Your doctoral mentor or guide is supposed to help you get through your dissertation successfully. However, there are some things that doctoral students or their guides end up doing that inhibit the progress of the students. Students have often reported after the completion of their doctoral degrees that their guides or mentors were often not that supportive. Here is what you need to do in order to improve your student-guide relationship.
Understand What You Need to Do
Often, a guide would not help you hundred percent or all through the way. They would expect you to be responsible for your own work. Instead of feeling disgruntled, you should consider asking your guide directly for help. You could do this by having a frank conversation with him or her. After all, the students would require proving at the end of the day that they have attained a certain level of competence since that is what the supervisors expect from their students. Instead of letting the students flounder around unlike back in the day, the guide should try to help them complete their theses.
Understand the Procedures
Writing a thesis does not happen overnight. You should start doing your research months ahead of your admission into the doctoral degree programme. You should make sure that your subject area is not too broad. If you do not start early on, you may find that you have a paper that is below average right before your thesis defence. Write paragraphs summarizing your research work and keep it ready well in advance. You would also need to cite the sources of the information you have gathered for your thesis.
Get Timely Feedback
Students feel that their guides do not give them timely feedback on their theses. You should make sure you prepare all your documents for the thesis defence and show it to your guide well in advance instead of complaining that your guide is not helping you.
