr Claire Lancaster:

I guess that’s quite a tricky one. From my own personal experience in life I’ve always tried to kind of go off with like, do you ever kind of… It didn’t really happen in my PhD, but with my colleagues or like other students, and just kind of discuss what’s being said, kind of try and remember that is over your PhD feels like your life. Just try and keep it in perspective and have a laugh about it and then hopefully on Monday you’ll feel more positive and can go in and kind of tackle the problem head on.

Adam Smith:

Where did you go? I mean, did you surround yourself… I mean, where did you go? Who did you talk to when you… Where did you go for help and advice?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

Probably just my students and colleagues around me. So people who are in similar experiences.

Adam Smith:

So you turned to your peer group. Because I know in your situations kind of family are great, but they don’t necessarily understand the circumstances. They care about you, but they don’t really understand the hierarchy, the makeup, the politics of it. So you kind of turned to your PhD buddies.

Dr Claire Lancaster:

Yeah, absolutely. Occasionally not during my PhD, but I’d mourned it to my parents and you’re right they’re just wouldn’t grab the nuance.

Adam Smith:

Another common problem that came up from the messages I received was a supervisor that was rather overbearing, but didn’t allow them to grow within the role. They kind of gave them… They had weekly meetings and came out with a set of instructions and really treated their student like an employee, like another research assistant rather than somebody who was growing within their own right. Which I know, I think sometimes can be quite a nice warm space to be in during the first six, 12 months kind of particularly if you’re transitioning from a very structured MSc, finding your own feet in a PhD, which is a podcast we did a little while ago, but then a great supervisor would allow you to grow within that role and then eventually set you free and you follow your own route. What do you think? Did anybody have a problem where their supervisor was more instructive? Nobody did. What would you do then in that situation? Prerana let go.

Dr Prerana Sabnis:

I don’t know. I’m just thinking about it as you’re saying it. No, I think like you said, I definitely had a lot more supervision and more instruction in the first year than I did in the third where I was sort of allowed to draw and express my ideas and talk about where I wanted to be as a researcher. But I think it would have been… I don’t think I would’ve been able to be trained as a PhD candidate ideally should be at that stage as a researcher, because at the end of the day, regardless of where in the world you’re doing it or what you’re doing your PhD on it is the… it’s supposed to be a base for you to eventually become an independent researcher, right? It’s supposed to be a place for you to learn how to sort of in a way how to think creatively, how to learn the skills that you don’t have.

Dr Prerana Sabnis:

And if I had someone who was restrictive on those fronts and didn’t really let me grow, didn’t let me make some of the mistakes I need to make to actually learn from them I wouldn’t have gotten everything out of that PhD that I should have. I don’t know if that answers the question, but I’m not really sure what I would have done in that case.

Adam Smith:

No, I think it does. I mean, I spoke to somebody, again, this is all people messaging on Twitter, who explained the situation where they almost conducted their own research entirely in private as a secondary secret project. So they did what their supervisor asked. I don’t know. That wasn’t you, was it Barbara?

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

No, I’m just going to say that’s what I would do. I mean, maybe that’s just a sign of who I am. I mean, that’s what I had to do, not in private, I just had to do it all myself. I think I would do that if I was overly supervised. I’d just start conducting my research in private. I mean, that-

Adam Smith:

I suppose you start-

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

… maybe says more something about me, [crosstalk 00:45:17] else.

Adam Smith:

To ask you a question. And again, I think that maybe comes back down to match. I think there are some people who kind of want a supervisor who is very present, very there all the time, very interested. There’s a balance, isn’t there? Between somebody who actually… What was your… Everything you send them in red ink and sends it back again to the person that does never even reply this. There’s got to be some in the-

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

It makes me wonder, Adam, and I don’t… Again, this would be a survey question, but it would be nice and it should be probably part of PhD programs where you interview your potential… you’re required to pick three people or something out of the faculty that you think might be of interest to you, where you have a set of interview questions that address these things, what is your work… what’s your work ethos around writing and research? Or whatever the thing would be and suss these things out before that relationship is sealed in the ego world of academia. I don’t know, but that seems like… Not that that’s an answer to your question either, but gosh-

Adam Smith:

Well, I suppose it’s nice to have hindsight, but I guess for anybody who’s listening to this, who’s early on in… early enough to do something about it would want solution to always have two supervisors, never just have one because she kind of spreading your [inaudible 00:46:39] then, you’re kind of spreading the bad. If one turns out to not be the best match than to the other one, plus as well I think one of the supervisors is likely to keep the other one… I think it’s quite hard for one person to ignore you if one of them is always responding. And so if you are facing a difficult time right now, you’re kind of 18 months in considering whether you approach your supervisor and find a reason not, “Hey, you’re a rubbish supervisor. Would you mind if I added another one?” That might not be the… Yeah, I don’t know. It depends on the person.

Adam Smith:

But maybe finding another reason to suggest bringing somebody else on board saying, “Hey, it’s great. But my thought process is now going slightly down another track. I know that’s not your main field I wondered if I could take on another supervisor or a mentor.” I mean, I think mentoring here could be great too. I mean, ideally your supervisor would… Actually, should your supervisor be your mentor, or should you always have an independent mentor? Claire, on you, what do you think on that one?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

That is an interesting question. I’m just thinking because I recently applied for the Alzheimer’s Society fellowship, which is a junior fellowship and they make you actually have a personal mentor who’s separate from anyone on your research team, which I think is quite a nice idea. But then during my PhD, I’d say supervisor mentor were already the same thing. I think is a good idea to have someone separate.

Adam Smith:

What do you think Barbara?

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

I think it would be… It’s hard to even imagine honestly, to have a mentor… I mean that’s what my fellow grad students were, they were my mentors. Because of my experience that would have not been really possible because of just the way that the faculty interacted with each other. They-

Adam Smith:

I mean, a good mentor won’t solve your problems for you, will they? But they will help-

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

No, but they did help. They did help.

Adam Smith:

Yeah. I mean, they’ll talk through, help you devise strategies. So I mean, one of the main takeaways we’re going to tell everybody at the end of this podcast is please don’t kind of suffer through this alone and sit there quietly and worry about this. Addressing communication is key to this and addressing the problems that exist. And if you have a mentor, because I can see not everybody wants to go… Because another question here is, is where do you turn when things do go wrong? Do you go to HR? Do you go to the head of the faculty? Do you go to chaplaincy or do you go to the advisory service? An earliest step before that was, if you had a mentor on your side, somebody independent, I think it’s important to have somebody to talk to that isn’t a peer and who is confidential and help you bring out your own head as to what’s going on.

Dr Prerana Sabnis:

I remember reading on Twitter just a few days ago, I don’t know who said this anymore, but they said, when you start a PhD it seems to be sort of the standard expectation that you expect your supervisor to be your mentor as well and your only mentor, but there’s actually no need to just stick to that one standard, go out there and find yourself other mentors. And this could benefit you not only in helping you solve issues with your supervisors, but also in terms of just getting, I guess, access to other resources in case you don’t want to stay in academia any longer, in case you want to pursue other routes, in case you want to have conversations about other fields that are sort of related to your research you’re doing, but not directly in it. So yeah, I think having a mentor who is not your supervisor, potentially having more than one might actually really work in your favor.

Adam Smith:

Yep. I completely agree. I’m conscious of time so I’m going to try and run through this next kind of 10 minutes also quite quickly. We had another scenario where, and I mentioned this at the start where the supervisor was new and this was the first person they’d supervise. But also a second issue was when the student wasn’t a PhD student in their twenties, but was somebody who was a mature student and we had three different issues here is one, the new supervisor in this instance didn’t really know what to do either and it wasn’t that they were deliberately bad, but they received no training. So any supervisors that are listening to this just try to be good, I mean, try to be good and decent and listen. And if there is some training available to you, go speak it out, go talk to people. Communication seems to be so important to all this relationship. Being able to talk about the problems openly and come up with solutions is so important, but did any of you have a new supervisor? Were they quite fresh, Barbara? You’re shaking your head.

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

Yeah, yeah, I did. I did. And I was also quote, the mature, which… I have heard also is nontraditional student, the mature PhD student. I was the oldest person in my program. Yeah, my advisor was new and dropped into the program as like I said, this sort of star and a lot of people… I was assigned to him as a new, as you would be in our program you just got assigned a PhD advisor and he was brand new. But quickly acquired advisees as I went along. So I maybe was one of his first, but that didn’t last long.

Adam Smith:

And maybe, I mean, if your supervisor is new, I mean, don’t avoid a new supervisor because I think potentially a new supervisor could be great-

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

Could be.

Adam Smith:

They might be the best one because they really care and they want to make a success of their first student that they’re supervising-

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

Absolutely.

Adam Smith:

… but maybe that’s a system where you’re both feeding back and recognizing that they’re learning to standard things. The mature student thing’s an interesting one because when I’ve spoken to a couple of friends, what they found is, is that the supervisor assumed a greater level of knowledge just because their student was the same age as them, or they just assumed, oh, they must have it together. They must know these things purely based on age and experience.

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

I mean, I certainly could see that being the case. I don’t think that was the case in my instance because my particular advisor had a reputation that ultimately lost him a lot of advisees that was similar to mine. So in my case, I don’t think that was so much so, but I can see that being certainly and especially somebody who’s already written a thesis for a master’s program, let’s say they were some terminal master’s program then went on to get their PhD. I could certainly see that influencing somebody’s advising sort of.

Adam Smith:

We’ve talked about some serious issues so far. Of course there are those terrible ones where somebody is abusive or there’s misogyny comes into play. There’s some of the messages I’ve received about inappropriate kind of messages late at night from supervisors and things like that. I think of course that’s clearly never acceptable. Claire, I mean, do you jump straight down the… Do you just immediately go down the formal route?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

I mean, it’s not great that things like this even happen, but I think in the ideal situation you should kind of clearly pick it up as soon as possible and say that’s not acceptable behavior either directly to the them or go to someone higher up. And I think it’s good to kind of recall exactly what was said or what was done and when it happened. In cases I’ve heard that are similar to this, when people then kind of take it to someone higher up in the university, having a kind of record is actually really useful and often it turns out lots of people have had similar experiences, same person.

Adam Smith:

Along with this podcast we’ll put some resources and links to places that you can turn to for independent advice or somebody to talk to. Prerana or Barbara, did you have any thoughts on that before we move on?

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

Well, it’s not going to be the situation with my advisor, none of that was ever an issue. However, I do know people that went through things like this, and I think having those professional resources on campus that are outside of the department, which we had at our university are really key support systems to manage that. But I think also being able to say those comments make me uncomfortable. That is not an attack. It’s an observation about the comment itself. I’m a communication studies major. I teach this stuff so that would be one of the first things I would advise rather than you make me uncomfortable, that comment makes me uncomfortable, is a very good strategy to identify the discourse that’s not professional in that moment and keeping a record, absolutely keeping a record. And you should anyway, all emails that you have between you and your chair, you should be having a… just to hold onto those, don’t delete them.

Adam Smith:

Having made that position clear, do you think then you should kind of give it a chance, should you try to go back to how it was before? You make it sound clear and then if they don’t get the message or if they suddenly become more hostile off or poke you less or become less helpful towards you because they’ve been rejected. I think being able to kind of set that aside and move on, but be prepared to deal with it if it doesn’t-

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

I think it’s a very difficult, and it’s difficult precisely because there’s nuances in degrees in these kinds of conversations and there’s also people who, and this is for me, other people would have to think through this differently based on their experiences and what they’re going through, but if it’s somebody who I presume is careless with their words, maybe is generationally not as aware and I make that comment and, “Oh, sorry. I’m old school.” Which is something I’ve heard for… “Sorry, just that’s the way I talk.” Well, it makes me uncomfortable. And then that I… I’m not going to go on and reply. I don’t, for me personally, but if it’s something pervasive then I, again, that record keeping and I would go to an outside resource outside of the department, you do address it, realize that they could change the dynamic.

Adam Smith:

But then that’s the problem, isn’t it? Because people are worried about it changing the dynamics so they don’t address it and then actually that ends up being worse.

Dr Prerana Sabnis:

Like Barbara said, and I think with different issues, there are a lot of nuances. I mean, for example, if I was meeting with someone or talking to, let’s say, someone who is a white male, who made a random blanket statement about brown people. And I said, actually, what you’ve said is very inappropriate, that statement makes me uncomfortable. It might just be a question of the person being ignorant of what could be offensive to someone. And if that person says, “Oh, I’m sorry that I hadn’t realized that would come off to you like that.” That is a different thing. But if I’m in the room with someone who is texting me late at night, who is sending me messages that are not necessarily advances, but that are making me comfortable and they continue to do so, it becomes a very tricky situation for me to say, do I want to report this? Because there’s nothing in those screenshots for me to actually report per se, but it is making me uncomfortable.

Dr Prerana Sabnis:

With regards to speaking out about it I think if you can speak out, you should speak out and especially because of what you just said not everyone is equally comfortable being confrontational, not everyone is always in a position to be able to confront someone. So I think the more people… I mean there’s strength in numbers, right? The more people that start talking about it, the more courage you give others to also slowly open up about your issues because plenty of other people could have faced the same issues, but they might not be the first ones to speak about it. So you might not always be in a position to speak about what’s happening with you and I think that is something we must acknowledge because of power dynamics, but if you can speak about it to whoever you can please do.

Adam Smith:

Yeah.

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

And I want to jump… Sorry Prerana, I just want to jump on that, that you are… If it’s a predator, if it’s somebody who’s predatory, quid pro quo kind of person, you’re likely not the first person and you’re likely not the only person. So this kind of finding strength in numbers is really important if you feel like you can’t speak out on your own. And if it’s those strange texts late at night what I’ve done in the past, which I actually had a very similar situation do exactly that, I just didn’t respond to those text messages until the following day during an appropriate time said, “Wow, I can’t believe you were texting me so late at night last night, by the way, blah, blah.” And just not responding and it actually put a stop to it, but that’s not to say that always works, but strength in numbers is so important.

Adam Smith:

That’s a really good point. Don’t reply in the… Kind of wait until it is an appropriate time. I completely agree. Any final thoughts before we finish.

Dr Barbara Ann Bush:

Just want to reiterate, you’re not alone, you’re in the program for a reason, hang in there and make friends with your fellow grad students, they’re your great resource.

Adam Smith:

Right point. Prerana?

Dr Prerana Sabnis:

Yeah. If you have the chance, definitely [inaudible 01:01:20] your supervisors before you start. Talk to all grad students, talk to current grad students, talk to your supervisor, sort of a Skype, and just do a preliminary check before you actually start out your PhD journey with them. And like Barbara said, have plenty of support systems built around yourself.

Adam Smith:

Claire?

Dr Claire Lancaster:

I keep this very quick. I would just say, put things on the table straight away kind of what you want to get of your PhD and hopefully kind of start building a good relationship early.

Adam Smith:

Thank you very much to today’s panelists, Claire, Barbara and Prerana. Please remember, don’t go through this alone, do reach out if you’re experiencing any problems. Details on the Twitter accounts of all our guests and our email address and contact details are in the text along with the website. We also have a WhatsApp community, which is very supportive. Please do consider joining that. We have socials for early career stage PhD students on every other Monday. It’s a very supportive group, there’s no judgment. And if you have problems, just join one of those every other Monday and come and have a chat with us. It’s a useful thing right now while people are in lockdown because of COVID et cetera.

Adam Smith:

We have profiles on all today’s panelists on the website, including details of their Twitter accounts. And if you have anything to add on this topic, please do tweet us using the #ecrdementia or do comment on the post or leave a reply below. Thank you very much everybody and I hope you’ll join us on the show again another time.

Voice Over:

Brought to you by dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk in association with Alzheimer’s Research UK and Alzheimer’s Society, supporting early career dementia researchers across the world.

END


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