Comments: Development of an early career academic supervisor in Statistics - a discussion on a guiding rubric

We would like to congratulate the authors on an insightful and interesting paper, addressing a contemporary topic for the continued existence of Statistics as an independent discipline in South Africa. In this commentary we express our support of the need of a guiding rubric, with some important additional views. We specifically and briefly focus on the identity crisis of Statistics, the need for mentoring networks of academics, funding of PhD students and concluding with some thoughts on guiding rubrics.