Click here for the latest version of the document "Golden questions for supervision"
The EGSH PhD council works on various projects with the goal of improving PhD wellbeing across faculties. Our current project is about developing a document specific to the EUR that can assist PhDs and their supervisors when creating their Training and Supervision Plans.
The PhD process is a stressful one; not just because of the competitive demands of research, but also because for most, it’s their first venture into working in academia. Particularly in the first year, PhD candidates rely almost entirely on their supervisors to provide a frame of reference for what is normal and what is not. We don’t know what we don’t know, so it’s difficult to figure out which questions to ask, or even if it’s appropriate to ask them. Our supervisors, on the other hand, can encounter the opposite problem: associate and full professors with many years of experience understand academic systems so well, they may consider some things to be obvious.
As a result, years of the PhD trajectory can go by with important conversation topics going unnoticed, leading to stress for everyone involved. It’s becoming more commonplace for PhD candidates to report high stress levels, and even to do research work past the end of their contract (and salary). A few years ago, Leiden University led an initiative to bring about change by introducing the Golden Rules: a document created as a point of guidance for PhD candidates and supervisors alike. This document has since been adopted and adapted by universities across the Netherlands, sparking discussions at the EUR: should we have a document like this too?
Within our PhD council, the Golden Rules became a topic of discussion. Although the faculties we represent are very different, we have one thing in common: a need to stimulate and facilitate conversations between PhD candidates and their supervisors, especially at the start of their trajectory. With this in mind, we started a long journey of co-creation to build an EUR version of the Golden Rules.
We began by brainstorming what questions we wished we had known to ask at the start of our PhD trajectory, based on our own experiences and what we had picked up as the eyes and ears in our respective faculties. We then asked small informal focus groups within our faculties (often council or PhD groups) to share their experiences and provide feedback.
These rounds were very heavy on the PhD perspective, so to balance the input, we worked with the EGSH to present our Golden Rules during the Challenges for Supervisors workshop, which allowed us to split into small groups of supervisors and workshop individual points on the list. We left this workshop armed with pages of notes and a new idea: these ‘rules’ seem quite imperative; maybe we can make this document more approachable if we provide questions instead.
The question concept was well received by the EGSH, but it did mean rewriting the document from the ground up. Given the increasing emphasis on reward and recognition themes at the EUR, we incorporated some new R&R related questions too. After much (re)writing, we were ready for our next step: presenting our progress at the annual EGSH award ceremony.
During the award ceremony, with an audience full of PhD candidates and their supervisors, we took the opportunity to ask some interactive questions about general themes within the Golden Questions document, alongside asking PhD candidates to evaluate how comfortable they would feel talking to their supervisors about some of the newer questions. This feedback allowed us to restructure the questions to be more balanced across the categories our staff deem most relevant.
We are now approaching the final stages of our co-creation, namely input from PhD officers from each of the six EGSH faculties, and input from HR at the EUR level. We hope we can learn from their feedback and build conversations and plans about this document, such as how it can be distributed within faculties when it’s finally done.
Although it’s not finished yet, we’d love to share our progress so far with you. Click the link below to read our current version of the Golden Questions.
For comments and suggestions, more information about this project or the work being done by the EGSH PhD council, feel free to email us at phdcouncil@egsh.eur.nl.