A letter to my future self, a research supervisor

Dear future Ollis,

I envisioned you as a successful professor with great achievements and I’m really proud of you. I couldn’t wait to get here. But I wanted to remind you what it is like to be in the position of your graduate students because I don’t know if you forgot, but you have also been a student yourself! I don’t want you to make the same mistakes that our supervisor made in the past. Mind them.

Be a mentor; guide your students through the process. They are at the beginning of their careers and are excited about what’s about to come into their lives. Don’t disappoint them, because that’s how they will remember you. There will be times when they are lost and you should be able to serve as a resource and advisory figure.

Don’t forget to be kind and understanding. They might be far from home and their cultures. It’s hard; you have been there and know having the support of your research team means the whole world. However, don’t push hard on “hanging out.” Your students are not your friends. Awkward situations might bring an awkward atmosphere into the office.

Respect them, treat them as peers. Praise them and share their success as yours. Everyone is valuable in the team and there’s no better way to inspire respect than to be respectful. Keep their minds happy and healthy because the better the workplace is, the better the results are. At the end of the day, they all are building up your CV, aren’t they?

Be fair. I know you very well and I wouldn’t like to have you as someone I had to negotiate with. Listen to them and try to put yourself in their shoes. Take your time to think what’s best for their interest and yours together.

Have time and funding in perspective. Financial problems can generate a big unnecessary stress on your students that will affect their results. Avoid that situation by keeping track of time and having goals, timelines, deadlines, etc. A good organization leads to good performance. 

Graduate school is not high school; give them space and teach them how to be independent. You sometimes are a control freak and I hope you have learned to delegate tasks and trust them by now. 

I know you care about everyone around you and you have probably made a good supervisor by now. I assume it was hard at the beginning and like any other thing in life, it was a learning curve. Regardless, please don’t forget my little advice here; your students will appreciate it.

Ollis

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My long-term goal as of now is to become a professor at some post-secondary institution or university. I love teaching and tutoring but I also have a big passion for knowledge and research. Eventually, and if my career goals go as planned, I would also love to guide future students towards the completion of their theses.

Over the last few years, I have wondered so many times if my supervisors were ever graduate students at some point in their lives because it sometimes doesn’t feel like it. So I thought that it might be a good idea to write a letter to my future self to remember what being a graduate student is like.

Oihane Cereceda is a PhD student in Engineering. This story was published on July 27, 2018, on Oihane’s blog, My story in a blog (available here), and has been republished here with permission.