Here’s a way of getting useful feedback on a course before formal feedback forms are circulated in the final week of term. I normally do this about halfway through a term.

I got this tip from my colleague Cathy Elliott. The approach is widely used in business/management circles. I’ve adapted it for a seminar context, but it can easily be done in different ways, e.g. electronically.

1. Circulate three pieces of paper, one marked ‘Stop’, one marked ‘Start’, one marked ‘Continue’. The sheet marked ‘Stop’ is for students to write down things about the course which they would like to stop or have changed. The sheet marked ‘Start’ is for things that they want which aren’t currently being done. And the sheet marked ‘Continue’ is for things which they like and want to continue. Obviously, these categories are not perfect, but they work pretty well.
2. Ask students to put a tick beside previous suggestions if they agree with them, and a cross if they don’t (or nothing if they don’t have an opinion). This will give you a sense of the number of students who feel a certain way – otherwise, you just get a list of suggestions with no idea about how many people agree or disagree.
3. Don’t start all of the sheets in the same place: this slows things down.
4. The sheets should go round at least twice, to make sure that people who wrote on them at the start have a chance to put a tick or a cross beside later suggestions.
5. This takes up to ten minutes, depending on the size of the group. I start the actual seminar after about five minutes,and let the sheets continue to circulate for the first few minutes of the actual seminar discussion. It’s not ideal, but otherwise I feel one loses too much of a 50-minute seminar.

Here’s an example from a second-year undergraduate course in research design (click to enlarge):

The second point, which is hard to read on the above scan, says not pushing people to participate – some just have nothing to say 🙂 . A fair point! Interestingly, the above students disagreed on what kind of group interaction they wanted, but appeared to agree that the format I was using wasn’t right. All of the students found it hard to digest one method we covered on the course: process-tracing.

This kind of feedback helps me to improve things before it’s too late. Sometimes, if I disagree about a proposed change, or if nothing can be done, I can explain why. But any kind of interim feedback session shows students that one cares about their views.

Simon Usherwood of Surrey University uses a similar approach, using PostIt notes. I might try Simon’s version of this method too in the future, to see if it works better or worse for me.

Does anyone else have useful tips on getting feedback partway through a course?

Stuart Corbridge is now a silver-haired Professor of International Development at the LSE (below left), but I still think of him as an intense, clench-fisted firebrand (below right) whose style I tried and failed to emulate when I started lecturing. (It took me a while to find a style I’m comfortable with – more relaxed, more humourous, not so stern.)

I still remember Corbridge’s presence, the inspiring way he lectured. I don’t remember him influencing my ideas as much. He did, I think, try to warn me away from methodological individualism, by linking it to Margaret Thatcher’s ‘no such thing as society’ comment. I loathed Thatcher and felt less keen on methodological individualism for a while. Eventually, though, I saw that I could accept methodological individualism without endorsing Thatcher.

Ultimately, Corbridge’s main influence on me was as a role model. Some young men wanted to be James Bond; I wanted to be Stuart Corbridge. And now I am, except with more jokes, less fist-clenching, and no such thing as society.

I ran a session for PhD students yesterday on ‘Impostor Phenonemon’.

• Do you suspect that you got where you are by luck or by fooling people?
• Do you feel that you don’t deserve your success?
• Are you worried that you will be uncovered as a fraud?

These feelings are very common. They are more common in women than men, but they flourish in academia – for both women and men.

Curiously, the only one who secretly feels like an impostor is the woman in the middle

There’s a test you can take to see how much of an impostor you feel. The test is not very good. For example, question 10 (‘It’s hard for me to accept compliments or praise about my intelligence or accomplishments’) also tests how British you are. And the scale for answers is odd: points 2 to 4 on the five-point scale are about frequency (‘rarely’, ‘sometimes’, ‘often’) while points 1 and 5 are about truth (‘not at all true’, ‘very true’).

Still, the figures are in the right ballpark, at least for me. I got 61 yesterday, but I think I would have got 78 during and soon after my PhD. Both results fall short of full impostor phenomenon (80 and above): I would answer ‘no’ to the three questions at the top of this thread.

Nonetheless, I used to worry that my work was very obvious and that anyone could have done it if they wanted. When I said this to my mentor, he said:

90% of academics worry that they are charlatans and the other 10% are.

Those numbers are wrong: there are academics who don’t worry that they are charlatans and certainly aren’t. But it was good to hear that other people have the same fear. Indeed, yesterday’s session on Impostor Phenomenon was partly about showing PhD students that these feelings are normal, they are common, there is no need to suffer in silence, and there are ways forward.

Here are a few tips we found in yesterday’s session. (Please add your own in the Comments section!)

• If you’re worried about whether your work is good enough, ask for more feedback: maybe your supervisors just haven’t told you. Of course, maybe your work isn’t yet good enough – as with many PhD students! That’s common, and fixable.
• It’s normal to spend time on something that turns out to be a dead-end. We don’t always know that in advance. Don’t blame yourself for ‘wasting’ this time. But do talk with your supervisors if you are worried that you might be going down a dead-end.
• We can feel inadequate if we constantly compare ourselves to the best.
• Get a support network of other PhD students; use social media to find them if needs be.
• Feeling like a charlatan/impostor is not purely psychological: it can depend on your context, which you can change.

And there are other things you can do to mitigate feelings of being a charlatan/impostor.

Importantly, these feelings can actually be fruitful. Some academics think they’re great when they’re not; your self-doubt can push you to do better. Some academics don’t like having their work criticised and may never hear the suggestions that lead to better work. It’s good to be nervous that people may spot problems with your ideas: it means you don’t already assume that your ideas are right.

I don’t think we usually give enough guidance on what it feels like to do a PhD. I’ve looked at six books on ‘how to do a PhD’, and it’s striking that only two of them say much about the psychology of doing a PhD: Harriet Churchill and Teela Sanders, Getting Your PhD, and to a lesser extent Estelle Phillips and Derek Pugh, How To Get a PhD (5th edition). (The best book for the thesis itself remains, in my view, Patrick Dunleavy, Authoring a PhD.)

And finally, it’s worth stressing that these feelings are often most intense among undergraduate students who feel out of depth at university. But I’ll discuss that another time.