Best practice in forming and maintaining a good supervision team for a PhD student

Abstract

The purpose of this essay was to explore the best practices in forming and maintaining supervision teams. Here the results from an interview study with six participants is presented, three of the participants were supervisors the other three were PhD students. The findings suggest that communication between the members of the team is essential, that complementing knowledge and skills of the supervisors is beneficial, that it is necessary for supervisors to be committed and that it is advantageous if the PhD student can have a say in who will be part of the team. These findings will hopefully help supervisors with the design of supervisor teams and might provoke some helping thoughts during a PhD project.