Your personal supervisor

Your department will allocate you an academic supervisor who offers you support and advice throughout your degree programme.

You will meet your supervisor two times per semester, plus three times in the summer period, to discuss your academic progress and to check that all is well with you and your studies. This is an important point of academic contact for all students. Your supervisor will encourage you to develop your academic and personal skills and can also act as a referee for any applications you might make in the future. They can advise what to do if things go wrong and refer you to the right people in the University for help with more personal matters.

Meeting with your personal supervisor 

It is primarily your responsibility to book and attend appointments with your supervisor, and it is better to arrange these in advance either by telephone or email. If you are unable to attend a supervisory meeting you should make reasonable attempts to contact your supervisor and to re-arrange the meeting. However, if you persistently fail to make contact with your supervisor and/or you fail to attend scheduled supervisory meetings then this will be reported to your programme leader and Chair of the Postgraduate Teaching Committee.

Records of your meeting will be kept by your supervisor – these may be accessed by other staff if necessary, for example, for continuity purposes if you change supervisor. You can access notes from supervision meetings via your e:Vision record.

You will be allocated a personal supervisor during the first weeks of term. You should ensure that you arrange to meet them in early on in the programme.

Although supervisory meetings usually happen face to face it is possible for them to take place remotely via telephone or video-conference (e.g. Skype, Zoom, Google Hangouts). 

Procedure for changing your supervisor 

Ideally, you should have the same supervisor throughout your time here but, if your supervisor is away for an extended period, you will be allocated a different supervisor.

Occasionally, the supportive relationship that we hope will develop fails to do so. You are encouraged to discuss any difficulties with your supervisor to try to resolve these. However, if you find that you cannot communicate well with your supervisor, for whatever reason, then talk to your programme leader, the Chair of the Postgraduate Teaching Committee, or if you prefer, contact one of the other support services.