Apply by: 26 July 2026
Teacher: Dr. Karolin Salmen
Date: Kick-Off 8th July 26, 2-4 pm
Self-learning phase accompanied by two open online consultations (15th & 22th July, 2-3 pm)
Send-Off 29th July, 2-4 pm
Place: Online on MS Teams Universität Heidelberg
Prerequisite: Participants should already have experience of supervising students working on their theses, ideally doctoral or MA students
Assessment: Regular participation and upload of assignments
Registration: Write an email to Lehren-und-lernen@uni-heidelberg.de stating your name, university, discipline, position, mail address; further information will be provided after registration.
Supervising doctoral students is one of the most rewarding things that anyone in university education can do. Guiding new scholars to become independent researchers, who conduct a project, write up the results, present them at the viva, is a satisfying experience. However – often supervisors state observations such as “my PhD student is a diligent worker – only he/she hasn’t got a clue as to what the data he/she came up with actually mean” – or “my PhD student is really bright, but he/she does not want to stay in science so he/she does not really put all possible effort into his/her project”.
Many of the possible problems between supervisor and PhD student stem from diverging expectations or assumptions about each other that have never been raised.
In order to prevent possible problems, we will be looking at the “ideal cycle” (selecting the doctoral student, getting him/her started, designing and planning a project, keeping up the students motivation, supervising the writing of the thesis and preparing him/her to present the data). We will also be looking at remedial measures when problems have occurred by discussing cases you bring along from your own experiences.
The aim of this online workshop is to maximize the chances of your students being successful and foreshadow problems that might arise.
After this course you will be able to…
define your role as supervisor in regards to your leadership style and your responsibilities.
define the core competencies (soft skills) needed in a doctoral student in order to successfully do a PhD with you.
optimize your ideal supervision-cycle, starting with the recruitment interview.
describe a framework of communication for regular performance evaluation with your students.
apply some ideas about trouble shooting.
online/blended/eLearning
theoretical input
group work
We use Microsoft Teams as a platform for the whole course. Please make sure that you have registered with Microsoft. We will need your mail-ID that you use for this in order to guarantee your access to the platform and the course.
The webinar is organised in the framework of the 4EU+ 1CORE project (One Comprehensive Research-Intensive European University, Work Package 2: 4EU+ Curricula: towards a joint educational offer), under the Erasmus+ funded European Universities Initiative.