About

This website is McGill’s central resource for guiding supervisors, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows through their shared learning experiences. Addressed primarily to supervisors and their doctoral students, it applies more widely to graduate and postdoctoral education, offering general insights from the scholarship of teaching and learning as well as specific advice on McGill’s practices.

Each page of this website has three sections plus additional resources:

• Practical advice: a suggestion or list of suggestions about supervision that can be acted upon immediately;
• Ideas for reflection: a question and related thought provocations for long-term, formative development;
• Research and evidence: a short scholarly literature review that includes a list of further reading on each topic;
• McGill resources: a set of annotated links to services, webpages, and other information from McGill.

The categories and topics are intended to illustrate that supervision is much broader than a supervisor and her or his supervisees. Supervisees experience supervision through McGill’s policies and procedures, through infrastructure and resources, and through the intellectual climate. They also experience it through the excellent individuals, committees, and teams who work with them as candidates and colleagues. Hence, while supervisors are critical to a successful research education experience, the research environment that students experience is similarly critical. Supervisors are part of a wider support network at McGill, a network that often becomes professional and that, for many students, is global in its reach.

Similarly global, but in origin, this website was adapted from the Oxford Learning Institute’s Research Supervision website in collaboration with Oxford and the Australian National University, which developed some of the foundational materials. Unless otherwise stated, the words of doctoral students and supervisors quoted on these pages are extracted from interviews and other data from a series of SSHRC-funded research projects and other research carried out at McGill by faculty, doctoral students, and staff during 2006-2013. Lynn McAlpine and Cheryl Amundsen were the primary and secondary investigators for the SSHRC-funded research.

Hosted by Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (GPS), and adapted by GPS with support from Teaching and Learning Services and in consultation with Graduate Program Directors, graduate students, and many others at McGill, this website is a current, research-based resource. It will be updated and expanded periodically. Your feedback to the editors is appreciated.