Mentoring/Supervising part time PhD students

[sambaprof]

I am considering mentoring/supervising part time PhD student, who works in industry in the research areas (data science, AI, ML etc., ) I am interested.

One of the advantage is I dont need to provide any support, since the student is working full time in industry (though I am considering giving assistance provided the student helps me with grant applications and it gets funded).

However, I am not sure how this will work out from a quality/productive research perspective.

That being said, even for the full time PhD students, at this point the students are doing TA work in addition to research and taking classes.
So, I am thinking from work load perspective part time and full time PhD student does not make that much of a difference.

Please advise your thoughts/words of wisdom  involving the part time PhD students in the research and mentoring/supervising them.

[polly_mer]

Why is the student doing a PhD? 

Is this an exercise to get a promotion and a raise or a personal learning experience?

What does mentoring look like?  For example, will you have a weekly lunch to discuss questions or are you providing a daily scrum to assign tasks?

A motivated person who wants a weekly chat can be a joy.

A person checking boxes who needs to be assigned daily tasks to make progress needs a paid manager.

[Liquidambar]

I tried it once.  It went badly.  The student was supposed to be given some release time by his employer to work on the degree, but the employer didn't live up to their end of the bargain.  After a couple years, the student had made very little research progress and couldn't pass our qualifying exam.  He seemed to feel that it wasn't his fault and therefore he should have been allowed to continue in the program.  (He also had a kid during that time period but didn't ask for a break from working on the degree.  He felt that this also wasn't his fault, which maybe it wasn't, but any accommodations we might have provided wouldn't be given retroactively after he failed the qual.)

I wouldn't take another part time student, but if I were to do so, I would make sure a lot more was formally spelled out from the beginning.  This would include a timeline and checkpoints.  We have standard ones for full time students, but the timeline wasn't as clear for part time.  I would also document more carefully in writing the student's failure to follow instructions, and I'd make sure I knew ahead of time how to get out of the advising relationship if necessary.  Because our checkpoints like the qual were delayed, there wasn't a good way to sever the relationship with a nonperforming student until I'd wasted a lot of time on him.

[ab_grp]

As someone who was a part-time PhD student working in industry and doing related research, I am interested to hear the advice given in this thread but will give my student-side perspective.  I agree that the timeline may not be as structured as a full-time student, so it would be good to get a plan in place monitor it carefully.  There are a lot of advantages such a student could bring to the table (e.g., maybe having more real life experience doing analyses and research and adhering to schedules), but there are lots of potential pitfalls as well, some of which have already been mentioned (e.g., work-school balance and prioritization).  Within the guidelines of your program, I would suggest trying to be flexible and open to possibly needing to provide a different sort of guidance.  It can also be a challenge to feel like part of the program or part of a cohort when you're on a different schedule, so that might be something the student could use some support with. 

[Liquidambar]

As someone who was a part-time PhD student working in industry and doing related research,

Oh, that reminds me of something I should have said.  My part time Ph.D. student's job didn't relate much to his Ph.D. topic.  It probably would have gone better if he were bringing relevant skills from his work, and if I were teaching him skills that he could use more immediately at work (vs after the degree was completed so he could be promoted to a higher position).  One of my colleagues has good results with Ph.D. students whose job is research-y enough that they can include some of their job in their dissertations.  I wasn't able to do that.  Either my student would need to come up with more time/motivation from somewhere, or I would have to invest a lot of time learning his job so I could help him figure out how to incorporate it into his degree.

[sambaprof]

The student is planning to start as of Fall 2021.

I am considering asking the student to collaborate with me over rest of the springer the summer (without pay) and see how it goes and then both student and myself can make a decision to continue with collaboration/mentorship or not.

[Hibush]

The student is planning to start as of Fall 2021.

I am considering asking the student to collaborate with me over rest of the springer the summer (without pay) and see how it goes and then both student and myself can make a decision to continue with collaboration/mentorship or not.

This is an excellent idea. A part-time PhD requires even more commitment than a full-time program because of the many distractions are very concrete.

My program does a few part-time PhDs, exclusively for university employees. The PhD has to be closely tied to their job and their research project is usually something that produces immediate value in their job but that they would not have done otherwise. In other words, it is the best-case scenario for a part-time PhD.

About half of the people who attempt this actually make it through, and they are as talented as our best PhD students. They typically take ten to twelve years, starting with an MS. That's two or three times as long as full-time students. They are often about 40 years old when they start, so the graduates aren't exactly starting off on a new career. They continue in the same career progression within the university but move up a bit in job title.

The ones who drop out usually can't devote enough attention to their studies because they underestimated how much work it really is or find that a lot of research is harder than it looks and less fun for them.

Again, that is a best-case scenario.

[soccer]

It's all about setting up the expectation. Before you accept this student, you should have a discussion with the student to make sure both of you understand how much time the student has for the project, which days/what hours this student will overlap with you during the week, and what you expect the student to do on their own.

I am considering mentoring/supervising part time PhD student, who works in industry in the research areas (data science, AI, ML etc., ) I am interested.

One of the advantage is I dont need to provide any support, since the student is working full time in industry (though I am considering giving assistance provided the student helps me with grant applications and it gets funded).

However, I am not sure how this will work out from a quality/productive research perspective.

That being said, even for the full time PhD students, at this point the students are doing TA work in addition to research and taking classes.
So, I am thinking from work load perspective part time and full time PhD student does not make that much of a difference.

Please advise your thoughts/words of wisdom  involving the part time PhD students in the research and mentoring/supervising them.