Your supervisor

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

You will meet your supervisor two times per semester, plus three times in the summer semester 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 and it is important that any discussions and actions are recorded on e:Vision. 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 supervisor

It is primarily your responsibility to book and attend appointments with your supervisor, and it is better to arrange these in advance preferably by email. This is an important point of academic contact for all students. Meetings will take place online or face-to-face. 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 between you and 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. As a postgraduate student we would encourage you to make notes from the meeting and put these on e:Vision with a plan of agreed actions.

You will be allocated a personal supervisor as part of your programme induction. You should ensure that you arrange to meet them in Week 1 of Semester 1. Module options need to be submitted by the end of Week 8. An important aspect of your programme is your dissertation and we recommend that you start thinking about this early on in your programme and discuss this with your supervisor.

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).

Dissertation supervision

Once you have selected and been allocated your dissertation topic you will be assigned a dissertation supervisor who will take over all aspects of your supervision. It is your responsibility to ensure that records of your meeting are promptly completed and confirmed by your supervisor in your e:Vision record. When you wish to request that your supervisor provides feedback on your dissertation please ensure you give them adequate notice to do so and negotiate this date with them. Generally your supervisor will acknowledge receipt of draft work by email, indicating when they will be able to provide comments.

Information relating to the frequency of supervision meetings and timelines for providing feedback can be found on the Information for Dissertations VLE site.

Procedure for changing your 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 staff.