If you want to have a PhD in the Netherlands, a professor at a university has to "nominate" you for the title of doctor. This professor is called your promotor. In many cases, the promotor also fulfillls the role of daily supervisor, but someone else can also take the role of daily supervisor.
Tips for good supervision
It is important that you make good agreements with your supervisor(s) about the supervision. This can prevent a lot of disappointments or conflicts at a later stage. We list a few tips:
- Make agreements with your supervisor about who is responsible for which aspects of the research, how often you will have a progress meeting, to which conferences you can go and about authorship in publications
- Have regular, recurring meetings with your supervisor(s). This prevents problems when your supervisor(s) do not have time, and it commits yourself to checking your progress regularly.
- Schedule regular meetings with your daily supervisor and your promotor (if they are not the same). This way you can prevent differences in opinion between your daily supervisor and promotor.
- If you experience difficulties in the supervision, do not hesitate to discuss this and possibly contact a confidential advisor (within or outside the graduate school ).
- In addition to your daily supervisor, make sure you have a number of people around you with who you can regularly share your problems or frustrations. Usually these people will be your office mates or fellow PhD candidates.
You can find more tips in the research report "Behoud talend (keep talent)".
Conflicten tijdens je promotietraject
The timely completion of your PhD research is a shared responsibility between you and your supervisors. Therefore, problems should be solved within this team. Sometimes the problems become a conflict and it is not possible to solve them directly any more. For these situations, PNN has made a roadmap in which we give information about which steps PhDs can take in case of conflict.
