Doctoral Supervision: Strategies for Support, Collaboration and Success

Register: Training und Weiterbildung - Research Careers Campus Graz

Target group: The workshop is aimed at researchers from all disciplines who already supervise doctoral candidates as well as those who plan to do so in the future.

Content: Supervising doctoral candidates can be challenging for both, the supervisors and the doctoral candidates. A crucial factor for the success of the demanding doctoral process is collaboration: From the perspective of the doctoral candidates, the quality of supervision is one of the crucial factors for maintaining their mental wellbeing. Therefore, it is worthwhile to reflect specifically on supervisory practices and also benefit from the experiences of others.

In this workshop, we want to explore, using case examples, the framework conditions and behaviours that support the doctoral process, and what the parties involved can contribute to ensuring that doctoral candidates remain motivated to reach their goals - and endure and overcome challenging periods.

Trainer: Meike Watzlawik is a professor of Developmental and Educational Psychology (Department of Development, Education, and Culture) at Sigmund Freud University (SFU) in Berlin, where she currently heads the Department of Psychology and the Master's program in Clinical Psychology. She studied psychology in Braunschweig, where she also obtained her PhD (topic: Sexual Identity Development) and completed her habilitation (topic: Identity Development of Siblings in Adolescence), before going to Clark University in Worcester, MA, USA, as a Feodor Lynen Fellow (Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stiftung). She then served as a visiting professor at the University of Osnabrück and as a visiting lecturer at various educational institutions before joining SFU. Her research focuses include identity development as well as sexual and gender diversity, areas in which she has supervised doctoral candidates for several years.