I am NOT your mother...

My new PhD student has been in my lab for two months. She is right out of undergraduate and has moved away from her family for the first time to work with me. Today in our supervision meeting it was pretty clear from the word go that all was not well. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that her eyes were red and puffy. Or was it that she wouldn't look me in the eye directly? Anyway, we quickly established that something was up, she didn't want to talk about it, didn't want to return home to deal with the issue and could she please have some goals to concentrate on for the coming week(s)?

At the end of our supervision session I gave my little spiel about PhDs coming at a time in one's life where 'life' just happens. During my candidature I attended about 10 weddings, half of which were great parties but in hindsight they should have saved their money (...), three or four funerals, a major relationship breakdown of my own and all that goes with it (lose house, possessions, cat etc). A PhD isn't really a test of how intelligent you are. Rather, it's a test of how well you can cope emotionally with the ups and downs of life whilst you're focussed intensely on a single outcome - the thesis. If you get into the PhD then you're 'smart' enough to finish it. It just happens that I know a lot of smart folk for whom life got in the way of writing up and they never completed.

At the end of all of this, she had cracked a smile and laughed a few times but her eyes remained devastatingly sad. So my next line kind of just came out and I'm not sure it came out right. I said to her that although I'm not her mother and I'm not wanting to have that kind of role, I have a responsibility to support her through the process of gaining her qualification. Thus, I explained that I felt that this extended to ensuring that she was managing at a personal as well as a professional level. Hence, if she either needed or wanted to contact me then she should feel free to do so after hours. If she needed help to access support services etc then I hope she would feel comfortable to ask for guidance etc.

I thought about this a lot for the rest of the day. As a graduate student I had male supervisors, none of whom discussed particularly personal issues (aside from the one who drank too much and then explained how pretty I was - another story, perhaps, for another time). I had some pretty awful things happen (mostly, in fact, as a result of me rejecting the super generous offer of a totally inappropriate student-supervisor relationship) and there was very little support for me from those people or their peers. So did that experience make me go 'soft'? Should students manage on their own and just get on with the work?

There are a whole lot of boundary issues with students. I discussed this after work with Academic Husband and we agreed that in this instance it was a good thing to offer some support. I've also asked one of the other grad students to catch up with new PhD student for coffee and chats because I suspect she's more likely to seek and benefit from support from her peers than her supervisor. It's just made me sit back and think about the best model for guiding students through such times and whether my own experience plays too much of a role in how I now approach such issues.