A brief primer on the PhD supervision relationship

Abstract

Becoming a successful academic and securing a principal investigator (PI) position at a research-intensive university requires many distinct skills. Beyond some form of technical skills and domain-specific knowledge, some of these skills include time management, scientific writing, public speaking, and project management. Training prior to the PI position involved some of these latter skills, and perhaps even some degree of trainee supervision, but PhD-level supervision and the associated responsibilities do not arrive until one becomes a PI. Many academic skills are learned ‘on the job’, but few more so than PhD supervision. While I myself have limited PhD supervision experience, I have reviewed the literature on PhD student-supervisor relationship and here present a brief primer.