Sleeplessness and anxiety: PhD supervisors on toll of COVID pandemic

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Survey of 3,500 supervisors lifts the lid on the demands of overseeing junior researchers — and the impacts of the pandemic.

Switching to remote working and helping to refocus projects has presented a challenge for PhD supervisors.Around one-third of scientists who supervise doctoral students say they have lost sleep during the pandemic because of their role, according to a poll of almost 3,500 research supervisors in the United Kingdom. Two-thirds said that their supervision responsibilities had increased over this time, with many wanting more support to address the well-being and mental health of their PhD students.

Yet significant changes, affecting both supervisors and students, have been made to the PhD supervision process during the pandemic, says Ronny Gunnarsson, who researches medicine and public health at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. “Many supervisors and PhD students have suffered emotionally from the lack of on-site meetings,” he says, a problem exacerbated by the loss of informal coffee-break-style chats that often resolve difficulties.

More than one-third agreed with the statement “concerns over supervision have kept me awake at night over the last 12 months”, with a similar proportion agreeing that, over the same period, “supervising doctoral candidates makes me feel anxious”.Richard Freeman, who researches doctoral education at University College London, says the power dynamic between student and supervisor makes the relationship complicated, particularly at the start.

Researchers believe a number of aspects of the relationships between supervisors and students have become more fraught during the pandemic.Christopher Madan, a neuroscientist at the University of Nottingham, adds that supervisors might have shouldered more of the burden of the disruption to and uncertainty about research projects as a result of the pandemic and lack of access to university campuses due to health restrictions .

 

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