Abstract: Supervisory meetings are a crucial aspect of graduate studies and have a strong impact on the success of research and supervisor-student relations, yet there is little research on supporting this relationship and even less on understanding the nature of this collaboration and user requirements. Thus, we conducted an exploratory study on the choice and success of tools and practices used by supervisors and students for meetings, for the purpose of making informed design recommendations. Results of a series of five focus groups and three individual interviews yielded three themes on: 1) supervisory style diversity, 2) distributed cognition demands, and 3) feedback channel dissonance. Student-supervisor collaboration has many unexplored areas for design and as a first step our work highlights potential areas for supportive designs and future research.