Every supervisor learns the same lesson early: a masters student and a doctoral candidate are different working relationships, not the same student at different lengths. The masters student needs a mapped route and steady checkpoints; the doctoral candidate needs to own the map and tolerate long stretches without you. Confusing the two is where supervision goes wrong, and it shows up as stalled chapters, missed milestones or a thesis that never lands. This guide lays out the real difference and how to run it.
Thesis Studio is Lectimax's module for supervision at cohort and portfolio scale. It gives you a shared view of every student's milestones so you can keep each relationship distinct. You define what a milestone means and what good looks like.
What does a masters supervision look like?
Masters supervision is, for most of the year, a structured project with a deadline. The student has a defined scope, a research question you helped narrow, and a schedule with hard checkpoints. Your job is to keep them moving through a route someone else has walked. You set the milestones, you check the drafts, you intervene early because the window is short. A masters thesis is a demonstration that the student can complete a piece of research to a standard, not that they can define a research programme from nothing.
The practical consequence is that you meet often and you set the agenda. A masters student who disappears for three weeks has usually stalled rather than advanced, and the cost of recovering is high near a deadline. Regular, short check ins beat occasional long ones.
What changes when the student is a doctoral candidate?
A doctoral candidate is training to become an independent researcher, so the relationship inverts. The student is meant to define the problem, choose the method and carry the project, and your role is to interrogate rather than to drive. You push back on a weak research question instead of fixing it; you ask what the literature says instead of telling them. The pace is slower and the milestones are coarser, because the work is about depth and originality that cannot be scheduled in weeks.
Independence does not mean absence. Doctoral candidates still need you, but they need a different kind of you: a critical reader and a gatekeeper of standards, not a project manager. The hardest thing is knowing when to let a student fail small, so they learn before the committee finds the flaw.
Where do the milestones differ?
Masters milestones are short and mechanical. They run from proposal to ethics to first chapter to draft to final. Each one is a gate you can check with a rubric in a few minutes. Doctoral milestones are fewer and weightier. They are a defensible research question, a complete literature map, a method that survives scrutiny and a draft that stands up to an examiner. Each of those is itself a project.
The real difference is what a milestone means. For a masters student a passed milestone means the route is still open. For a doctoral candidate a passed milestone means the research question has survived your best attempt to break it, which is a much higher bar.
How much independence should each level carry?
Masters students get limited independence within a clear frame. You choose the feasible scope, you approve the method and you set the pace. You intervene the moment the work drifts. Too much freedom at this level produces a diffuse thesis and a panicked student. Doctoral candidates get wide independence inside a firm standard. You hold the quality bar and the rigour of the argument, but the student owns the choices, the setbacks and the timetable. The PhD is the last time someone is graded on a long piece of work, and it works best when the student is the one steering.
Getting the level wrong cuts both ways. Supervise a masters student like a doctoral candidate and you will carry a thesis that collapses at the deadline. Supervise a doctoral candidate like a masters student and you train someone who cannot work alone, which is the one outcome the degree is meant to rule out.
How do you run both across a whole cohort?
The difficulty is rarely one student; it is twenty at different stages at once. Each needs a different kind of attention, and the memory of who is due what stops being reliable around the fifth student. The answer is a shared, current picture of every milestone rather than a stack of individual diaries. When you can see the whole cohort at a glance, you notice the masters student who has not moved and the doctoral candidate who is quietly stuck on a method. You direct your attention where it matters.
You make the calls. A cohort view keeps every student's state in one place and turns supervision from a set of private conversations into a portfolio you can actually run.
FAQ
Do masters and PhD students need different checklists? Yes, and the difference is the pace and the bar. Masters milestones are short gates on a fixed route; doctoral milestones are heavier and define the research itself.
Can the same supervision habit cover both? The rituals overlap, but the centre of gravity does not. Meet a masters student to keep them moving; meet a doctoral candidate to interrogate their thinking.
Is Thesis Studio a substitute for my judgement as a supervisor? No. It keeps every student's milestones visible so you can supervise them as the distinct projects they are. You keep the call on what each milestone requires.
If you run supervision across a portfolio of students, the Thesis Studio explanation walks through the workflow, and the features page shows how it fits the rest of Lectimax. New accounts get 200 free credits to try it.