Troubleshooting Blog

Hi, and welcome to our new troubleshooting blog! This page will updated regularly with common issues that PhD students have encountered during their studies and advice on how these issues could be resolved.

Currently we are all in our first year of our PhDs so here are some of the problems that we have experienced with the peer advice that was given.

Post #1

Issue: “Supervisors consistently failing to reply to emails. This can include anything from trying to arrange a meeting or asking for feedback on work.

So the question is how to deal with a supervisor not pulling their weight?”

Solutions:

·         “my advice would be to bring it up in your next meeting, and if nothing improves maybe go to your second supervisor and discuss the issue with them or talk to your postgraduate advisor”

·         “I was once recommended to find out when your supervisor is most likely to reply. For example I had a supervisor in the past who only seemed to respond to emails if they were received late evening, so maybe ask them if there is a time in their day where they dedicate to responding to emails and try and contact them then :) Failing that, my supervisor sends me a copy of his weekly schedule so I know when I can find him at his office. Talking to them about it as suggested sounds like a good place to start!”

·         “I've always found that persistence works for me. It seems selfish and you don't want to feel like you're getting on their nerves but the message gets across that you are an important priority as a research student. This is helped if you have an office near to theirs where you can just pop your head in and drop a reminder. “

·         “On many occasions my professor has told me that he found my emails in the junk folder and therefore was not able to respond to my query on time. Maybe using a less formal way of communication (text) could be used to double check if they have received the email or not.”

·         “We have an annual review at MMU so if you have any issues such as that, then these can be addressed with another academic who is not involved at all with your PhD. Someone I know I had the same issue as yourself Joe with their supervisor and this was discussed at their review. The person who did the review then went and spoke to the supervisor and this definitely sharpened up their communication!”

Post #2

Issue:  “Hey guys, I'm having some issues with my literature reviews as I'm not sure how to narrow my searches down.... Any advice?.... Also how do you guys all keep up to date with your literature?”

Solutions:

• “Have you tried to search for your keywords in title only? Try putting your keywords into the search bar with [title] next to them. You could do the same with [abstracts]”
• “Keeping up to date you can set alerts to be sent to you when anything meeting your criteria pops up. For example on science direct you sign up to it personalisation and you can then define the journals, topic alerts and search alerts to be emailed to you when something new is published. Narrowing your searches tends to be more on the wording you use and making sure if you put and/or they are in capitals... That will only do so much though”
• “I use zetoc alert, it's very similar to science direct but I think it's been good for me so far!”
• “If you want to narrow down your searches on Web of Science you could try using 'adj2' to group words closer together. E.g. Instead of searching 'exercise' which is very broad, you could do 'exercise adj2 (training OR supervised OR maintenance)' which would search for them terms within 2 words of exercise. The number can be changed to suit accordingly. Hope this helps if you didn't know this already.”

You can ask for advice from other PhD students by posting on the DTA corner facebook page. All posts will remain in the closed group, and we will ask for your permission to post these on the blog anomalously prior to posting. We are currently working on getting an email address set up and a website forum made so please stay tuned for updates!

We hope that these posts may help both current and new PhD students in their future, remember no question is silly to ask! Chances are other people are going through the same thing!

Tasha

30.06.2016