1. Challenges (gr 1) No special training on PhD supervision skills – Lack of standards and benchmarks Insufficient supervision due heavy teaching load borne by supervisors Low incentives to supervisors/department Poor command of English and communication skills among students Lack of foundation courses for students – Research methodology, scientific writing etc Misunderstandings/conflict of interest Cheating/Plagiarism

2. Typical Supervision Session (gr 1) Supervisors having a common understanding before communicating with the PhD candidate

3. Qn1 (gr 2) 1.References/literature – Access to good/recent literature materials for student and supervisor – Understanding work done by others and extracting relevant materials – Citing and plagiarism 2.Research knowledge and writing skills - insufficient 3.Budget for the research work (most of the times the budget is limited)

4. Qn 2 (gr 2) Good proposal writing skills shared between supervisor proved to be beneficial to the student

5. Challenges when supervising (gr 3) 1.Some students are unable to formulate a clear research question – Research gap/relevance of the study – Access to and updated literature review – Data analysis & synthesis 2.It is difficult to actually monitor the candidates field activities. (Data collection/cleaning) 3.Financial constraints (e.g the biomedical sciences) where tests may not be done locally 4.Delayed Approval from regulatory bodies (NIMRI/TFDA) 5.Time to actually supervise* (Multitasking)

6. Supervision session that was beneficial to the PhD student (gr 3) 1.Prior planning – Schedule of activities etc 2.Output/Publications/Skills 3.Log books*

7. Three most important challenges I have encountered (gr 4) TIME – Timely reading of candidate’s work – Too many students to supervise- poor output – Candidate delay in meeting deadlines SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS – Student doesn’t adequately respond to comments – Struggle to help students to conceptualize the problem – Difficult to understand what the student think or want to do – English language barriers- – Student doesn’t have courage to challenge the supervisor

8. Example of a supervision session where I find that the supervision was of much benefit to the PhD students (gr 4) When student present his/her work for the first time in the department and get feedback from staff and peers When a student comes up with critical questions- which need brainstorming When a supervisor and student reach consensus certain critical issues “Ahaa” effects