The benefits of recording your supervision meetings

I've decided to share some helpful pearls of wisdom gained as a result of the PhD experience. What a difference this is to my usual lamenting, no questioning, of why I chose to put myself through this experience in the first place. So this is a positive, enlightening and mildly useful blog about why a PhD student will find benefit in recording their supervision sessions. The benefits aren't obvious at first. In fact the first thing that hits you is that you will have to set aside time to listen to the recording again. So if you had a 2 hour meeting (like mine typically are) you need to accommodate at least 3 hours to listen to the recording and make rough notes. If it's been a particular complex session where you discussed theory or where your writing was dissected - you might need at least double your original meeting time to go through the recording. Also if in the meeting everything you said or wrote gets ripped to shreds it's not a very comforting thought, that when you listen to the recording you will actually be forcing yourself to relive the experience. So when faced with these initial realisation - why the hell would you want to do it?

Well for me it's simple - during supervision you can concentrate on following the discussion you are having with your supervisors and focus all your attention on responding to what they are saying, rather than trying to divide up your time on capturing the discussion and attending to your responses to their questions. You get an accurate record of really useful comments, phrases, insights etc...that your supervisors have on a range of issues - from their interpretation or critique of a particular bit of theory, their summary of what they think you are saying in a written piece you've given them to review, to dates for the next meeting or instructions or tasks they expect you to complete. But beyond these almost obvious, implied benefits associated with recording of your meetings - listening to the recording also means you have a chance to gain perspective on what they have said, your responses and how you might have felt about the meeting. Often I've left a meeting feeling completely deflated by the experience and listening to the recording helped me to put those feelings into perspective. It's almost like a de-briefing space where I can almost set aside my emotional responses and cut directly through to the content of the discussion. I'm then able to see with more clarity the different layers of the interaction, I see where I made good points and also see how my supervisors might have been trying to help me get to a particular conclusion or where they actually praise, validate and affirm me and my work. Of course sometimes the crap said and expressed gets rubbed in your face directly - but in the grand scheme of things, I think that's useful too - it's about getting to know your supervisors, the nature of this crazy, sometimes unexplainable process (game?), know yourself and anticipate how to respond to similar situations the next time around. I've been doing this since 1st year so it's really just become part of my practice as a PhD student, I almost can't see doing my meetings another way.