Dissertation Direction (2): Working with your supervisor

In addition to choosing your topic, I felt it would be beneficial to share some tips on working alongside your supervisor, so here we go...

📚 My first piece of advice is to get to know them! You'll be working closely with them for most of the year, so it's important to make that effort! I was fortunate enough to know my supervisor beforehand, so this was easier for me!

👩‍🔬 Make contact with your supervisor ASAP! It's important that you don't just wait for them to contact you first!

👩‍💻 suggest a meeting to discuss the details of your project! Generally the sooner you have the first meeting, the sooner you can get the ball rolling with the project!

📚 Secondly, make sure you are organised for meetings (so you can really get the most out of them)

👩‍🔬 I found it helpful to prepare an agenda beforehand, where I'd write a list of points that I wanted to discuss, which really helped as I never left realising I'd forgotten to ask something!

👩‍💻 Take some form of minutes during your meetings so that you don't forget your supervisor's responses to everything you discuss!

📚 Keep in touch with your supervisor!! Try and have contact with them as regularly as possible, as regular updates can be a good way to keep motivated and stick to your timeframe!!

👩‍🔬 Every supervisor and project will work differently- I found only a few initial meetings useful to begin with, but when I started the data analysis, I found a weekly meeting very helpful; this was great for me as I knew I could pull all my queries together and discuss them at the next meeting which was never too far away!

📚 finally, if you're struggling to get hold of your supervisor, don't panic! Don't worry about emailing them again after a few days to follow it up! Lecturers can be very busy, so emails can easily get lost in inboxes and sometimes they may appreciate a reminder!

I hope that this post will be useful for some of you, and do stay tuned for a final post with some general tips!👀

Katie (IG= KTnu.trition)