How important are regular supervisor meetings?

You are bound to have a PhD supervisor as a scholar. Sometimes you may even have two supervisors who are in charge of monitoring our progress and extending you support throughout your PhD journey. A supervisor is assigned with the duty to keep a track of the progress that you make and have your schedule reports ready with him. This responsibility to monitor your progress is important for your benefit as well as it ensures that you do not lag behind in your research process and you are able to complete your PhD in a timely fashion with the regular guidance and support that has been extended by your supervisor. Supervisors have the calibre and discretion to extend this support to the supervisor in long distance also but however, some amount of meeting regularly is important to cope up with the intellectual and emotional demands that a PhD raises. The question that should be discussed here is, how often should the supervisor and scholar be meeting?

The first thing that is important here is that the frequency of the meeting between both the scholar as well as the researcher should be mutually agreed upon by negotiation.  No one party should be dictating terms to the other party in terms of relationships. Too many meetings some time feel like an apt solution to pace up the work but that may not be necessarily true as if the meetings are too frequent , it can get counterproductive and become more like a burden or a chore rather than a practical and useful chance which could be used productively to guide or to learn.

There isn’t a thumb rule that says, it is the right frequency to meet.  How often you meet your supervisor should be determined by the kind of support you think you need for your work. You subject knowledge, prior research experience and exposure to statistical techniques will determine how much of learning and support would be required by you. Usually scholars find it important to meet often in the initial stages of their PhD till they get on track and know exactly what is to be done, same thing in the end of your programme when you need to finalise your thesis. During the interim period, often people tend to meet less as most of the time scholars are busy with the allotted writing or research work quite independently.

How often you meet may not be as important as how much of time when you meet is used up productively. Try to maximise the productivity of how much ever opportunity that you get to meet your supervisor.