Navigating your relationship with your supervisor
The student-supervisor relationship is a weird one. It's not like any other professional relationship you've navigated before.
It's not really like boss/employee, because you're not told what to do. It's not like teacher/student, because there's no set curriculum or right or wrong answers. And the power differential makes thinking of it as mentor/mentee not quite right either, because whether we like it or not, your supervisor has a big influence on how well you do in the end.
This uncertainty means a lot of research students approach the relationship with a mental model that doesn't quite fit. You might come in expecting to be told what you need to know or do. You might be reluctant to be honest about what you do or don't know, treating each meeting a bit like a performance review. Or you might be reluctant to advocate for what you need, because the power differential makes that feel risky.
And here's the thing: not all supervisors are good at navigating this relationship either. They might have a mental model built on how they were supervised. There might be a mismatch between their approach and what would actually work best for you.
This is why I recommend working a "curious conversation" into one of your first few meetings.
Prepare yourself first
Before you have this conversation, you need to do some thinking about your own side of it. Sit down, maybe with your Everything Notebook, and write a bit about:
- How do you work best when collaborating with others?
- How do you typically react to feedback? (Honestly, not how you think you should react, how you actually react.)
- Are there skills you're worried you don't yet have?
- What are you most anxious about when it comes to navigating this relationship?
By knowing your own answers, you can actually participate in the conversation rather than just receiving information. And it sometimes surfaces things worth saying to your supervisor, like: I tend to spiral a bit when I receive a lot of feedback at once, so it helps me to talk it through.
That kind of self-awareness makes you genuinely easier to supervise.
Start with the surface stuff
Ease in with the practical, logistical questions. Your supervisor is expecting these:
- Is email the best way to contact you between meetings?
- Is it useful if I send an outline of what I'd like to cover before each meeting, and/or a summary of what we decided after?
- What's your approach to feedback? What will it look like, and how long does it usually take?
These feel small. But knowing that your supervisor prefers a pre-meeting agenda, or that two weeks for feedback is normal for them. That information saves an enormous amount of anxiety.
Then go deeper
Once you've got the logistics sorted, move into the deeper questions:
- What does good supervision feel like to you, when it's working? This gives you a sense of where their supervision style comes from.
- What do your most successful students tend to do when working with you? This is kind of asking "what do you want me to do?" but in a less direct way.
- Is there anything you wish students had asked you earlier? This gets at all the implicit questions students are reluctant to ask.
- Is there anything about how you work that would be helpful for me to know?
That last one is the gem. It gives your supervisor the opportunity to tell you things like: they're home with their preschooler on Wednesdays so are unlikely to answer email. Or they don't work weekends. So while it might feel productive to send them something at 5pm on a Friday, the reality is they won't look at it until Monday, and you could have just taken the weekend and sent it Sunday night.
These questions surface all the implicit "ways of working" things that, when you know what to expect, are much less likely to result in anxiety for you or resentment for them.
Making the most of every meeting
The curious conversation is a one-time investment. But good supervision habits are ongoing.
One thing to understand: you are the chair of these meetings. This is not a boss/employee relationship where someone tells you what you need. Your supervisor is expecting you to drive the agenda. It is your responsibility to get what you need out of each meeting, and that requires a little preparation.
Before each meeting: think about what you actually need the outcome of this meeting to be. Maybe you need help making a decision. Feedback on a piece of work. Reassurance that you're on the right track. Help thinking through a problem. By framing the meeting in terms of what you need to get out of it, you'll be more focused in how you use the time. (Use your Everything Notebook for this, there's a supervision prep template in the toolkit below.)
During each meeting: prioritise the important stuff first. Supervision meetings have a way of drifting toward the comfortable and away from the thing you most needed to discuss. Say the hard thing early.
After each meeting: send a brief summary email: what you discussed, what you decided, what you're going to do before next time, and what they committed to. As a supervisor, I found this really helpful, particularly when I had a lot of students. Check with your supervisor whether they'd like this. Most will.
One more thing
A slow reply to your email is almost never a sign that something is wrong. It's almost always a sign that your supervisor is very busy. Give it 48 hours, then follow up, cheerfully, not apologetically.
Supervisors are brilliant and busy people. They want to see you succeed. The more you can make it easy for them to help you, by coming to meetings prepared, asking specific questions, flagging problems early, the better the relationship will be.
This post is part of the What They Forgot to Teach You about doing research series from Reveal Research. Download the supervision prep template and the full overwhelm toolkit at https://www.revealresearch.org/store/p/the-overwhelm-toolkit
