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Preliminary organisation

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Supervisions are arranged very early in the term (or often before the beginning) so, if you wish to supervise, you should start looking for supervision work well before lectures start. If you are a member of a college that takes undergraduates it is considered courteous to offer your services first to the Director of Studies at your own college. If they cannot offer you anything directly they may pass your name on to an organiser of a Part II `circus'. (Even if you belong to a graduate college it may be best to start with with your own Director of Studies, if such a person exists, since he or she may well have good connections with an undergraduate college.) If this does not work, your Research Supervisor may be able to help (though such assistance is not part of their duties towards you). Both Departments maintain notice boards for advertising demands for, and offers of, supervision work². In addition, there is a Moodle site where directors of studies advertise supervisions and supervisors offer their services.

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Three hours of supervision use up one afternoon a week. Most people will find that their main work does not suffer, and may, indeed, benefit from one afternoon a week doing something different. Six hours of supervision use up two afternoons a week. If afternoon seminars and morning lectures already eat deeply into your time, this may well be too much, though some people can manage this amount of supervision without their main work suffering. If you find yourself doing more than six hours of supervision a week on a regular basis you are almost certainly doing too much for the health of your research. In addition, many scholarships and awards specifically limit the amount of teaching you may do to six hours a week. The same restriction applies to all students studying for a Cambridge PhD³.

There is another way of approaching the matter. Observe that the amount of preparation required is much the same whether you give one or three supervisions. There are thus substantial economies of scale in giving several supervisions on the the same exercises but, as the number of supervisions increases, you will become aware of the diseconomies of boredom and staleness (`Have I already told them that, or was it the previous pair?'). Most supervisors find that if they give such a series of supervisions they are happiest with the second or third supervision and that their satisfaction with their own performance then tails off.

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Many Directors of Studies prefer, if possible, to use experienced supervisors for the general first and second year supervisions where bad supervising will do most harm. Frequently the director of studies will do mainly first and second year supervisions in order to get to know their undergraduates. Whenever possible, also, they use members of their own college who will, in theory, and usually in practice, feel personally involved in the success of their college's candidates. On the other hand, few, if any, colleges can fill their third year supervision requirements from their own resources and many specialist subjects have only a limited pool of potential supervisors. Thus the majority of supervisors start by taking on specialist Part II or Part III supervising. In many ways, this is the easiest work for new supervisors: the material is fresh in their minds; the students are more used to handling supervisors; and there are fewer of the unfamiliar and difficult `how best to teach this material' sort of problems.

If you are a Cambridge graduate, you are probably familiar with the material in each course. Otherwise, you can find the contents of each undergraduate mathematics course (closely specified) in schedules which bear the lapidary phrase `These schedules are minimal for lecturing and maximal for examining'. Copies of the schedules are given to each undergraduate and further copies are available from the Faculty Office in CMS. Once a course has been running for a couple of years the Tripos questions will help flesh out the Schedules and should also be consulted. Copies of the last few Tripos papers are available on the Web Site http://www.maths.cam.ac.uk/ppa/. Copies of the last 30 years' Tripos papers are held in the library. If you are in doubt as to how the lecturer intends to cover part of the course ask the lecturer or consult the lecture notes of one of your better students.⁴

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