Supervisor meeting notes: a template, an agenda and what to do after

The short answer: what supervisor meeting notes need

Supervisor meeting notes, or meeting minutes, are a short record of what you and your supervisor agreed. If your department has its own supervision record form, use it. If not, your notes only need to answer five questions:

• When you met and who was there.
• What you discussed, as topics, in the order of the agenda.
• What you decided, in words as exact as you can manage.
• Who does what, by when: the action items, each with an owner and a deadline.
• When you meet next and what should be ready by then.

Half a page is enough. Notes that run too long stop being read, even by the person who wrote them.

A supervisor meeting notes template

Copy the structure below into a document or wherever you organize your work. The example is made up, from a thesis about school gardens.

Decisions and action items are the rows that matter most. If the meeting is rushed, write down at least those two.

Before the meeting: building the agenda

The agenda is the list of what you need to settle in the conversation. It comes almost ready from the last meeting's notes:

1. Reread the last action items. Mark what is done, what is in progress and what got stuck, and why.
2. List what moved since then: sections written, data collected, papers read.
3. Write down the questions only your supervisor can answer. Good questions are specific: “should I stay with public schools or add private ones?” gets you further than “what did you think of the chapter?”.
4. Bring a proposal for every problem. If you are stuck choosing a method, come with two options and what speaks for each one.
5. Order by importance. If time runs out, whatever is at the bottom is what can wait.

Send the agenda and the material ahead of time. How far ahead depends on what it is: a paragraph can be read on the spot, a chapter takes days. In your first meeting, agree on that lead time and on the channel: email, comments on the document or a message.

During the meeting: what to write down

Do not try to transcribe the conversation. Write down decisions, deadlines and reading suggestions, with the author's surname and the year so you can find the text later.

• When a piece of advice is vague, ask for the example: “do you mean section 2.3 should come before 2.2?”.
• Before you wrap up, read the action items and deadlines out loud. It is the most useful minute of the meeting.
• Set the next meeting while you are still talking, even if the date changes later.
• If you want to record the meeting, ask first.

After: send the notes and turn what you agreed into tasks

Clean up your notes the same day or the next, while you still remember, and send them to your supervisor with a simple line: “Here are my notes from our meeting. Let me know if anything differs from what we agreed.” It prevents misunderstandings and builds a record that helps at your proposal defense, your final defense and whenever someone asks “didn't we decide that already?”.

Then turn every action item into a task with an owner and a deadline, on the board or list where you organize your work. An action item that never becomes a task tends to come back whole at the next meeting.

How often to meet

There is no general rule: it depends on your program, your stage and your supervisor. What works is agreeing on it in your first meeting and revisiting it when the stage changes. Some practical reference points:

• Weekly or every two weeks in the deciding stages, such as narrowing the topic, choosing the method and preparing for a proposal or final defense.
• Monthly in long, more independent stages, such as data collection or writing a chapter.
• As a group, when your supervisor has several students: a lab or group meeting for shared updates and a shorter one-on-one for each project.

A meeting with nothing new to show still counts. Saying “I'm stuck here” early costs less than finding the problem the day before a deadline.

When your supervisor does not reply

Supervisors often follow several students at once, on top of teaching and their own research. Often, silence is a lack of time. Before you conclude anything else, make replying easy:

1. Shorten the request. A message with one clear question and the date you need an answer by is easier to answer than a long email with a chapter attached.
2. Offer times. Instead of “can we talk?”, suggest two or three slots for a 20-minute conversation.
3. Follow up politely after a week, replying to the same message so the context stays together.
4. Use the other channels you agreed on: the group meeting, office hours or a co-supervisor, if you have one.
5. Talk to your program if the silence goes on and a deadline is at risk: the director of graduate studies (or the equivalent in your program, such as the graduate program director or postgraduate research tutor), or whoever your handbook names. Bring the dates of your messages; your notes and emails show what you tried.

If things do not improve, changing supervisors is an option, with rules that vary from one university to another and are usually set out in the program's handbook, regulations or code of practice. Read them before you talk to your program.

What about research group meeting minutes?

The structure is the same, with two extra cares. List who attended, because not everyone will be at every meeting. And keep decisions that apply to the whole group, such as a file naming convention or the authorship rule for papers, apart from those about a single project. Group decisions deserve their own record, easy to find months later.

How to record the meeting in Kanban Pesquisa

In Kanban Pesquisa, meeting minutes live in the same project as your tasks, on every plan, the free one included:

1. In the project, open Documents, choose Add and then New record.
2. Give it a title, such as “Supervision meeting 4”, and choose the Meeting minutes type and the date.
3. Write the discussion and decisions in Record / minutes / decision and the action items in Follow-ups.
4. Create a task for each action item, with Owners and a Deadline, and tick the minutes under Linked documents. The task then shows the meeting's text and follow-ups.

To see only the minutes, open Filters in Documents and pick the Meeting minutes type. They become a history of your work for your proposal and final defense. Your supervisor can follow along with Viewer access, which does not count toward the free plan's limit of 5 editors per project.

To see how it looks before creating an account, the example project opens without signing in and has meeting minutes in Documents.