I strive for effective, compassionate supervision and I clarify my goals, approach and expectations in my guidelines for graduate students (available here, from McGill’s best practices in supervision). As I wrote, most students enter a relationship with a thesis advisor without a clear idea of what they can expect so I compiled this handout to give you some idea of what I expect of you as student and what you can expect of me as an advisor. So that this never happens, I hope:

My highest level priority is for both of us to communicate and set mutually-agreed-upon goals (LINK OTHER POST) and then both do our best to make those goals into reality. As one of my students, I plan to treat you as a junior colleague who is maturing into a professional engineer or scientist. This means that you can actively co-create opportunities to meet your goals, and also puts a large responsibility on your shoulders to live up to the expectations of performance that are required of a colleague.

I have found clarifying my goals, approach and expectations in my guidelines for graduate students have helped students and helped me be a more effective and compassionate supervisor.

Thank you to the awesome Cutting Edge Workshop for Early Career Geoscience Faculty where I learned about graduate student guidelines a few years ago. I emphatically encourage all young faculty to attend!