In the first of an occasional series of interview posts, Dr Max Hänska-Ahy, Dr Sarabajaya Kumar and Dr Shuxiu Zhang (left to right below) talked to managing editor Jane Hindle about the coaching offered to LSE’s PhD students to support their writing, completion and viva preparation
Max and Shuxiu, as student participants on some of these programmes, what did you understand by the term ‘coaching’ before you started them?
Max: The term sounded odd to me. You coach a football team, but how do you coach someone for completion of their thesis or for their viva? I did not really know what to expect, but am generally open to trying things, so I thought I would find out more.
Shuxiu: At first, I assumed it to mean that I would receive guidance in a ‘how to do it’ kind of way. Over the course of the programme, I realised that coaching is much more open and dynamic, where students have the opportunity to steer the sessions with their key concerns and discuss possible solutions.
And Sarabajaya, as the designer of these programmes, what do you think the students understood by ‘coaching’ and what in fact should we understand by it?
My experience is that most students are unsure about what coaching might entail prior to engaging with the programmes, as indeed I was before I became a European accredited coach [in 2012]. However because we establish a ‘contracting framework’ at the outset – a thinking environment in which the coaching relationship can flourish through discussion and clarification of our roles and boundaries – I think that our mutual understanding is fairly quickly established in the initial session. The central idea of coaching is that it is a two-way relationship designed to raise awareness through giving feedback and effective questioning: the coach draws on well proven tools and processes to assist the coachee to achieve their desired outcome. In this respect, it is a highly appropriate strategy for developing people and for achieving specific goals.
Sarabajaya, can you tell us a bit about the various programmes available?
There are four altogether, two group based and two individual. The group based Coaching for Completion is a five session programme run jointly with my Teaching and Learning Centre colleague Dr Claire Gordon and is offered to all students who are a year away from submitting their theses. The initial session is dedicated to establishing ground rules, discussion of desired outcomes and, from that, agreement about what the remaining sessions will cover – usually things like time management and dealing with stress and anxiety, as that’s what the students often want. The Writing Coaching Group came out of my own experience as a part-time PhD student, when I got together with two students from other universities to support and critique one another once a term through the final stages of writing our theses. At LSE, the programme is co-delivered with former Royal Literary Fund Fellow Marina Benjamin and is mainly peer run. We start by giving the students a crash course in writing group etiquette and then link 4 or 5 students from different disciplines to form a group that meets independently, usually monthly, to read and comment on one another’s work. We have had excellent feedback from last year’s completion and writing groups, with students saying that their groups motivated them, stimulated discussions, helped with structuring their work and gave them constructive ways of moving forward as well as companionship and routine – the sorts of things that PhD students really appreciate.
The two individual programmes are for viva preparation and completion. The viva programme is very popular – I saw over 100 students for one to one viva coaching last year – and I’m told that it’s a significant help in getting the student’s mind into the realm of talking about their thesis and their original contribution to knowledge, as well as considering the sorts of questions that examiners, who of course bring their own hinterland of research with them to the examination, will want to ask. The completion programme is generally longer – I offer up to six half-hour sessions – and the discussions are usually around the student’s use of time and balance of commitments to ensure they are giving themselves the best possible opportunity of completing and completing effectively.
Shuxiu and Max, what did you find most helpful in the programmes you did?
Shuxiu: I wanted to deepen my knowledge about how to effectively tackle and execute the final stage of my thesis writing, logically, presentation-wise and persuasively, and the Coaching for Completion Group was immensely beneficial for that: simply having a platform to express personal concerns to a like-minded group made me feel supported, which is comforting in a highly competitive academic environment. I also did two Coaching for the Viva sessions with Dr Kumar which gave me guidance on how to structure answers, mentally prepare, and how to perceive and approach it objectively. I owed much of my viva success to these sessions.
Max: I was hoping to gain some practical advice, but also the advice of someone who was not my supervisor or an academic in my department. Having an independent person to consult with (not about content but about the processes more generally) can help lay some doubts to rest, and in general make you feel more prepared. In the individual Coaching for Completion sessions I did, it was great to be able to meet that independent person at regular intervals during the final stretch of writing – it created a kind of review schedule in which I would report what I had done in the past two weeks (but without the anxiety that may be involved in telling your supervisor you’re behind schedule) and get advice on structuring and managing my time. I was also given anonymous examples of the experiences of other completing PhD students, which helped me to realise that I was on the right track and that any doubts I had were quite normal.
Two final questions to you, Sarabajaya. First, why do you think coaching is particularly useful in the context of the PhD experience? And, second, how can people find out more about the programmes?
The PhD experience, especially for social scientists, can be a lonely and uncertain process, beset by wrong turns, writer’s block and sometimes anxieties. Many PhD students can feel isolated and become demotivated, especially as it is a fairly lengthy process. So the intervention of coaching programmes at appropriate moments, where students can make active progress through the support of peers and/or an independent coach who have themselves been through the process, can be highly beneficial. The longer term benefit of the coaching relationship is that it can be the key vehicle through which the individual is able to make and sustain change.
There is more information about the programmes and how to sign up at our Coaching for PhD students web page.
