Dear PhD student: Who’s got your ear? – Your supervisor? Or the bricks in the walls?

Who tells you what to do and how to do it?

Most, if not all, PhD students would not hesitate to answer: Supervisors do that. However, having supervised 15 PhD students and been involved in countless other PhD projects, I am increasingly convinced that this is not the only right answer.

Rather, I think the ‘bricks in the wall’ silently guide you. Without you ever realizing. Let me start off with some examples …

You rarely do as you’re told

Imagine that you are attending a conference and sit in on a plenary session with your supervisor. After the presentation, your supervisor suggests that the topic covered could be of interest to your research group back home. You are then asked to write up a one-pager outlining the presentation and, in doing so, also look into a paper or two. It’s adjacent to your work, but not something you have read about previously. Importantly, your supervisor stresses that it should simply be a draft. And you’re explicitly asked not to spend more than 2-3 hours in preparing it before sending it to your supervisor for comments.

How much time would you expect to spend doing this task before sending it to your supervisor?

(pause for a second to answer the question before reading any further…)

I have presented this specific scenario and question to quite a few PhD students and postdocs over the last year. The answers vary surprisingly little, and they are often provided without any hesitation: about 8 to 10 hours, sometimes even more.

But… You were asked explicitly to only use 2-3 hours. Why, then, do you not blink when saying you would spend more than that?

Two main reasons are always provided: (1) “I want to make sure that it looks good before my supervisor sees it” and (2) “My supervisor doesn’t know time very well – what takes a few hours in his/her mind, takes a lot longer for other people”.

Both of those reasons are quite problematic. However, before getting into that, let me provide another example of where your actions are not aligned with what you deep down know is the right thing to do: Peer-to-peer dissemination.

Consider the case of oral presentations. You have attended hundreds of these, and you have been bored out of your skull for the vast majority of them. The problems are obvious: The presenter provides background info that no-one cares about and their slides are complicated to follow and stuffed with text that you simply read instead of listening to the presenter (which, however, makes little difference as the presenter is also simply reading the slides out loud). And of course, the presenter goes slightly over the allotted time. It’s always like that. And it’s both inefficient (from a communications point of view) and painful for those attending.

What do you then do when you’re asked to give a presentation? Even with these harrowing experiences fresh in mind, you most likely sit down and prepare a standard presentation that is just as horrible. Why? Because that is what is expected from you. Or rather, it is what you think is expected of you.

The bricks in the wall…

Having observed and pondered this phenomenon for quite a while, I have come up with a simple explanation: You are being influenced by ‘the bricks in the wall’.

And what do I mean by bricks?

The bricks represent traditions and expectations. That is, not so much the actual traditions of university life, but rather the PhD students’ expectations related to their own performance, influenced by what the students’ expect is expected by others.

You hear the moans of older PhD students bouncing of those walls, and you absorb them and assume that what they describe is the way things really must be. You are being pushed into certain ways of carrying yourself under the weight of the university setting (/walls). And, as argued above, you suddenly assume downright irrational habits in order to ‘fit in’ with what you think is expected of you.

Oftentimes, you do all of this without any of your supervisors having ever formally (or informally) argued that these expectations exist (outside your head, that is).

But is it really that bad? Well, let’s assume the perspective of your supervisor…

The supervisor’s perspective

The influence from university bricks dawned upon me when I was charged with setting up a new research unit at a hospital pharmacy. This organization had very little experience with research and the first few people hired in were completely research na?ve. To my surprise, this setting, however, offered a very different dynamic, with many of the usual challenges of doing research and supervising completely absent. Most importantly, the junior staff was surprisingly receptive to suggestions on how to do things, with seemingly no attempts at ‘keeping up appearances’ or other barriers. As a result, we completed, in terms of supervising and research training, what usually takes me 1?-2 years in just six months. 

This points out the main issue with brick-burdened PhD students: They are very difficult to supervise.

Consider the initial example. You state that you want to look good in the eyes of your supervisor and that it is your perception that he/she doesn’t really know what it requires of you to complete a job. On that basis, you enter into a spiral of systematically downplaying what it took you to come up with a given product. While the supervisor asked you to spend 3 hours, you spent 10. And while this is just one hypothetical case, there will be numerous other ways you do the same thing. Can you, then, really blame your supervisors for losing the sense of what you can do within a given amount of time?

Supervising is made very difficult if students are not honest and transparent about their work, but instead downplay what a task requires of them or hide away their failures and insecurities. It’s like supervising someone that hides under a fluffy duvet.

Personally, I had simply accepted that this was probably the way it was (yes, the bricks also affect us!). As such, I had to some extent given up. At least I had stopped trying to challenge it. That changed, however, when I set up this new research group, as it made me realize just how important it is to address this issue head on.

A disclaimer-and-a-half

There are of course bad supervisors out there. Even downright horrible ones. Some students go so far as to say that their supervisor simply sees them as a nuisance that is tolerated as long as data and papers come out in the other end. In rare cases that might even be true.

With such supervisors, or with supervisors that are simply very ‘old-school’, it might be considered easier to do ‘business as usual’, even if such ‘usual business’ is contra-productive.

However, you generally don’t receive tenure without having the ability to think at least slightly outside the box. And while some supervisors are of course truly ‘old school’, have you considered that what you perceive as being ‘old school’ might simply be age- and generation differences? If you’re mixing the two, you might erroneously classify your supervisor as a traditionalist, even though he/she would be receptive – perhaps even appreciative – of other and more direct ways of doing your PhD?

What should you do?

How to approach this, that is, how to break free from ‘the bricks’, will depend on many different things. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, how your relationship is with your supervisor, how far along you are in your graduate program, what field you’re working in, what type of department, etc.

Regardless of all this, however, you should always aim for being honest and transparent when interacting with your supervisor.

Most importantly, you need to make yourself aware when you’re doing something because the bricks told you to. This could be when interacting with supervisor or when preparing oral presentations. And probably a thousand other examples – they are easily identified once you start thinking about it.

If you have read this far, you probably already have ideas on things to do differently. Perhaps you even have to re-evaluate what projects you’re involved in (see “How To Say No”). Or perhaps you should simply start by having a chat with your supervisor?

Science is full of wonderful and weird (and wonderfully weird) people. This is particularly true for PhD students. Let’s not be weighed down by traditions and unsubstantiated (self-)expectations. And bricks. Rather, find your own way of doing things. That’s what will bring you the farthest.

--------------------------------------------------------

A huge thank you to all the students that have put up with me and my many (and often unsuccessful) attempts at doing things differently. And to the very many students that have provided their input to the text above.