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]Your supervisor plays a critical role in your project; not only he/she is meant to be your best sourer of advise and guidance, he/she may also be able to influence your grade. Therefore, it is important that you know how to work with your supervisor in an optimal manner.
Most importantly, your supervisor is not an all-knowing oracle. While even the most experienced educators/practitioners have differing views about various aspects of a project, the supervisor you get could be an inexperienced junior faculty members or a senior student. Therefore, do not expect your supervisor to have a sure-fire solution to all your problems. Even when you get an answer from him/her, do not take it as the best possible answer one can get.
Furthermore, you may not get immediate answers to your questions. Be patient. Sometimes supervisor to consult other supervisors, a senior professor, or other resources before answering.
When faced with alternative ways of doing something, do not ask the supervisor to make the choice. Instead, ask what are the pros and cons of each alternative. You can make your final decision based on your own opinions, your supervisor's opinions, experimentation results (i.e., you can try out each alternative in small scale to see which one is better), and other information you can gather on the subject.
When you call the telephone (worse, the mobile phone!) of the supervisor, you are effectively saying "I don't care what you are doing now. drop it and attend to me right now!". When you write (email or SMS), you are saying "attend to me when you have time".
If you want to meet the supervisor, make a prior appointment or follow the predetermined consultation hours. Most supervisors are too nice to turn you away if you come unannounced, but they will not be happy about the disruption.
When you make an appointment with your supervisor, PLEASE be there on time. Plan to meet together 10 minutes before the appointment time and go to the supervisor's office as a team, rather than each member joining the meeting one at a time.
Prepare your questions before you meet the supervisor. Better yet, email the questions to the supervisor in advance. This helps to clear you own mind about the issue you want to discuss. Avoid involving the supervisor in the things you should do yourselves (such as debugging).
While a supervisor might offer to meet you "as many times as you want" and ask you to write "as many emails as you want", it is your responsibility to limit the number of both to reasonable levels. For example, it is better to consolidate your questions into a single email than firing off an email the moment you encounter a problem. It shows forethought, care, and professionalism on your part. It makes the supervisor's life easier as having to switch many times between tasks (to respond to your frequent emails) could heavily disrupt the supervisors work schedule.
Keep meetings short: get in, do your business, get out.
Discuss the questions with your team first. Try to find answers on your own before you approach the supervisor. You do not get credit for spending time in the supervisor's office. Do not start team discussions in the middle of a meeting with the supervisor.
A safe bet is your supervisor cannot speed-read. In that case, do not send him/her a document five minutes before a meeting and then expect feedback during the meeting.
Some supervisors keep the supervisor-team relationship informal and relaxed while others want to maintain a certain level of formality. It is the supervisor's choice (or may be dictated by the course structure) and you should not try to force a different level of formality into the relationship.
It is important that the supervisor is in touch with all the important developments in your project. For example you can give your supervisor access to your project discussion forum, code versioning system, mailing group etc. Copying every internal project-related email to the supervisor is a definite "no no"; sending a weekly summary or a progress report (even when the supervisor does not ask for such) is a better alternative.
If your team is facing difficulties, let the supervisor know; pretending otherwise will prevent the supervisor from helping you on time.
If the project did not go well, resist the temptation to blame the supervisor. While the supervisor gave all advise in good faith, it was not his/her responsibility to make the project success.
Any suggestions to improve this book? Any tips you would like to add? Any aspect of your project not covered by the book? Anything in the book that you don't agree with? Noticed any errors/omissions? Please use the link below to provide feedback, or send an email to damith[at]comp.nus.edu.sg
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---| This page is a part of the online book Tips to Succeed in Software Engineering Student Projects V1.9, Jan 2009, Copyrights: Damith C. Rajapakse |---