Guides

Supervision is a craft that mostly gets passed on by accident - you run your lab roughly the way your own supervisor ran theirs. These are write-ups of what tends to work, aimed at people who supervise research and at the scholars on the other side of the table. They are about the practice, not about our software.

• For supervisors16 September 2026·5 min read

  What a supervision meeting should actually produce

  Most supervision meetings end with everyone feeling the conversation went well and nobody able to say what happens next. The fix is to decide, before you start, what the meeting is supposed to leave behind.

• For supervisors15 September 2026·5 min read

  How often should you meet your PhD scholars?

  Weekly is too often for some scholars and nowhere near enough for others. A defensible answer depends on where they are in the degree, and the cost of getting it wrong is not symmetric.

• For supervisors14 September 2026·5 min read

  Writing action items a scholar can actually act on

  Keep working on the analysis is not an action item. The difference between a task that gets done and one that quietly rolls over for three months is usually visible in how it was worded.

• For supervisors13 September 2026·5 min read

  The first ninety days of a new PhD scholar

  The habits a scholar forms in their first term tend to persist for the whole degree. Most of what goes wrong in year four was set up, invisibly, in month two.

• For supervisors12 September 2026·5 min read

  Co-supervision without stepping on each other

  Two supervisors giving contradictory advice is worse for a scholar than one supervisor giving mediocre advice. Most co-supervision problems come from three questions nobody answered at the start.

• For supervisors and administrators11 September 2026·5 min read

  Keeping a supervision record that survives a handover

  Supervisors move institutions, go on leave, and retire. The scholar stays. What you write down during normal supervision decides whether that transition costs a fortnight or a year.

• For PhD scholars10 September 2026·5 min read

  How to run your side of a supervision meeting

  Your supervisor sets the agenda, but you control most of what the meeting is worth. A guide for doctoral scholars on getting more out of an hour you only get so many of.