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Are You Dealing with Forgetful Supervisors?

Category : General
Date : September 7, 2015

Having a forgetful supervisor can surely add a lot of humour into your otherwise mundane and dull journey. At the same time, surely it puts you through some weird experiences when your supervisor may give you the most perplexed look each time you go and meet as thy need to be told everything about your research from the very beginning.

Though these tips may not help to bring back the memory of your supervisor, but they would surely help you to deal with such kind of problems in a better way surely.

  1. Keep Your Mails Short and Crisp: Supervisors are busy people and they get hundreds of mails in a day from different sources. Often they just skim through the mails and avoid reading detailed and elaborated stuff. When you write crisp and succinct mails you give them no reason to ignore your mail. All the more better is to use bullet points or numbers to highlight and distinguish between the points and make the supervisor’s task easier.
    Have an Agenda for a Meeting: Never go for the meeting without an agenda. It is very helpful, irrespective of whether you have a forgetful supervisor or no. Having an agenda brings out more productivity from the meeting and gives you a chance to bring back the supervisor to the point when he diverts here or there.
  2. Send a Recapitulation Mail: Whatever outline you draw from the meeting, write up the minutes and send it to the supervisor in short. It adds a lot of clarity to the conversation and clears out the ambiguity if any.
  3. Send Polite Reminders: It is perfectly fine to send polite reminders to supervisors. They are after all humans and it is acceptable for humans to be forgetful. Your supervisor may have many other scholars to deal with and it is your responsibility to make the work progressive and if at all you fear that it is rude to send reminders to your supervisor, let me tell you , it is perfectly all right and better than letting your work stay hung without any response.

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