The aim is to encourage staff to reflect on supervision practice, develop and/or enhance their skills and network with other supervisors from the UNSW community.

Supervisor Training Workshops for staff new to supervision will be offered in Semester 2 as follows. The workshops will be faciliated by Dr Margaret Kiley, Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Educational Development and Academic Methods at ANU and will include cover:

http://www.fIRST.edu.au

UNSW has recently subscribed to the fIRST (for Improving Research Supervision and Training) website. This website provides access to a range of resources which can be used by supervisors, postgraduate coordinators and students. Resources available include:

To access the members' pages, you will need to type in your user (login) name and password. UNSW's user name and password are:

username: unsw
password: unsw2052nsw

A recent article in Nature outlined what constitutes good scientific mentoring, drawing on evidence from competitions for Nature's awards for creative mentoring in science.

The article was written by UNSW Emeritus Professor Adrian Lee (former Pro Vice-Chancellor Education and Quality Improvement UNSW), Carina Dennis (Australasian correspondent of Nature) and Philip Campbell (editor-in-chief of Nature and founder of the Nature mentoring awards).

The article provides information on what makes a good mentor including personal characteristics; teaching and communication; building communities; skill development, and networking.

The full article can be found in Nature: Volume 447 Number 7146.