In my previous post I described why I find a two-day course, an ineffective training for reducing PhD-supervisor miscommunications. In this post I like to present a suggestion, which I think may be more effective.

By my critical essay I did not want to question the good will of the FOM personnel service and the trainers. Indeed, it is a great challenge for many PhD students to stabilize their position in relation with their supervisors. With all the respect for all supervisors, I also think that they are not classified as the best human resource managers, which is the main duty on their shoulders from the time they become group leaders.

The title of this post describes pretty well what my suggestion is; to organize the experiences of former PhD students in handling their issues, in the format of written cases.

Introduced by Harvard Business School, case studies are important materials for many management textbooks. Writing a case is also a very common assignment in a business school. A well-organized case library can be a very useful reference in medicine or law.

My suggestion to FOM is to organize a casebase (like a database) in which a PhD-student or a group leader that has a certain issue, is able to search for similar situations that has happened in the past. Finding such a written case will help the inquirer realize she is not the only one experiencing such a problem. He may get some ideas how he can act or how he should not act. Although the cases may be anonymous, but with the scale of Dutch academic community, it is not improbable that the case one founds is indeed written by a former PhD of the same supervisor, thus it can be very relevant. A PhD study is about research. Given enough relevant material, a graduate student is able to find out himself the most useful information for a given problem.

Who is going to fill the casebase?

In the central office of FOM one of the first things that grabs the visitors’ attention are the colorful columns of theses written by FOM graduates. I myself like these books very much. They are an excellent source for the follow-up research. But as a matter of fact, each of these attractive books may cost a student between 3 to 6 month to edit and publish. If FOM has enough authority to ask for such an effort, FOM can also ask for few more pages about a success story, a failure story, or both written as cases. If such a system exists and people are well informed, some may voluntarily contribute. And finally, back to the original problem of finishing in time, FOM can ask all those students who request an extension to write about their cause of delay as a case, not merely to be judged, but for sharing the experience.

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