Supervision of PhD candidates on practical work at LTH

Current practices at the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Immunotechnology

Abstract

In several research fields, practical work in a laboratory or field setting is a substantial part
of third cycle studies. Despite that the supervision of PhD students has been given thorough
attention since the introduction of formal learning outcomes for third cycle studies, there is
still a lack of routines and guidelines for how supervision of practical work should be
addressed. In this study, we investigated the current practices of supervision of PhD
students’ laboratory and/or field work at two departments at LTH via an online survey. Our
survey showed that there is a lack of formal training of practical work at the two
departments investigated. Supervisors and PhD students shared the view that practical work
was to a large extent taught through learning-by-doing and informal training by more senior
peers. Although this doxastic system of “cascade mentoring” works well in many instances,
the lack of formal routines and assessment of practical skills may cause delayed learning
trajectories and propagation of faulty conduct. We believe that introducing a formal
mentoring system for practical work will accelerate the confidence of new PhD students in
the laboratory and/or field setting and improve the quality of experiments conducted during
the initial phase of third cycle studies.