Advice for PhD Supervisors My first PhD student is having his viva tomorrow. Hence, I began contemplating a bit about the whole process of supervising. One thing I realized is that while there seems to be plenty of advice for PhD students I cannot recall ever seeing advice for supervisors. So 


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*What resources are available for PhD supervisors?

*If you are experienced supervisor, then what would be your advice?   

 A: A new blog post came out yesterday from the AMS, with some nice advice:
https://blogs.ams.org/matheducation/2018/01/08/advice-for-new-doctoral-advisors/
A: I think the below book is very good for both students and their supervisors. I hope it can be helpful.
"HOW TO GET A PhD, A handbook for students and their supervisors-FIFTH EDITION", by ESTELLE M. PHILLIPS and DEREK S. PUGH.
A: There is a previous MO thread about this: Resources for mathematics advising.
Here is a list of resources: 


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*Section 2B of Indiana University's How to be a Good Grad Student is Advice for Advisors.

*The Assistant Professor's Guide to the Galaxy: section 7 has to do with advising. This section focuses more on what grad students can do for you, but does have one concrete suggestion:



In my personal work with students, I set goals for them and insist that they document their progress with draft manuscripts. My work with them on these drafts often leads to conference papers. My students always publish before they finish, sometimes jointly with me and sometimes on their own, depending on the degree of my own involvement.

Going off my own experience: there is a lot of value to an early publication before starting the thesis process. I think it builds confidence and probably also helps when the student hits the job market.


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*Advice to a young mathematician by Atiyah, Bollobas, Connes, McDuff and Sarnak. 

*Ravi Vakil's website has information for potential students but you can read from it his advising style: http://math.stanford.edu/~vakil/potentialstudents.html

*There's also a nice (though a bit outdated) report from the National Academic Press in 1997 called Advisor, Teacher, Role Model, Friend. That definitely sums up the best advisors I know, so perhaps there is some timeless information in there.

*Steve Krantz's Mathematician's Survival Guide has a lot of information, though little about advising as I recall.
Hope that helps!
A: Of course a supervisor has to work hard in helping his student to study,to learn and to get good results. I think that is his job. But, in my opinion , it is  not a good thing to sign any publication as joint work with his student (at least before his viva !). This does not help to evaluate the work done by the student himself, and it does not help much more in his forthcoming career. A common publication by a supervisor and his student (before getting PhD) is not, in general, beneficial to the student. But the student must be helped to publish as soon as possible (in his own name ). I think so.
