On constructive supervision

[theteacher]

Hi all,
I did my Ph.D. and a short postdoc at two prestigious research-intensive universities. After that, I joined a mid-tier university (with strong education roots) three years ago as TT Assistant Professor. I'm now an Associate Professor (with tenure). I feel happy in my current position (no stress and friendly environment).

I had a few remarkable successes in the last three years (winning competitive funding, quality publications, excellent teaching feedback, service, etc.). But I still have an apparent problem with recruiting and training Ph.D. students. My students aren't productive, lack motivation, and heavily rely on me to lead their projects into publications. I tried different processes and read many articles on constructive supervision, but things aren't progressing well. Do you have any suggestions on how to address this limitation? Does anyone here have a similar experience when moving to a less prestigious institution?

Thanks

[Caracal]

Hi all,
I did my Ph.D. and a short postdoc at two prestigious research-intensive universities. After that, I joined a mid-tier university (with strong education roots) three years ago as TT Assistant Professor. I'm now an Associate Professor (with tenure). I feel happy in my current position (no stress and friendly environment).

I had a few remarkable successes in the last three years (winning competitive funding, quality publications, excellent teaching feedback, service, etc.). But I still have an apparent problem with recruiting and training Ph.D. students. My students aren't productive, lack motivation, and heavily rely on me to lead their projects into publications. I tried different processes and read many articles on constructive supervision, but things aren't progressing well. Do you have any suggestions on how to address this limitation? Does anyone here have a similar experience when moving to a less prestigious institution?

Thanks

I have no specific advice, but I'm almost sure the problem is both you and them. The students you have probably aren't as self directed as the ones you went to school with, and there's a good chance that like all of us, you extrapolate too much from your own experiences and have a distorted view of what was normal at your graduate institution. This may be leading you to not provide enough guidance and to have unrealistic productivity expectations for the students.

And some of the students might just be poorly suited for grad school. Others may be struggling for other reasons. It hasn't been the easiest couple of years. You should probably be having discussions with colleagues about some of this and trying to get a sense of what's normal in general and at this particular moment. Students who really aren't producing might need more close supervision and clear schedules they need to meet if they want to stay in the program. Other students who are on track might just need more time.

[Hibush]

Getting really good PhD students is hard.

Top programs in many fields have recruiting pipelines that help them identify the rare student with the talent and personality to be a successful PhD student.

You will have to establish relationships with faculty at several schools to help you find those likely students when they come along. Bring some from those schools in for undergrad research experiences in the summer. That improves your recruiting chances of the ones that seem to have the style you need.

[mleok]

The bottom line is that one usually has to be at a top institution to routinely admit students with the combination of drive and preparation. At a slightly lower ranked institution, one usually has to deal with students who are lacking in one or the other. For me, I prefer students who have the drive, even if their preparation is slightly weaker, as it's easier for me to address the lack of preparation, but it's difficult to imbue students with drive when they lack it.

[Ruralguy]

I agree with Mleok. Being from a school that likely supplies students like the ones you mention, I can only say you have to set clear goals . If they can't meet them, then it's either drive, prep or unrealistic expectations or some combination. But once you figure out which knob you need to turn to get more out of a student or at least less aggravation for you, you can move more smoothly.

[mleok]

I agree with Mleok. Being from a school that likely supplies students like the ones you mention, I can only say you have to set clear goals . If they can't meet them, then it's either drive, prep or unrealistic expectations or some combination. But once you figure out which knob you need to turn to get more out of a student or at least less aggravation for you, you can move more smoothly.

One simply needs to figure out where the students currently are, what you might be able to change (usually preparation as opposed to motivation), and then assign tasks that make the most of those positive traits. It's rarely the case that everything we do requires inspiration and insights, so even a student who requires micromanagement can be a positive asset so long as one's expectations are realistic.

[mleok]

I should mention that one thing I did last summer was that I had a bunch of orphaned manuscripts which required revisions and additional work to be publishable, and the graduate students who had started working on them had graduated and are now in industry jobs. So, I got my new graduate students to work on finishing these papers up, paired up based on their initial research interests. This was quite productive, as it gave them something concrete to do, with relatively short-term rewards, and allowed them to learn some basic professional skills. After they had done this, I then revisited the question of research interests, and set them up with research topics of their own.

[Hibush]

I should mention that one thing I did last summer was that I had a bunch of orphaned manuscripts which required revisions and additional work to be publishable, and the graduate students who had started working on them had graduated and are now in industry jobs. So, I got my new graduate students to work on finishing these papers up, paired up based on their initial research interests. This was quite productive, as it gave them something concrete to do, with relatively short-term rewards, and allowed them to learn some basic professional skills. After they had done this, I then revisited the question of research interests, and set them up with research topics of their own.

Noted. I am very enthusiastic about a couple such orphans.

[theteacher]

Thanks, everyone, for the valuable discussion. It seems I need to work on setting some realistic expectations for myself.

Hibush's comment on setting recruiting pipelines is interesting. I recruited two students for a paid one-year research internship/assistantship (using my funding money). I worked so hard on supervising them and teaching them the research processes. We published three Q1 journal papers. At the end of their internship, they decided to join more prestigious universities for their PhDs. So I feel working as a free training center for more prestigious universities.

[mleok]

Thanks, everyone, for the valuable discussion. It seems I need to work on setting some realistic expectations for myself.

Hibush's comment on setting recruiting pipelines is interesting. I recruited two students for a paid one-year research internship/assistantship (using my funding money). I worked so hard on supervising them and teaching them the research processes. We published three Q1 journal papers. At the end of their internship, they decided to join more prestigious universities for their PhDs. So I feel working as a free training center for more prestigious universities.

I guess it depends on what you mean by mid-tier university, but you can't really blame students for wanting to do their PhD at the most prestigious university possible, that just reflects an understanding of how academic hiring works. The only way to overcome that is to be a star researcher in your field, where your individual professional reputation is able to overshadow the reputation of your institution. That's also how you establish these kind of recruiting pipelines, when your colleagues at excellent feeder schools encourage their best students to apply to your program to work with you based on the excellence of your individual research program.

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

Thanks, everyone, for the valuable discussion. It seems I need to work on setting some realistic expectations for myself.

Hibush's comment on setting recruiting pipelines is interesting. I recruited two students for a paid one-year research internship/assistantship (using my funding money). I worked so hard on supervising them and teaching them the research processes. We published three Q1 journal papers. At the end of their internship, they decided to join more prestigious universities for their PhDs. So I feel working as a free training center for more prestigious universities.

Obviously, this is field-specific, but I would consider three research papers to be a very good return-on-investment here.
Also, I know of a very strong group in the overall mediocre university in the middle of nowhere that after landing a major grant doubled grad student take home pay. To my knowledge they do not have any trouble attracting decent grad students anymore despite multiple things stacked against them. So, there are instruments to offset relative lack of attractiveness.

[Hibush]

Thanks, everyone, for the valuable discussion. It seems I need to work on setting some realistic expectations for myself.

Hibush's comment on setting recruiting pipelines is interesting. I recruited two students for a paid one-year research internship/assistantship (using my funding money). I worked so hard on supervising them and teaching them the research processes. We published three Q1 journal papers. At the end of their internship, they decided to join more prestigious universities for their PhDs. So I feel working as a free training center for more prestigious universities.

Obviously, this is field-specific, but I would consider three research papers to be a very good return-on-investment here.
Also, I know of a very strong group in the overall mediocre university in the middle of nowhere that after landing a major grant doubled grad student take home pay. To my knowledge they do not have any trouble attracting decent grad students anymore despite multiple things stacked against them. So, there are instruments to offset relative lack of attractiveness.

The goal of any good grad program is to get students on a great professional trajectory. You have done that well.

Figuring out your niche in the ecosystem will be important. What are your strategic adaptation that allow you to compete well? Does it make sense to train MS students to go to big-shot PhD programs that they'd never have a shot at otherwise? That would have great value for PhD programs looking to diversify where their students come from without admitting students who would do poorly. In that case you'd be the middle of an important pipeline in your field and a valued colleague of the highest-profile programs.

Being in that role would also put you in a favorable position for training grants and for big multi-institutional research projects that include graduate training as a component. That money really helps wiht recruitment.

[Caracal]

I should mention that one thing I did last summer was that I had a bunch of orphaned manuscripts which required revisions and additional work to be publishable, and the graduate students who had started working on them had graduated and are now in industry jobs. So, I got my new graduate students to work on finishing these papers up, paired up based on their initial research interests. This was quite productive, as it gave them something concrete to do, with relatively short-term rewards, and allowed them to learn some basic professional skills. After they had done this, I then revisited the question of research interests, and set them up with research topics of their own.

Noted. I am very enthusiastic about a couple such orphans.

Sorry to derail the thread with a stupid question from someone far away from the discipline, but does this work because everyone gets an author credit on these? It's good for the students who started the papers because if someone else picks it up, and does the revisions they get a line in their CV for something they were never going to have time to finish themselves?

If so that makes me a little jealous. I have a revise and resubmit that has long since expired. I put together the article from some dissertation pieces at a point when I was on the market and it would have been a nice thing to have on my CV. By the time I had some breathing space to work on revising the paper, I wasn't on the market anymore and it seemed like I should be spending any research time I had working on writing a book. I can't see myself ever doing much with that paper again, which is sort of a shame. If there was some world where a grad student in need of a manageable project could take my manuscript, fix it up and send it off and we both get credit for it, that would be great...

There are obviously lots of reasons collaboration is different in the sciences and humanities, but I do sometimes think that if you were designing a system from the ground up it might be good to incorporate some elements of the collaboration process into humanities work.

[Ruralguy]

Typically, you would give author credit to anybody who contributed materially to the paper in most of the sciences. Its a bit marginal if they just, say, provided one graph or something like that, but a significant re-write that probably includes re-analysis, etc. I would think that would usually get author credit in physical sciences anyway.
Some papers include as authors, everyone in the collaboration generally, but others consider this to be unethical.

[mamselle]

I should mention that one thing I did last summer was that I had a bunch of orphaned manuscripts which required revisions and additional work to be publishable, and the graduate students who had started working on them had graduated and are now in industry jobs. So, I got my new graduate students to work on finishing these papers up, paired up based on their initial research interests. This was quite productive, as it gave them something concrete to do, with relatively short-term rewards, and allowed them to learn some basic professional skills. After they had done this, I then revisited the question of research interests, and set them up with research topics of their own.

Noted. I am very enthusiastic about a couple such orphans.

Sorry to derail the thread with a stupid question from someone far away from the discipline, but does this work because everyone gets an author credit on these? It's good for the students who started the papers because if someone else picks it up, and does the revisions they get a line in their CV for something they were never going to have time to finish themselves?

If so that makes me a little jealous. I have a revise and resubmit that has long since expired. I put together the article from some dissertation pieces at a point when I was on the market and it would have been a nice thing to have on my CV. By the time I had some breathing space to work on revising the paper, I wasn't on the market anymore and it seemed like I should be spending any research time I had working on writing a book. I can't see myself ever doing much with that paper again, which is sort of a shame. If there was some world where a grad student in need of a manageable project could take my manuscript, fix it up and send it off and we both get credit for it, that would be great...

There are obviously lots of reasons collaboration is different in the sciences and humanities, but I do sometimes think that if you were designing a system from the ground up it might be good to incorporate some elements of the collaboration process into humanities work.

I've seen some STEAM (i.e., arts included) departments work like this.

And I know a couple of plain-old-humanities instructors with groups around them who either work in an interdisciplinary, who's-got-the-baton-now way, who've had multi-author articles get accepted. At least one included someone who'd left for a time-consuming new post, and handed off their work to an incoming first-year-grad student who finished it up; both were named as authors.

I agree, the humanities would probably look six ways of sideways at the kind of 20-author monstrosities one sees on by-lines in the sciences, but my sense has always been there are transferable practices that could work in the humanities if someone just figured out the details, as this group did.

M.