Is it rude to ask my PhD student to give a daily report?

Question

I normally have weekly meetings with my PhD students. However, when I saw one student, I noticed that she simply did a few easy things before to the appointment. During the conversation, I felt her work was even worse quality than my two summer interns.

I'm thinking of requiring her to give me daily updates, regardless of what she did.

I have five PhD students; if I just ask her to do this, would it appear like I am targeting her? Is there a better way to handle this? Any comments or suggestions?

P.S. I don't exactly record their working hours; nevertheless, in most of the weekly meetings with other students, I believe the quality and quantity of work, as well as the questions and difficulties expressed, are fair.

P.P.S.

1. If she has not improved her development, she may not be able to graduate.
2. I'm not certain of the specific explanation behind this. If I ordered her this week to complete job A with three subtasks A1, A2, and A3 (which, in my opinion, is a realistic weekly task), she may report that she has completed A1 at the next week's meeting.
   When I asked about A2-3, she just said that she is learning. But as I further ask what she is learning she merely told me she was learning. But when I ask her about what she's learning, what gets her stuck, and so on. She just cannot explain.

However, when the assignments were urgent, I would ask her to finish A1 on Monday, A2 on Wednesday, and A3 on Friday, and by checking in on her work on a daily basis, she was able to complete them. That is why I am thinking I should start setting deadlines for each work and asking for progress on a daily basis.

To be honest, I prefer not to do it. As for the other pupils, either I tell him/her about A1, A2, and A3, or they will submit the findings next week. OR I'll simply say A, and they'll figure out A1-A3 and proceed. Some may offer B and C.

P.P.P.S. Thank you all of the comments and suggestions. I think I will start from telling her she may not be able to graduate given the current performance, and asking progress/update more frequently, such as everyday/every two days. I am not good at micromanaging, but some students may need. In this case, the tasks/goals maybe more structured.

Answer 1

What I've learned in 19 years being a professor is that every one of my students is/was different and that the same approach does not work for everyone. So you find ways to individualize what you do with them. This may include having meetings more/less often than for others.

That said, before you make decisions, have a conversation with the student. Tell her what you observe, what your thought process is, and how you think you want to tailor your approach to her. Come to a solution together with her, instead of making one for her. Ask her whether her work is done just before the meeting and whether she thinks that she would do better work if she met with you daily.

Answer 2

Have your student drive her own research progress

It is sensible to adjust supervision arrangements to individual students, but at tertiary level it is also best if the student drives their own progress rather than being encumbered by busywork to allow the supervisor to police their progress. There are several problems with asking for daily reports of progress, including the fact that they: (1) detract from time available for substantive research progress; (2) discourage modes of research progress that involve general reflection, etc., where substantive progress is not evident on a daily basis; and (3) put the supervisor in the role of "policeman" for research progress. It is generally much better for a supervisor to focus on research outcomes in terms of milestones, etc., than to try to track progress each day.

An alternative method that might be useful here is to assist your student to set her own research schedule and give her accountability to drive progress. If you have not already done so, you should have your student create a Gantt chart setting out her research and publication plan, and ensure that this plan is sufficient to advance her research to completion within the program time, with proper milestones, etc. Instill her with the knowledge that she will be accountable for driving her own research progress (but can ask for your support when needed) and that if she does not make sufficient progress then she will be in danger of missing milestones and ultimately failing to complete her program. Use the "empower and trust" model where you give the student a realistic understanding of her options and their consequences, and then let her choose her own pathway and consequent outcome. Keep her informed if you perceive a lack of progress and offer support where needed, but don't take on the role of policeman.

Your existing weekly meetings should include discussion to keep track of progress over the periods between these milestones to see how work is progressing, but the student should be responsible for driving progress. Have a realistic discussion with your student about progress towards research milestones and point out where she appears to be falling behind.

Answer 3

In general when a subordinate fails to meet expectations you are in conflict. This is OK in the sense that it happens. This type of conflict resolution is quite simple to solve by following these steps:

1. Meet with your subordinate/student/intern/etc. in a relaxed environment, potentially over coffee. Start with all the goods she has (smart, diligent, whatever you can find) this whole process creates empathy and reduces the feeling of being attacked.
2. In casual talk, ask how things are going at home, how she generally feels, etc. Maybe she is troubled or depressed. Students can easily get overwhelmed due to immigration, inability to handle time, family issues, etc.
3. If something is wrong with her, evaluate wether you are able to do something about it and offer your help. If not, ignore this step.
4. Then, clearly and shortly express that you "believe" that she is falling short of your expectations. Immediately admit that "believing" something does not make it true, so to be fair, tell her that you are going to evaluate her performance closely in the following days.
5. To this end you will negotiate (not impose) a reasonable work plan with her, including expected milestones and goals, and will follow her in the following (15 days to 3 months), taking into consideration the potential personal complications learned in step 3 (a feasible, tractable and reasonable plan is very important because is the difference between leadership and harassment). Daily progress checks maybe in order if the problem is that the student gets overwhelmed by self-management for example.
6. Evaluate her performance improvement taking into consideration her personal circumstances.
7. If she improves, then stop.
8. If she does not improve express the potential complications that can arise from her failing to improve (not graduating/not being recommended for further research/not being recommended for graduation, etc.) and put her in a final performance evaluation plan.
9. If she still does not improve, consider terminating her.

Remarks:

1. This process is best done by an informal committee of your peers. While you will lead the process, it is always good to have a second opinion to your own to keep the process objective, especially during steps 3 and 6.
2. In general when a subordinate fails to meet expectations you are in conflict. This is OK in the sense that it happens. As a Ph.D. professor, you are in a leadership position, and the nature of the leader can be a nature of conflict. People come to work bounded by mission, not friendship. Your student mission is to graduate, and your mission is to steer your students on the right path, not be their BFF. Not everybody has to like you.
3. Cultural differences can create communication barriers. When I was a Ph.D. student I was unable to understand orders from my professor because he came from a high-context culture (such as France, Japan, Korea) and I came from a low-context culture (such as USA, Latin America, Germany).

Answer 4

First thought is that is seems overambitious. Consider how much time is spent on producing the report versus how much time is spent on research. I am not sure what a daily report would reveal. It is clearly a case where the student feels forced to produce unimportant steps to report rather than anything of real importance.

Since the progression of a student depends on the students personality and also the character of the research being conducted, the optimal reporting interval must take external conditions into account. If the progress depends on laboratory experiments, daily reports may be reasonable but in the end the anticipated progress must be considered. In my opinion, I would expect slower progress early in the progress, speeding up as the thesis project progresses through time. That said, the progression will highly depend on the project and the personality pf the student. Hence, the expectation on progression reports should be adapted to reasonable time frames depending on the character of the project and the personal characteristics of the student.

The progress of a PhD project may not be easily forecast since it depends on many individual factors as well as field dependent, as well as local, expectations.

Answer 5

I think an issue here is that your expectations of her are not getting conveyed - if you do not convey to her that she is not performing up to the expectations set by her PhD program, she doesn't have sufficient opportunity to correct it. Have a monthly (non-technical) feedback meeting with her (and all your other students as well, individually), where both you and your students can tell each other what the goals and expectations are, and what is and isn't working.

Some students need more micromanaging and/or hand-holding, while for some others, their performance would decrease in the long term if micromanaged. By the end of the third year, the student should not need micromanaging, but in the first couple of years, they may. Such expectations should be conveyed - that you're asking for daily updates now, but would like to ween her off of it eventually.

As an alternative, having a clearly outlined project and its milestones can be used. Progress need not be evaluated on a daily or a weekly basis, but whether the milestones of the project are being met in a reasonably timely manner or not. This would require you to work in a goal-oriented manner, rather than a task-oriented manner. As a rule of thumb, a goal would be any target you're looking to achieve in 3-9 month, anything longer would start looking more like a vision. The milestones of the goal can be reasonably clearly defined, either by you, or by your student. A milestone would still need to be broken down into tasks, but it is better that that is driven by your student and not by you, so that she has a sense of ownership about the work and feels sufficiently motivated to do it. In a purely task-oriented environment, a student will find it hard to get a sense of what's going on and may lose interest after a few months.

Also, one has to be mindful that work does not happen at a steady rate. Sometimes, the student might be spending her time learning some tools necessary to do the work, or just thinking, planning, and reading literature. Such activities cannot be done in an environment where daily update on progress is expected.

Answer 6

Actually, I believe that this is a red flag for a PhD, and given the other information about the student, I think it would be better to have a serious talk about leaving academia.

I saw people trying to get a PhD for five, even seven years, and then leaving university without it. And even if you barely pass your PhD, you need to leave academia anyway.

On the other hand, from my professional experience outside university, I know quite some people who do a decent job if you give them short, concrete tasks, but failing at anything like "solve this problem and come back with the solution in a month". There are enough jobs for those people, but working in academia is usually not the right thing for them.

Answer 7

I'm sure many of us had times during our PhDs when we needed more structured encouragement. Hopefully this is a short phase of being stuck and she'll come through it with your help.

Some brief daily communication may be a good idea, and in some situations could be delegated to a postdoc; their role may be perceived as more of a supportive one, avoiding adding to the anxiety the student is probably feeling.

Something else I've seen work successfully, is for the student to be expected to make daily progress notes, to be available at the weekly meeting.

While not a perfect tool for this situation, an approach informed by SOFT (successes, opportunities, failures, & threats) reports is simple and could be helpful: What progress have I made? What are the next steps I should be looking into? What has gone wrong? What issues do I think will cause problems? One line on each of those would be a sensible scale for any daily update, with the expectation of being ready to provide more detail.

Answer 8

Absolutely. Taking time off the student who is overwhelmed and giving them another task to prepare for every day is clearly going to help.....

I would suggest the fact you even asked this question indicates the student may not be the whole problem.

Answer 9

As always it depends on how one asks a student for a daily report. Asking for a report and not anyone else knowing about it, yes it is more than rude, actually, it is unsafe for a professor and for the student.

I could go on here on why it is unsafe, however, I'll skip it and go to the important part, and keep in mind we're now mid-2024!

What is important for a student is that he or she finishes his/her studies successfully. For a professor or scientific research supervisor, the same. So how can a prof. / sc. res. supervisor manages a work culture and environment for that to be possible, for a student to be able to deliver daily and even intraday reports of ongoing works?

It can do it online. In a "neutral", secure, and safe platform, for instance, Github, a dataverse, zenodo. Personally, I give preference to GitHub as it has many functionalities that allow the delivery of written content using markdown language. Nowadays it also supports MathJax for writing mathematical formulae and equations. Finally, GitHub has a built-in document revision that keeps track of any changes made to a document.

There's also the option to use Twitter and LinkedIn, asking a student to publish once a day about work activities. For instance a publication about new content on a page on GitHub. With new photos and videos, etc ...

In the end, when work is done and the course/program/scholarship is completed the student has available to advertise professionally a data repository full of work that can be used to showcase his\her professional skills online to HR recruiters. When using Twitter or Linkedin as a history of records with a timeline, it allows easier navigation by someone interested in learning more about work and skills.

The professor/sci. res. supervisor is able to copy the data repository, on Github is as simple as making a "fork" of it. to use it for his \ her professional needs.

To make it easier to understand what I commented above, I'm sharing here an ongoing open scientific research project that is using Github repositories to deliver near real-time updates of work activities:

https://github.com/aeonSolutions/openScience-Smart-DAQ-to-Upload-Live-Experimental-Data-to-a-Data-Repository/wiki/Validation-of-Experimental-Data-Origins:-A-Swarm-of-DAQ-devices-able-to-Deliver-Unique-Experimental-Data-using-Blockchain‐like-Fingerprint-ID-to-a-Data-Repository