I have written so far two posts on the matter of supervising PhD students (see “A doctoral student abandons: At a loss what to advise…” of 2014, and “Supervising doctoral students: A complicated task” of 2015). Actually, I have published three more posts on doctoral students, but these two are most directly connected with the post today.
The current post springs from this circumstance: in the same week one of my doctoral students sent me her finished dissertation and another announced that she is quitting the PhD programme. Both have been working with me for slightly over three years, are foreign, and have gone through the Covid-19 crisis, which broke out when they were both beginning work on their dissertations far from home. The student who has just finished had taken our English Studies MA at UAB and simply could not go back home for quite a long time, and, so, she decided to make the best of the circumstance. The student who has quitted moved to Barcelona just two months before Covid-19 erupted and I’m very sorry to say that she has not weathered the circumstance so well. I do not wish, however, to discuss their personal cases but to think out loud again about the work we do as PhD supervisors.
In my case, a peculiarity is that for each dissertation a student completes under my supervision, another fails to do so. I have supervised so far eight dissertations but other eight students have given up on me, usually between the third and the fifth year (part-time students can use up to six years to complete a dissertation at UAB). I am currently supervising four more students and although I trust they will all submit their dissertations on time, I am bracing myself for new desertions. In fact, I have decided not to accept any more doctoral students until at least two of my current students finish. This does not have to do so much with the actual workload (of which more in the next paragraph) but with the terrible disappointment that each unfinished dissertation is. I’m very proud of the eight dissertations successfully submitted, but the other eight are holes in my heart. I loved the topics, otherwise I would not have accepted supervising them, but they are like phantom limbs particularly because I have spent in most cases years guiding the students.
The way my university calculates the hours for PhD supervision has varied over the years. One matter I wish to clarify is that we, supervisors, don’t get any extra money for this task, in case anyone was wondering; it’s just part of our teaching load. According to the current figures for UAB, supervising a PhD dissertation from beginning to end amounts to 100 hours of work. Our PhD students pass a yearly assessment interview, after which we get credited with 25 hours for the first two years; the remaining 50 hours are added to our personal account when they submit their dissertation and pass the viva. If, however, a student ends up completing their dissertation in four or five years, which is quite common, we don’t get any hours after the second year, we just work for free.
Since in the last three years I have been supervising from four to six dissertations, this means I have been giving away quite a good number of hours. In fact, my Department has suggested that I should stop accepting new PhD students (a hint I have taken). This means that the maximum number of students we may supervise, which is six, is far in excess of our teaching hours. In practice, a student who abandons in the third year or later means a loss of 50 hours for the final dissertation, or more if supervision extends beyond the third year. But losing them also means losing the hours invested in reading texts they are working on, correcting their written submissions, and of course, the time used in the monthly meetings. By the way, if you’re curious, supervising a BA dissertation (6 ECTS) is worth 10’64 hours and an MA dissertation (12 ECTS), 23’52. An important difference is that BA and MA dissertations have a fixed time frame; all my BA students have completed their dissertations on time and only one MA student had to re-submit his. Tutoring them is not a gamble (at least in my experience), whereas tutoring PhD students is indeed a gamble. Of course, I would not abandon a PhD student unless we had a very serious disagreement (or they ran out of extensions); it’s been always up to them to quit.
Perhaps a mistake we all make (at least in the two programmes I work for) is not reading the MA dissertation of the unknown students we accept. I believe that the best case scenario is the one in which I have supervised a student’s MA dissertation and I am, therefore, well aware of their academic skills when I accept them as my PhD students. Only one of the students who abandoned their dissertation had been my MA tutoree (she quitted because she could not combine a full-time job with writing a dissertation). In the other seven cases, I trusted that the students had the necessary academic skills, but discovered when they started submitting written work that there were problems, in some cases these were rather serious despite their possessing an MA degree. That was not always the case, of course: some brilliant students, like the person I have alluded to, abandoned when they just could not cope with, as I have noted, working full-time and being PhD students. This is a situation that Spanish universities are failing to address, in view of the scant scholarships for PhD students.
I am, then, beginning to learn the lesson the hard way: you need to read their MA dissertation before accepting a new PhD student. Why don’t we do that? For a variety of reasons, the main one being a bit of laziness, why not acknowledge this? The programmes I work for require abundant documentation to apply for submission, but in neither case is the MA dissertation itself required, just the diploma certifying the possession of an MA degree. Prospective students’ admissions are processed by a committee whose members review the documentation, which includes a PhD dissertation proposal, and then allocate a tutor to the student, if they are admitted. What follows is a direct interview between the student and the prospective tutor, usually based on the proposal rather than the work done so far. Perhaps national and international colleagues will be surprised at the process I am describing here since they do read MA dissertations before taking on a PhD student, but it’s not something I have done in my own practice. An alternative, of course, is asking a student to submit a new paper before accepting them, but this might take months. In my own case, by the way, my UAB PhD supervisor had been a member of my MA dissertation tribunal; my other supervisor accepted me as a foreign visiting student for one year because I had a grant, but never asked to read any of my work previous to the PhD dissertation.
I must stress that, in any case, an MA and a PhD dissertation are very different types of work, not only because of the extension (we ask for 50 pages in the MA, 300 in the PhD programme), but also because, as I have noted, the time frame is different. So is the process of accompanying the student. In MA dissertations, the process is started in November when tutors are assigned, and ends in July, after a handful of very specific tutorial sessions: choice of topic, elaboration of a proposal focused on a thesis statement, reviewing of the proposal, working on the dissertation’s structure, submission of a segment to the future examiners and discussion of their feedback, one or two more tutorials to check how the student is progressing, reviewing the finished text, and preparing the viva. Let’s say ten sessions. With doctoral dissertations the tutorials devoted to the student’s progress vary very much in number (though they are usually about ten/eleven a year). I see my students once a month, whether they are full time or part-time, but I am never sure whether the meetings are fruitful (they’re always nice indeed) until I see chapter drafts. These usually start materializing in the second year if they materialize at all. If a couple of chapters are not drafted by then, it is very unlikely that the student will finish. I understand now, however, that my supervisors must have despaired with me, because I only started writing in my third year and, basically, gave my UAB supervisor the complete text rather than separate chapters.
In one-to-one tutoring, as happens with PhD students, personal affinity is important, I find, but not essential. Unlike BA and MA tutorees, who are always met in the office it is quite habitual to meet PhD students over coffee for tutorials (I’ve never met individual students for lunch, though I’ve taken groups out for them to meet and socialize). This may change now at my university after the terrible situation affecting diverse female PhD students sexually preyed on by a couple of male supervisors in different schools. Some male colleagues have expressed their concern that they have shared private cell phone numbers with female students or met them outside the university for coffee (for tutorials, not for socializing). The campus where I work is not attached to any town or city and if supervisor and tutoree live close by, it makes sense for them to meet where they live, hence the use of alternative meeting spaces. Anyway, it is easy to slip into more personal conversations with a PhD student and, as I was saying, personal affinity does play a role in a situation with regular contact over years. None of my students has quitted over personal differences, but this may happen, of course. Besides, let’s not forget this, writing a dissertation is awfully stressful and students may see their lives altered in ways they could not foresee when they applied for admission to the programme.
When BA or MA students abandon a programme, it is taken for granted that the teachers are not responsible for their personal decision. In the case of PhD students, however, the teaching staff involved is not a collective but just one person. We need, therefore, to ask ourselves whether we have personally failed when a PhD student quits. In the end, I believe that I have written all this to tell the eight students who will never submit their dissertations that I am sorry I have failed them, and I wish I could have done better by them. They can be assured that I have done my best, but then that is not always sufficient. Sorry.