The Role of a Ph.D. Supervisor: Guiding Research and Career Development

A Ph.D. supervisor is not only a mentor for academic research but also helps develop the skills required for a future career and association with other global groups. There are mainly two types of supervisors.

The first one has research objectives and the second asks for the research objectives. Similarly, researchers, who already trained in PG classes for the research and those who didn't know and thought about it.

Challenge For Ph.D. Supervisors

The most important thing is that the supervisor should provide research objectives or not, when a person shows interest in working with them?

Here, both supervisor and researcher have to judge and check the skills of one another. Especially, supervisor should remain unbiased, if the scholar has not been trained during their postgraduate courses.

Additionally, while adding a Ph.D. is a must to your academic profile and you need it for job promotion, remember that the scholar will invest a significant and crucial part of their life and will plan their future around it.

It is also true for the scholar: do not accept a supervisor who offers mentorship just because you need a Ph.D. degree for a similar purpose. In such cases you can loose your valuable life's time and mental stress extra.

Approaches for Ph.D. Degree

A Ph.D. is a form of training either in a specific or interdisciplinary area, where the scholar must produce results based on the research objectives defined in the synopsis.

Again, I must emphasize that a core researcher faces many problems along the research pathway, and to address those problems, they require manpower. This manpower comes from the research scholars in their group. The supervisor knows the research problems and the path to addressing them and defines these problems as research objectives. In this way, the supervisor trains the scholar and shows them the path to the research problem.

How do they do this? By providing a few papers to read and present in the early stages, and then, according to the problem, they train the scholar in the necessary computational or experimental techniques. When the scholar becomes capable of reproducing the same results or working effectively with a team, the supervisor hands over the research problem to be completed. Through this process, there is immense learning, as the scholar gains deep insights into their research.

On the other hand, some supervisors ask the scholar to frame their own research objectives and only meet with them once this task is complete. If the scholar has not been trained beforehand, it is easy to imagine the frustration they will experience in the library or while working through complex research articles. After spending 3-5 months on this alone, a scholar may visit the professor to discuss the objectives they he defined. But when the professor looks the research objectives does not fully understand their area of interest (which might be different from his expertise), then he asks for the objectives to be refined or expressed in different terms. This could lead to another 3-5 months of effort.

In cases, where the professor needs a Ph.D. candidate for their own purposes, they may agree to the scholar’s research objectives but leave the responsibility for theory, methods, and experiments entirely to the scholar. At this point, the scholar is left on their own — ah! God help him.

Learning from Ph.D. Degree

I am sure few of you have ever faced this situation (second case), you know the lesson learned: you earned the degree, but did you also learn how to manage publications at the last minute or meet deadlines? Did you followed the unethical practices due to this reason?

Now you can compare the role of the supervisor in both cases and the outcomes of the research. There may be various challenges in the second approach, in such cases, the scholar often remains under constant mental pressure and wastes a large amount of time on unproductive tasks.

Recommendations

So, my suggestions are to the supervisors and researchers for this case:

1. If the scholar has already published research understands how to define research objectives, and aware of the methodology, has confidence he will get the results, invite him and get a meeting with a few other similar field experts, give the opportunity to scholar to share their objective with them ...how much feasible they are? Now, accept him when you have the necessary equipment and support.

2. Train the postgraduate students to define and explore the research objectives of their interest, and explain the possibilities to achieve the results.

Conclusion Ph.D. Degree

At the end, every life is very important, and so understand the values to their time. Research is not for a degree it is a kind of training to understand our surrounding, with a systematic approaches. Add the values through your research, so one can proceed with the true work in the true sense in the future. Let's understand our surroundings and helps each other, train each other for the best. You can do research in any area with your own understanding, of your own problems, but remember traditional research has its own pathway while original research takes time and revisions, repetitions, patience, and hard work.

What are your experiences with your Ph.D. degree? Share them with us and let us know which approach your supervisor followed.