Category: Supervisor Series
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Advice for supporting PGRs who are carers
By Calum Cameron-White, Research Culture Project Assistant. I’m writing this blogpost about the time I spent as a carer, whilst working in a university environment. Based on my lived experience, I’m here to deliver a few hundred words with some concrete proposals and advice for anyone who is supervising, supporting, or designing programmes for postgraduate…
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Boundaries in PGR Supervision
By Steve Hutchinson, Director of Hutchinson Training & Development specialising in Leadership, Communication and Personal Effectiveness; and co-author of ‘Coaching and Mentoring for Academic Development’. If you meet postgraduates you’ll hear horror stories about supervisors. For example recently I encountered a furious PGR with “a terrible supervisor” who, it transpired, “only sees me once per week!” (!)…
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Mind Your Language: Managing career-related conversations with researchers
This is a Pathfinder Expert Voices post, by guest blogger Dr Holly Prescott, Researcher Careers Specialist, at the University of Birmingham “With my PI, there is this penalty for thinking about or going into industry…like, you are dead to me” (Hayter & Parker, 2019). If I could choose one quote from my reading around researcher…
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Learning about Research Integrity from our supervisors
By Dr Sam Oakley, Research Governance and Integrity Manager, in the Research Services Directorate Research Integrity is one of our institutional strategic priorities for Research Culture. If we are taking a ‘cultural approach’ it’s essential that the training we roll out for our researchers is not just policy-driven from the top down also enables us…
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Eight Things Your (New) PGRs Need You to Talk About
By Dr Joanna Royle, Researcher Development Manager Co-ordinating PGR Induction Week is perhaps the most invigorating part of my job. There’s something about that mix of excitement and discombobulation as so many PGRs get to grips with the next stage of their professional lives. What should they be doing? When should they be doing it?…
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Supporting Your PGR Supervisees’ Wellbeing
By Suzie Shapiro, PGR Mental Health Adviser Undertaking postgraduate research can be an exciting time; however, it also presents very tangible challenges. It can be a time of culture shock, overwhelm and isolation that can impede a researcher’s wellbeing and their performance. So, when we talk about ‘wellbeing’ what do we really mean? Let’s consider…
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Get the ‘Right’ Doctoral Researchers – Good Practice in Recruitment
By Steve Hutchinson, Director of Hutchinson Training & Development specialising in Leadership, Communication and Personal Effectiveness; and co-author of ‘Coaching and Mentoring for Academic Development’. Let’s start with a thought exercise. If you could design a perfect doctoral researcher who was perfectly suited to the intellectual, organisational and psychological challenges, what ingredients would you include…
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Thesis Mentoring: a route to supervisory good practice
By Dr Kay Guccione, Head of Research Culture & Researcher Development and Dr Jennifer Boyle, PGR Writing Adviser Research Staff play a vital role in the day-to-day support and development of doctoral researchers and with the right training and framing they can deliver thesis support that makes a big impact! The Thesis Mentoring programme has…
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People Make Research – recognising those who make a positive difference to our research culture.
By Kay Guccione, Head of Research Culture and Researcher Development, Chris Pearce, Vice Principal for Research and Knowledge Exchange and Miles Padgett, Academic Champion for Culture. Our city slogan tells us that People Make Glasgow, and in Research Services we believe that People Make Research. UofG’s People Make Research project launched for the first time…
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Asking insightful questions, a core mentoring practice
By Kay Guccione, Head of Research Culture & Researcher Development I have been enjoying working with a range of different new mentors, on various schemes, in recent months. Part of their orientation to mentoring practice is introducing them to the use of ‘questioning’ as part of developing a facilitative coaching style. This helps mentors to develop,…
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Getting started with supervising Masters projects
By Dr Stephanie Zihms, Lecturer in Researcher Development, University of the West of Scotland. I offer this post as an introduction to the process of supervising Masters Degree projects, and I will cover how to craft an appropriately sized project, build good working relationships, and ensure timely completion and reporting. It’s intended for all people new to supervising…
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Why can’t I write? Understanding factors underlying difficulty with writing
By Jennifer Boyle, Writing Adviser for Postgraduate Researchers at the University of Glasgow As writing adviser, I work with postgraduate researchers from across all Colleges and disciplines, from a variety of different backgrounds, and who might be at any stage in their studies. In workshops and in 1:1 appointments, one thing that is constant across…
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Praise and encouragement goes a long way towards building confidence in laboratory work
By Charlotte Slaymark, Biogeochemistry Technician and PhD Candidate, University of Glasgow Supervision may be the most important aspect of a postgraduate’s experience during their masters or PhD programme. Supervisors are there to teach, guide, develop, support, and empower postgraduates into becoming independent researchers and highly skilled people. The experience is formative, and it is likely…
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Supervising disabled and chronically ill PGRs
Dr Jennifer Leigh is a Senior Lecturer in Higher Education and Academic Practice at the University of Kent. She has written on various aspects of marginalisation in academia and STEM, and creative, reflective, and embodied research methods. She is co-editor of the 2020 book Ableism in Academia, which you can download for free here. Dr…
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Neurodiversity in research: Rethinking rules and expectations
Elliott Spaeth is a Lecturer in Academic and Digital Development at the University of Glasgow. He is trans, disabled, and neurodivergent. What is neurodiversity and why do I need to know about it? In 2015, an image of a dress went viral because people saw its colours differently – some saw blue and black, others…
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Reducing stress in doctoral supervision, engage with your community
By Dr Kay Guccione, Researcher Development Manager A couple of weeks ago I put together a workshop for University of Glasgow supervisors called Working with Stressed Researchers. The workshop used this short article on how to respond to stressed researchers as a prompt for discussion. The article is part of the toolkit from the ‘Are…
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More JEDI needed in PhD supervision
Originally posted on A community blog, on doctoral supervision relationships and pedagogies: This is part one of a double bill on supervision and diversity, by Dr Jessica Gagnon (@Jess_Gagnon) an educational sociologist, focused on inequalities in higher education. She has worked in higher education in the US and UK for more than 20 years. Jessica…
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Mentoring, much more than advice
By Dr Kay Guccione, Researcher Development Manager As with all types of educational practice, there’s not a ‘right way’ to do mentoring, each mentor chooses their own approach, style and practices, and chooses how and when to apply them in different partnerships, situations and contexts. However, there are certain frameworks into which we fit these…
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Writing a great reference, a guide for supervisors and PIs
By Katrina Gardner, Careers Manager for PGRs and Research Staff at the University of Glasgow. Katrina works closely with the Researcher Development Team to offer careers workshops and one-to-one consultations for researchers, as well as guidance for supervisors and PIs seeking to support their researchers. PIs and supervisors are asked regularly to write references for…
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Supporting researchers through ‘emotionally demanding’ research
By Susie Smillie, researcher in the School of Social and Political Sciences and founder of the Emotionally Demanding Research Network in Scotland (@EmotionalResrch), supported by Kay Guccione Researcher Development Team. In this post I use the term ‘emotionally demanding research’ to describe research with participants, data or environments that have the potential to impact upon…
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Supervisors and Research Integrity: roles and challenges
By Dr Sam Oakley, Researcher Development and Integrity Specialist Both research and policy make it clear that supervisors have a key role to play for Research Integrity, but what does that actually mean in practice? ‘Research Integrity’ is a conceptual policy term that lacks a single definition: whilst acknowledging the different priorities of different disciplines,…
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