phd advisor does not care

Want to Get your Dissertation Accepted?

Discover how we've helped doctoral students complete their dissertations and advance their academic careers!

Join 200+ Graduated Students

Get Your Dissertation Accepted On Your Next Submission

Get customized coaching for:.

• Crafting your proposal,
• Collecting and analyzing your data, or
• Preparing your defense.

Trapped in dissertation revisions?

What to do if your phd advisor is ignoring you, published by steve tippins on june 27, 2019 june 27, 2019.

Last Updated on: 7th June 2024, 04:40 am

“My PhD Advisor is ignoring me!” I hear this type of statement surprisingly often from students and clients. While sometimes it’s just a case of nerves on the part of the student, there are times when someone’s PhD advisor really is ignoring them.

In this post I will try to explain why your advisor might be ignoring you and possible actions that you can take.

What to Do if Your PhD Advisor Is Ignoring You

• Understand university policy
• Write your Chair
• Set up a phone call
• Ask for a new committee member

Jump to the Action Steps here.

Why is my PhD Advisor Ignoring Me?

Why do advisors ignore their students? Some simply feel that doctoral work should be an independent process–and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Others may be underpaid and overloaded with work. In rare cases some may actually be negligent. Either way, you’ll want to do something about it. But first let’s explore the possible reasons why your PhD advisor might be ignoring you.

Nervous tension

Is your PhD advisor actually ignoring you? It does happen, but if you’ve been living off of coffee and instant noodles and staring at your computer screen 23 hours a day for the past week, it may be worth evaluating if your perception is accurate.

The dissertation writing process can be enormously stressful. Sometimes, a student working late will discover a critical problem with their paper and email their advisor about it at 10 pm. 

They’ll wake up at 6:30 am to start work again and check their email, but there’s no response. They have breakfast and check again at 7:15. By 8 am, they’ve checked their email four times, each with increasing anxiety about the lack of response. 

Meanwhile, the professor is maintaining a healthy work-life balance by not checking his or her email outside of working hours. Depending on how many students a professor is advising and how many other responsibilities they have, they may not even get back to you within 24 hours. 

It’s a good idea to check in with your advisor when you start working together about what sort of response times you can expect, and how they prefer to communicate.

Perhaps email works best for them, or maybe they prefer to schedule a phone call. Maybe Wednesday afternoons are a particularly good time to be in touch. The more you can communicate with them about what works best, the better relationship you will have.

A culture of less support

Many doctoral students go through what I call the  “go wander in the woods and see what you find” model. See my post on this topic. Basically you are left on your own to find what you need to complete your study. While this can be overwhelming, it’s also incredibly rewarding to know that you did it almost all by yourself. 

Becoming a scholar capable of independent thought and research is part of the purpose of the dissertation requirement, so you may receive less support than you’re used to simply as a natural part of the process. Professors may expect you to be capable of handling many aspects of the process on your own.

However, you shouldn’t be left totally in the dark. You have a PhD advisor for a reason–because you need support designing your study, settling on your methodology, and refining your research questions. There is a difference between hand-holding and providing critical support, and a good advisor will understand this and be available for your needs, within reason.

Lower salaries

An additional factor to consider is how institutions pay advisors . At many schools, faculty are part time/adjuncts. This is very cost efficient for the school as minimal benefits are paid and tenure is not part of the equation. 

Under this scenario your advisor may be getting paid something in the neighborhood of $100 a month to work with you. This number may seem very low based upon your tuition dollars but it is very close to actual figures at several institutions (this could explain some of the turnover that you see among faculty).

With numbers like these, faculty may ration their availability to match compensation levels. I have never heard this stated overtly but in an economically rational world it would be easy to see this happen. Regardless of whether it is benign neglect or rational economic behavior, the end result is you waiting for responses.

What You Can Do if Your PhD Advisor is Ignoring You

If you find yourself in a situation where you are feeling neglected or that your submissions seem to have fallen into an abyss, there are some things that you can do. Don’t escalate to the last option immediately; there could be a legitimate reason for a delay and you don’t want to burn any bridges unnecessarily. 

Here are the steps you can take if your PhD advisor is ignoring you.

1. Understand university policy and gently hold people to it

Before you start contacting people, I suggest that you look into your school’s policy regarding document review times. Most schools have a policy that work must be returned within a certain time period. 

If you find that you are still within the allotted time then you will have to be patient and work on other things (for example, you can never spend enough time reviewing the literature). If, however, you find that your Chair/committee has exceeded the allotted time then move on to the next step.

2. Write your Chair 

Sometimes people forget or situations beyond their control arise. Respectfully reach out to your Chair and ask about the status of your most recent submission. This may get things moving and get you where you want to be.

3. Set up a phone call

If an email does not get the desired results, set up a call with your Chair. A phone call can allow you to express your concerns in a respectful way and let your Chair. Sometimes this is all that’s needed to get things back on track. 

4. Complain

If you still feel your PhD advisor is ignoring you, then it is time to bring your concerns to the attention of your academic advisor and perhaps the program director (or whatever title your school uses). 

Schools do not like to have students complain and when they do they usually take action. Your Chair does not like to hear from his/her boss that there have been complaints. This can clear things up quickly.  However, I urge you to exhaust all the other options first.

5. Ask for a new committee member

After all options have been exercised the last thing to try is to ask for a new Chair. Be aware that schools are reluctant to do this and even if they do, it can cause a delay as a new Chair is brought up to speed.

There are times when things move more slowly than expected. Some seem to be systemic and other times people need to be prodded to help things move forward. This is your degree, so it is up to you to both stay on top of things and remember to start with kindness. It really is true that catch more flies with honey. Good luck!

PS. If you’re looking for additional support, I also coach students who are in the process of writing their dissertations. Or, if you’re in need of an editor for your dissertation , we’ve got you covered.

Steve Tippins

Steve Tippins, PhD, has thrived in academia for over thirty years. He continues to love teaching in addition to coaching recent PhD graduates as well as students writing their dissertations. Learn more about his dissertation coaching and career coaching services. Book a Free Consultation with Steve Tippins

Related Posts

Dissertation

Dissertation memes.

Sometimes you can’t dissertate anymore and you just need to meme. Don’t worry, I’ve got you. Here are some of my favorite dissertation memes that I’ve seen lately. My Favorite Dissertation Memes For when you Read more…

Surviving Post Dissertation Stress Disorder

The process of earning a doctorate can be long and stressful – and for some people, it can even be traumatic. This may be hard for those who haven’t been through a doctoral program to Read more…

PhD by Publication

PhD by publication, also known as “PhD by portfolio” or “PhD by published works,” is a relatively new route to completing your dissertation requirements for your doctoral degree. In the traditional dissertation route, you have Read more…

How to Cope with a Problematic PhD Supervisor

• by James Hayton, PhD
• January 17th, 2022

Need help? Book a free introductory session

Why you (probably) shouldn’t do a phd, “i can’t contact my phd supervisor until i have something to show”.

“Is there any system that protects PhD candidates from having a problematic supervisor? For example, any ways to make complaints? Or would complaints not help but make the relationship worse?”

The simple answer is yes, usually there are ways to make formal complaints.

My view is that universities and supervisors have a responsibility to provide support, feedback and guidance to PhD students. There’s a trust that you place in them when you invest years of your life and possibly quite a lot of money in tuition fees, and they have a duty to provide adequate support in return.

If you’re not receiving that support, you’ve got to be assertive . You’ve got to speak up, and you’ve got to speak up early while there’s still time to find a potential solution rather than waiting until the last few months of your PhD when it might be too late.

If you don’t say anything because you’re afraid of their reaction, there will probably be much worse consequences later.

However, as you rightly point out, making a formal complaint to the university or to your department is likely to affect your relationship with your supervisor.

I think that it’s always best to try to resolve any issues directly with your supervisor, and formal complaints should really only be used as a last resort if you’ve made every reasonable attempt to sort things out, but the working relationship has completely broken down. At that point, it doesn’t really matter how they react because the relationship is already dead.

So how should you try to address problems in your relationship with your PhD supervisor?

The original question doesn’t specify what the problem is, so I’ll go through a few common issues and how you might be able to approach them.

Problem 1: A lack of contact

The first common problem is simply a lack of contact. This is especially common if you’re doing a PhD remotely and you’re entirely dependent on email for communication.

Sometimes this isn’t entirely the supervisor’s fault. Often I speak to students who say they emailed the supervisor three months ago but didn’t get a reply. They can then get stuck in a cycle of worry about whether the supervisor cares about the project or whether the work they sent was good enough.

But then when I ask if they’ve tried to follow up, often they say they’re afraid of appearing rude, or they don’t want to disturb their supervisor because they’re so busy and important.

But remember that academics struggle too. The day your email arrived, maybe they had 100 other emails in their inbox. Maybe they had a grant application deadline. Maybe they were about to reply and someone knocked on their door. And maybe they fully intended to get back to you and because they wanted to give you a considered reply they didn’t do it in the moment and then it slid further down their inbox.

Personally, I try to stay on top of my email, but sometimes things slip. It doesn’t mean anything that I haven’t replied, and It’s helpful to me if you follow up on a message I haven’t replied to.

So try not to project your fears onto your supervisor. Assume good intentions and just send a polite follow up.

If they consistently don’t reply, then yes, that’s a problem. What I would do is say that you would really value their input and whether it would be possible to have more frequent contact, whether there’s something you can do to make that easier… and if there’s still no response or if they say no or if they get angry, this is when you might consider trying to change supervisor.

Problem 2: Multiple supervisors & contradictory advice

You might have more than one supervisor. Maybe they aren’t communicating with each other or maybe they are giving you contradictory advice.

In this case it’s your responsibility to manage the communication, making sure that they are both copied into emails, and they each know what the other has said.

It’s also worth noting that, often, supervisors are giving you suggestions and it’s up to you to decide what to do with them. They will want you to have counter-suggestions, they will want you to have your own ideas and they will want you to make decisions.

So instead of seeing it as contradictory advice, maybe try to see it as a range of options that you can try, or even modify to come up with another option of your own

Then in your communication with both supervisors, you can say what you’re going to try first.

Problem 3: Harsh feedback

What if your supervisor keeps giving you overly harsh feedback ?

This can be difficult to take, especially if you’ve put a lot of work in and if you’re feeling a bit stressed. So there’s an emotional component that can sometimes affect the way you interpret feedback and it can make you feel demotivated and disengaged.

When you were an undergraduate and you submitted an essay you probably just received a grade and moved on. You weren’t expected to make any changes. But at PhD level, you’re learning to be a professional academic. And when professional academics submit a paper—unless they submit to a low quality journal that accepts anything—there will almost always be things they have to change in response to the reviewers comments.

That’s actually a good result, because a lot of the best journals completely reject the majority of submissions. So I can guarantee that your supervisor, no matter how good their publication record, will have had work rejected and they will have had harsh feedback. It’s not a personal judgement, It’s just part of the job and it’s necessary to improve your work and your writing.

What I’d suggest is really engaging with the feedback, possibly just one section at a time to make it a little bit easier, and making sure you really understand the points they’re making and asking them questions to clarify if necessary.

One of the biggest frustrations I hear from PhD supervisors is students not saying anything. Most supervisors would want you to ask questions, they would want you to tell them if there’s something you don’t understand and they would want you to discuss a point you disagree with.

So try to become an active participant in your feedback, rather than a passive recipient.

For more on this point, check out my video on dealing with harsh feedback .

What makes a good PhD supervisor?

Stay up to date

I offer one to one coaching in academic writing. Click below to learn more and book your introductory session.

share this with someone who needs it:

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Current ye@r *

Leave this field empty

PhD: An uncommon guide to research, writing & PhD life

By james hayton (2015).

PhD: an uncommon guide to research, writing & PhD life is your essential guide to the basic principles every PhD student needs to know.

Applicable to virtually any field of study, it covers everything from finding a research topic, getting to grips with the literature, planning and executing research and coping with the inevitable problems that arise, through to writing, submitting and successfully defending your thesis.

Useful links

About james hayton, phd, latest phd tips, academic writing coaching.

AI-free zone

All the text on this site (and every word of every video script) is written by me, personally, because I enjoy writing. I enjoy the challenges of thinking deeply and finding the right words to express my ideas. I do not advocate for the use of AI in academic research and writing, except for very limited use cases.

Why you shouldn't rely on AI for PhD research and writing

The false promise of AI for PhD research

Ten types of PhD supervisor relationships – which is yours?

Lecturer, Griffith University

Disclosure statement

Susanna Chamberlain does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Griffith University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

View all partners

It’s no secret that getting a PhD is a stressful process .

One of the factors that can help or hinder this period of study is the relationship between supervisor and student. Research shows that effective supervision can significantly influence the quality of the PhD and its success or failure.

PhD supervisors tend to fulfil several functions: the teacher; the mentor who can support and facilitate the emotional processes; and the patron who manages the springboard from which the student can leap into a career.

There are many styles of supervision that are adopted – and these can vary depending on the type of research being conducted and subject area.

Although research suggests that providing extra mentoring support and striking the right balance between affiliation and control can help improve PhD success and supervisor relationships, there is little research on the types of PhD-supervisor relationships that occur.

From decades of experience of conducting and observing PhD supervision, I’ve noticed ten types of common supervisor relationships that occur. These include:

The candidate is expected to replicate the field, approach and worldview of the supervisor, producing a sliver of research that supports the supervisor’s repute and prestige. Often this is accompanied by strictures about not attempting to be too “creative”.

Cheap labour

The student becomes research assistant to the supervisor’s projects and becomes caught forever in that power imbalance. The patron-client roles often continue long after graduation, with the student forever cast in the secondary role. Their own work is often disregarded as being unimportant.

The “ghost supervisor”

The supervisor is seen rarely, responds to emails only occasionally and has rarely any understanding of either the needs of the student or of their project. For determined students, who will work autonomously, the ghost supervisor is often acceptable until the crunch comes - usually towards the end of the writing process. For those who need some support and engagement, this is a nightmare.

The relationship is overly familiar, with the assurance that we are all good friends, and the student is drawn into family and friendship networks. Situations occur where the PhD students are engaged as babysitters or in other domestic roles (usually unpaid because they don’t want to upset the supervisor by asking for money). The chum, however, often does not support the student in professional networks.

Collateral damage

When the supervisor is a high-powered researcher, the relationship can be based on minimal contact, because of frequent significant appearances around the world. The student may find themselves taking on teaching, marking and administrative functions for the supervisor at the cost of their own learning and research.

The practice of supervision becomes a method of intellectual torment, denigrating everything presented by the student. Each piece of research is interrogated rigorously, every meeting is an inquisition and every piece of writing is edited into oblivion. The student is given to believe that they are worthless and stupid.

Creepy crawlers

Some supervisors prefer to stalk their students, sometimes students stalk their supervisors, each with an unhealthy and unrequited sexual obsession with the other. Most Australian universities have moved actively to address this relationship, making it less common than in previous decades.

Captivate and con

Occasionally, supervisor and student enter into a sexual relationship. This can be for a number of reasons, ranging from a desire to please to a need for power over youth. These affairs can sometimes lead to permanent relationships. However, what remains from the supervisor-student relationship is the asymmetric set of power balances.

Almost all supervision relationships contain some aspect of the counsellor or mentor, but there is often little training or desire to develop the role and it is often dismissed as pastoral care. Although the life experiences of students become obvious, few supervisors are skilled in dealing with the emotional or affective issues.

Colleague in training

When a PhD candidate is treated as a colleague in training, the relationship is always on a professional basis, where the individual and their work is held in respect. The supervisor recognises that their role is to guide through the morass of regulation and requirements, offer suggestions and do some teaching around issues such as methodology, research practice and process, and be sensitive to the life-cycle of the PhD process. The experience for both the supervisor and student should be one of acknowledgement of each other, recognising the power differential but emphasising the support at this time. This is the best of supervision.

There are many university policies that move to address a lot of the issues in supervisor relationships , such as supervisor panels, and dedicated training in supervising and mentoring practices. However, these policies need to be accommodated into already overloaded workloads and should include regular review of supervisors.

• professional mentoring
• PhD supervisors

2024 Vice-Chancellor's Research Fellowships

Head of Research Computing & Data Solutions

Community member RANZCO Education Committee (Volunteer)

Director of STEM

Chief Executive Officer

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• CAREER COLUMN
• 10 December 2021

Managing up: how to communicate effectively with your PhD adviser

• Lluís Saló-Salgado 0 ,
• Angi Acocella 1 ,
• Ignacio Arzuaga García 2 ,
• Souha El Mousadik 3 &
• Augustine Zvinavashe 4

Lluís Saló-Salgado is a PhD candidate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. Twitter: @lluis_salo.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Angi Acocella is a PhD candidate in the Center for Transportation & Logistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. LinkedIn: @angi-acocella.

Ignacio Arzuaga García is a PhD student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. LinkedIn: @ignacioarzuaga.

Souha El Mousadik is a PhD student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.

Augustine Zvinavashe is a PhD candidate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.

When you start a PhD, you also begin a professional relationship with your PhD adviser. This is an exciting moment: interacting with someone for whom you might well have great respect and admiration, but who might also slightly intimidate you.

Access options

Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals

Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription

24,99 € / 30 days

cancel any time

Subscribe to this journal

Receive 51 print issues and online access

185,98 € per year

only 3,65 € per issue

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-03703-z

This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged .

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Related Articles

Why you need an agenda for meetings with your principal investigator

• Research management

The grassroots organizations continuing the fight for Ukrainian science

Career Feature 11 SEP 24

How a struggling biotech company became a university ‘spin-in’

Career Q&A 10 SEP 24

The human costs of the research-assessment culture

Career Feature 09 SEP 24

How can I publish open access when I can’t afford the fees?

Career Feature 02 SEP 24

Tales of a migratory marine biologist

Career Feature 28 AUG 24

Nail your tech-industry interviews with these six techniques

Career Column 28 AUG 24

Why I’m committed to breaking the bias in large language models

Career Guide 04 SEP 24

Binning out-of-date chemicals? Somebody think about the carbon!

Correspondence 27 AUG 24

Open Rank Tenure-track/Tenured Faculty Positions in the Department of Genetic and Genomic Sciences

Seeking expertise in areas including Cancer Genetics; Artificial Intelligence; Drug Development & Clinical Trials; Functional Genomics; & Gene Editing

New York City, New York (US)

Mount Sinai Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences

Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) of Robotics

The Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering (D-MAVT, www.mavt.ethz.ch) at ETH Zurich invites applications for the above-mentioned position.

Zurich city

Gathering Outstanding Overseas Talents, Innovating to Lead the Future

The 16th Peiyang Young Scientist Forum and the 2024 Tianjin University High-Level Forum for University Faculty, Postdoctoral Fellows...

Tianjin, China

Tianjin University (TJU)

High-level Talent Recruitment dedicated to teaching & research

College of Water Sciences, Beijing Normal University

Beijing, China

OSU Neurology Clayton C. Wagner Parkinson’s Disease Research Professorship

Columbus, Ohio

The Ohio State University (OSU)

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

Sai Kanth Dacha

Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Columbia University

• New York City
• Google Scholar

What to Look for in a Potential PhD Advisor

12 minute read

Published: July 17, 2020

“Is he ghosting me?”

“Is she mad at me? Did I say something wrong?”

“Am I good enough? Does s/he even recognize and appreciate what I’m doing?”

Although these sound like the thoughts of someone worried if their partner/spouse is mad at them, these are also the kinds of thoughts that PhD students riddled with Impostor Syndrome often have about their advisors/PIs.

This apparent similarity might seem strange at first sight, but there is often a deeper reality to it: a PhD advisor, and by extension the relationship that a student has with their advisor, has enormous influence over the graduate school experience of the student. Just as a romantic relationship requires effort, communication, honesty and integrity, so does the relationship with one’s PhD advisor.

The struggle is real

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but doing a PhD is quite challenging, especially these days. Grad school application processes are notoriously expensive. Acceptance rates tend to average around 5-10% for STEM fields in the US , and can be low as 2–5% for some programs. International students have the added complication of getting a visa: in 2018, rejection rate for non-immigrant F-1 visa was around 35% . Once they’re in, graduate students world over are often not compensated well enough. In the face of ever-increasing cost of living, this leads to financial stress . Anxiety, stress, impostor syndrome, loneliness, concerns about the future, funding issues are only some of the all-too-familiar challenges that PhD students have to face on a daily basis; all while trying to do something completely new and original that no one in the world has ever done before! It is perhaps no wonder that PhD dropout rates in the US are as high as 50% .

Program structures and academic supervision also have a big role to play. Specifically, the relationship that you have with your advisor can greatly influence your PhD experience. The stories that I’ve listened to from my friends and colleagues over the past few years have made me realize exactly how bad things can get. Together with my own advisor struggles, these stories have given me a better perspective now on what it is that one should look for in a potential PhD advisor. This article is an attempt to give words to my thoughts on this subject — while my grad school experiences are still fresh in memory — in hopes that it will be useful to a prospective PhD student that is looking to find a thesis advisor.

The “Obvious”

1.1) research areas, type of work:.

Assuming acceptance into a PhD program, the first “obvious” thing to look for in a potential advisor is their research interests. Often times, incoming PhD students already have a few research groups in mind before they join the program. This is good practice, but is far from sufficient.

Perhaps the best advice that I’ve received on this topic is from my current advisor, when I first met him before joining his group: look for what it is that you would do on a day-to-day basis and see if you find that exciting, rather than make a choice purely based on research topics. Are you an experimentalist and enjoy hands-on work? If so, would you want to do system-level work or are you more interested in device fabrication? Or are you more inclined to do computational or theoretical work? Asking these questions in addition to what area you want to work in can greatly help in deciding which research group to join.

1.2) Funding:

Funding for universities and scientific research is awfully lacking in many countries, and this is often reflected in the number of active researchers per million population. My own home country India, for instance, has only about 150 researchers per million . Availability of grant funds can vary from one field to another, but generally speaking, there isn’t enough to go around. I have known far too many of my own peers who have had to either TA (in addition to doing research) for multiple years on end, or switch groups because funds ran out. As a result, it is usually helpful to check with a potential advisor if they are willing to fund you for the entire duration of your PhD.

The Less Obvious (And underrated)

2.1) the human being:.

Professors, especially the more popular ones, are some times made out to be larger-than-life figures who can do no wrong. The fact of the matter is that they are human beings, and have personalities and flaws just like everybody else. This might not matter to most people that interact with them, but it does to their PhD students.

A professor that I once worked with drew pleasure from needlessly ridiculing some of his students in front of other people. Another professor I knew would yell at his students as though they were his servants. The advisor of one of my friends is infamous for making his students spend many days on a report or a proposal, only to organize an 8 hour meeting soon after to rephrase everything the way he likes it. Another friend of mine has an advisor that has consistently given preferential treatment to one specific student in the group that she seemingly liked better. I could go on, but you get the point. In all of these cases, the personality of the advisor only affected their student(s), and no one else.

This is not to say that all advisors are bad people; in fact, in my experience, many are good people. But the point is, whether an advisor is a decent human being or not is often overlooked by many before they decide to work for him/her. Does s/he seem like a reasonable individual? Will they let you stay home if you fall sick, or will they expect you to come in no matter what? Do they seem like someone that would care for your mental health and your progress? These questions are important ones that both current and new graduate students must start asking.

As with toxic personal relationships, toxic professional relationships with PhD advisors are bad for students’ mental health. Suicide rates are high enough among PhD students as it is, and the last thing that you’d want as a first-year PhD student is to end up in an advisor situation that could make you regret your choice of doing a PhD. It is therefore a good idea to do your due diligence.

Some of this is hard to assess before joining a group, of course. But talking to current group members and asking the right questions can give you a good sense of things. This, of course, is still not a sufficient enough or a clear-cut enough solution, but it’s a good start. And if you somehow do hear something about what kind of a person s/he is, you would know to not neglect that information.

2.2) The Researcher:

Some researchers prioritize publishing as many papers as possible over all else, and go after quantity over quality. In my field, I have seen competitor groups that try to publish a new paper for every slightly-different result that they get in the lab. More often than not, this has made me desperate to get my work out as quickly as possible (in other words, prematurely). About a year ago, I insisted to my advisor that we submit some experimental observations that I made in the lab to a popular conference in my field. He said no. I persisted, and he still said no. He was not convinced that the data that I had collected was good enough to be published anywhere, despite my confidence in it.

The publication-starved graduate student in me was disappointed and a little heart-broken, but I later realized that he had taught me an important lesson about scientific integrity. (The data that I was so confident about later turned out to be not so reliable after all!) In my view, the kind of researcher that your advisor is will greatly shape what kind of researcher you will go on to be.

2.3) Willingness to Invest in You:

Time : There is some times a misconception among the general public that professorship can be a laid-back job, but most professors that I’ve interacted with are incredibly busy people. In addition to managing multiple research projects, students and postdocs, they are often shooting for new grants, teaching courses, are on various committees and also taking care of their kids and family. While part of their unavailability is therefore more than understandable, some advisors don’t end up making enough time for their students at all. Whether or not you actually get advice from your advisor on a regular basis is key to your growth as a researcher.

Resources: Would a potential advisor invest in your learning and training, or would they rather have you do only what matters for churning out papers? The whole point of a PhD is for you to learn about a subject in as much depth and breadth (in that order) as possible. It is therefore crucial that your advisor gives you the space and opportunities to learn and grow. This could mean anything from providing access to learning material to letting you attend summer schools and academic conferences.

Both of these are important aspects for a good learning experience, and it is a good idea to discuss them with current students of the advisor before making a decision.

2.4) Expectations and Communication:

New professors are often under pressure to publish at a faster pace to be able to keep their jobs. This usually means greater pressure on his/her graduate students to work harder. Older/tenured professors are a bit more “relaxed” in this regard. Neither is necessarily better than the other for a graduate student, but the potential workload and pressure is something to consider. Make sure you know what is expected of you before making the commitment, especially if you have other responsibilities (other jobs, kid(s) to take care of etc.).

Part of doing so is to be able to communicate with your advisor freely. For a long time, a friend of mine has had issues communicating her concerns with her advisor about sexist micro-aggressions directed at her by certain members of the group. The advisor was a woman too, which would ideally have meant that my friend should have felt safe to voice her concerns. But she didn’t. The reason there was simple: the advisor was far too detached from the individuals that made up the group, and communication between her and her students (especially my friend) was non-existent.

The moral of the story is that being able to communicate with your advisor freely about anything and everything is important, to say the least. To those that aren’t going through the PhD experience themselves, this might seem like asking for too much, but as any grad student that has suffered from issues such as this would tell you, communication matters.

Also “Obvious” (But overrated)

3.1) “connections”/”popularity”/h-index:.

It could be tempting to readily join any “popular”/highly-published/well-connected professor’s group if they will have you, but this could prove counterproductive if you have not paid close enough attention to the more fundamental aspects that I’ve mentioned above. The professor that I mentioned before — the one that likes to ridicule his students needlessly in front of others — is extremely well-known in a worldwide scientific collaboration. He is one of the most brilliant people that I have ever met. But I would not want to do my PhD with him.

3.2) University Affiliation:

This is a popular one too. Wouldn’t it be “cooler” to introduce yourself as a PhD student at Harvard or Cornell rather than one at Florida State? It probably would, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is better. It is true that Harvard or Cornell might offer you a better overall student experience than some lesser-known universities (not that Florida State isn’t well-known), but there are so many more important things for a PhD. In addition to what I’ve already mentioned above, research environment in the department, access to research facilities and potential collaborators are much more crucial for a well-rounded research experience — irrespective of whether that is at an Ivy League school or some other. These factors are not relevant for undergraduate studies, but for graduate research, they most certainly are.

It is easy (and tempting) to fall into the illusion that h-indices and rankings matter a lot, but more often than not, that illusion breaks as quickly as it comes once the PhD grind begins. Working with a well-connected advisor at an Ivy League school surely has its benefits, but only if you are able to get the support that you need from them to be able to get through grad school in one piece.

The Bottomline

If there is anything that you take away from this article, I hope it is that there is more than what meets the eye when it comes to choosing a PhD advisor. Beyond what the numbers will tell you, the human being that your future advisor is is something that matters. Deciding to do a PhD is a huge commitment. Perhaps today more than ever, graduate students all over the world are facing increasing difficulties with financial compensation, stress, work-life balance and mental health. Having a supportive advisor by your side can greatly help make these 5–6 (hopefully not more) years a better experience.

Checking all of these boxes might not be possible for many. An advisor situation without any issues whatsoever might be even more unlikely. I certainly have had my own challenges and struggles in this regard. I’ve realized that some level of friction and some compromise is almost inevitable, and that that is not necessarily a result of you or your advisor not doing enough, but rather a reflection of the difficulty and complexity of undertaking scientific research. But by asking the right questions before (or even after) making the commitment, and by demanding what is only fair, we not only help our individual selves, but we also help build an environment where the needs of graduate students are better heard. And that, in my view, ultimately only strengthens academia and the scientific community at large.

I am incredibly grateful for the extremely considerate human being and the brilliant researcher that my advisor is — in that order. My hope is that you will be too, for your future advisor.

Needless to say, this article is neither “expert advice” nor “peer-reviewed”. But it was written with the hope that at least some of it will be useful. All this is is the inner thoughts of a 4th year PhD student that has hit multiple roadblocks on his research and is waiting for his advisor to respond to some of his emails.

This story was originally published by the author on Medium .

You May Also Enjoy

Navigating the academic postdoc job market.

7 minute read

Published: July 02, 2023

Thoughts and advice on finding your way through the ever-confusing postdoc job market.

An Informal Guide for Ph.D. Interning During the Semester via the F-1 CPT

8 minute read

Published: January 11, 2022

A few months ago, I had faced the task of extending my summer employment at Nokia Bell Labs into the Fall semester. Little did I know that the process of getting work authorization for the semester and ensuring compliance with other rules is a bit of a minefield, especially for an international Ph.D. student in the U.S. like myself. There were many factors to weigh, and I spent a frustrating few weeks with little guidance to ensure that I’m in compliance with rules concerning everything from immigration and full-time student status to health benefits and tuition fee. Part of this difficulty stemmed from certain specific aspects of the situation that I was in, but a bigger part of it was also that there aren’t very many practical guides out there for international Ph.D. students wanting to do internships during the semester (which as I learnt recently, many are interested in). And so I decided to put together this informal and practical guide that might be helpful for students that might be in similar situations.

Emory Global Health Case Competition - A Reflection

1 minute read

Published: March 20, 2021

A reflection after taking part in the 2021 Emory Global Health Case Competition.

The Earth-bending Scale of the Great Lakes

Published: January 11, 2021

Did you know that you don’t need to be in space to observe the effects of earth’s curvature?

My PhD advisor is not being supportive at all.

My phd advisor is not being supportive enough. I am in my 4th year of my phd and planning to wrap up in 4-5 months (only if everything goes as planned and things work in my favour). My research and dissertation is the last thing on my advisor’s to-do list. And I am growing extremely frustrated about this. I do not know how to handle this situation. First she is never around. Only time she is available in her office is when she has a class. She even skips her office hours allotted for students. She does not respond to my emails, calls, text messages. So only way for me to get hold of her to look for her when she has a class. I have to wait outside her door. And when I see her during this time, she tells that she is extremely busy and cannot talk. Then I ask for a meeting time to discuss about my phd dissertation. Every single time she has been late to these meetings. And sometimes she has skipped the meetings totally without informing why she is not showing up. I really want go into her office and scream that I am not able to handle this anymore. But I have been as diplomatic as possible. When I send her some writeup, she takes weeks to review it. On an average it has taken at least 3 weeks to one month to receive her feedback on something. Its not that she has like 10 other students. I am her only PhD students and she has one other master’s student (he has the same complaint too). I some time think to quit and start working. I have reached a point that I want to be done with all this and move on. But I have invested so much time in this that I do not want to lose this. But I feel extremely helpless and at her mercy. Does anybody have any suggestions, recommendations for me? I am growing frustrated with my situation. I have a job in had from my previous internship and want to go and join. But I am stuck here, helpless.

This is a difficult, but unfortunately not uncommon, situation to be in. Firstly you need to try to book another meeting with her and tell her, face to face, honestly, that you need more support. If you've done this already, or if this doesn't work, then you need to write it down formerly in an email. If that doesn't change anything, then you need to go to the head of graduate studies, or staff involved in pastoral care, and ask for some assistance. (Ps 3-4 weeks to review work is fairly reasonable, but the rest is unacceptable.) Good luck and I hope you can resolve this. You've come too far with your PhD to give up now.

Hi, Sorry to hear you're having trouble with your supervisor. Do you only have one supervisor? Do you not have a team? Most institutions have supervisory teams of at least 3 to avoid scenarios like this. That should be your first port of call. Is there someone you can talk to in your department like a Head of School/pastoral tutor? Or even a graduate school administration member? This behaviour is not acceptable and you really need all the support you can get this close to the end. Try and find out who there is in your institution who can give you the support you need.

Everything you describe in your post sounds fairly normal to me. Professors not being around and not answering their e-mails is about the most common thing in academia. Several weeks to get comments on a writeup? I know cases where it took more than a year. The same is true for supervisors not being "supportive enough". A large portion of PhDs result from students essentially working by themselves with little or no supervision or support from anybody. Curiously, you entirely fail to mention in your post what the status of your research is. I would say this is the most important aspect. Do you have results? Publications? A convincing argument to make and presentable conclusions? Only when and if your supervisor is happy with those aspects, she will give her OK for you to wrap up. Frankly, your post sounds a little like you are trying to impose your personal timeline on your supervisor, no matter what the state of your work is. I can tell you that in the history of academia, this has worked exactly 0 times. Finally, at the end you say that you would really like to quit and take a job elsewhere. You should realize that this is a decision you have to make independently from how your PhD is going. If you want to quit, quit. If you want to finish your PhD, finish your PhD, which realistically might take you another year or two. Make up your mind - and then live with the consequences either way.

Post your reply

Postgraduate Forum

Masters Degrees

PhD Opportunities

Postgraduate Forum Copyright ©2024 All rights reserved

PostgraduateForum Is a trading name of FindAUniversity Ltd FindAUniversity Ltd, 77 Sidney St, Sheffield, S1 4RG, UK. Tel +44 (0) 114 268 4940 Fax: +44 (0) 114 268 5766

Welcome to the world's leading Postgraduate Forum

An active and supportive community.

Support and advice from your peers.

Your postgraduate questions answered.

Use your experience to help others.

Sign Up to Postgraduate Forum

Enter your email address below to get started with your forum account

Login to your account

Enter your username below to login to your account

Reset password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password

An email has been sent to your email account along with instructions on how to reset your password. If you do not recieve your email, or have any futher problems accessing your account, then please contact our customer support.

or continue as guest

Postgrad Forum uses cookies to create a better experience for you

To ensure all features on our website work properly, your computer, tablet or mobile needs to accept cookies. Our cookies don’t store your personal information, but provide us with anonymous information about use of the website and help us recognise you so we can offer you services more relevant to you. For more information please read our privacy policy

Machine Learning Blog | ML@CMU | Carnegie Mellon University

Statistics:.

• [ Submissions ]
• Submissions

Categories:

• Educational

[instagram-feed num=6 cols=6 imagepadding=0 disablemobile=true showbutton=false showheader=false followtext=”Follow @Mint_Theme”]

Perhaps It’s Not You It’s Them: PhD Student-Supervisor Relationships

• First Online: 15 September 2022

Cite this chapter

• Zoë J. Ayres 2  

9561 Accesses

This chapter explores the PhD Student-Supervisor relationship, outlining the role of a PhD Supervisor, discussing relationship management, and how to recognise signs of bullying and harassment if they occur.

(Trigger Warnings: bullying, harassment, sexual harassment)

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save.

• Get 10 units per month
• Download Article/Chapter or eBook
• 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
• Cancel anytime
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Depending on your country of study a PhD Supervisor may be called the Principal Investigator (PI) or you PhD Supervisor, or PhD Advisor. For the purpose of this chapter I will use “Supervisor”, to mean the academic in charge of your PhD research.

I count myself lucky every single day that I fell into the 76% category.

If you did not get this memo before starting your PhD, please do not worry. It is common for first-generation students to not get this information ahead of time.

Survivor bias is defined as the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility.

The sunk cost fallacy reasoning states that further investments or commitments are justified because the resources already invested will be lost otherwise . In the case of PhD study it can be that if we just “stick it out” and try to manage the abuse we are being subject to we will get our PhD. In reality, leaving and starting a PhD elsewhere may be beneficial.

van Rooij E, Fokkens-Bruinsma M, Jansen E (2021) Factors that influence PhD candidates’ success: the importance of PhD project characteristics. Stud Contin Educ 43(1):48–67

Article   Google Scholar  

Woolston C (2019) PhDs: the tortuous truth. Nature 575(7782):403–407

Pyke KD (2018) Institutional betrayal: inequity, discrimination, bullying, and retaliation in academia. Sociol Perspect 61(1):5–13

Vilkinas T (1998) Management of the PhD process: the challenging role of the supervisor. In: Quality in postgraduate research. University of Adelaide, Adelaide

Google Scholar  

Rose GL (2003) Enhancement of mentor selection using the ideal mentor scale. Res High Educ 44(4):473–494

Vilkinas T, Cartan G (2006) The integrated competing values framework: its spatial configuration. J Manage Dev 25(6):505–521

Guccione K, Hutchinson S (2021) Coaching and mentoring for academic development. Emerald Group, Bingley

Book   Google Scholar  

Hund AK, Churchill AC, Faist AM, Havrilla CA, Stowell SML, McCreery HF, Ng J, Pinzone CA, Scordato ESC (2018) Transforming mentorship in STEM by training scientists to be better leaders. Ecol Evol 8(20):9962–9974

Amundsen C, McAlpine L (2009) ‘Learning supervision’: trial by fire. Innov Educ Teach Int 46(3):331–342

Schimanski LA, Alperin JP (2018) The evaluation of scholarship in academic promotion and tenure processes: past, present, and future. F1000Research 71605

Bagilhole B (1993) How to keep a good woman down: an investigation of the role of institutional factors in the process of discrimination against women academics. Br J Sociol Educ 14(3):261–274

Aiston SJ, Jung J (2015) Women academics and research productivity: an international comparison. Gend Educ 27(3):205–220

Giacalone RA, Knouse SB, Montagliani A (1997) Motivation for and prevention of honest responding in exit interviews and surveys. J Psychol 131(4):438–448

Hall W, Liva S (2022) Falling through the cracks: graduate students’ experiences of mentoring absence. Can J Scholarsh Teach Learn 13(1):1–15

UK Research Councils Statement of Expectations for Postgraduate Training. https://www.ukri.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/UKRI-120721-StatementOfExpectationsPostGradTraining.pdf . Accessed 21 Jun 2022

Chamberlain S (2016) Ten types of PhD supervisor relationships - which is yours? https://theconversation.com/ten-types-of-phd-supervisor-relationships-which-is-yours-52967 . Accessed 21 Jun 2022

Clay M (2012) Sink or swim: drowning the next generation of research leaders? Aust Q 83(4):26–31

Bégin C, Géarard L (2013) The role of supervisors in light of the experience of doctoral students. Policy Futures Educ 11(3):267–276

Hemprich-Bennett D, Rabaiotti D, Kennedy E (2021) Beware survivorship bias in advice on science careers. Nature 598(7880):373–374

Parker-Jenkins M (2018) Mind the gap: developing the roles, expectations and boundaries in the doctoral supervisor–supervisee relationship. Stud High Educ 43(1):57–71

Moran H, Karlin L, Lauchlan E, Rappaport SJ, Bleasdale B, Wild L, Dorr J (2020) Understanding research culture: what researchers think about the culture they work in. Wellcome Trust, London, UK

Lee D (1998) Sexual harassment in PhD supervision. Gend Educ 10(3):299–312

Misawa M (2015) Cuts and bruises caused by arrows, sticks, and stones in academia: theorizing three types of racist and homophobic bullying in adult and higher education. Adult Learn 26(1):6–13

Cohen A, Baruch Y (2021) Abuse and exploitation of doctoral students: a conceptual model for traversing a long and winding road to academia. J Bus Ethics:1–18

Moss SE, Mahmoudi M (2021) STEM the bullying: an empirical investigation of abusive supervision in academic science. EClinicalMedicine 40101121

Gewin V (2021) How to blow the whistle on an academic bully. Nature 593(7858):299–301

Saló-Salgado L, Acocella A, Arzuaga García I, El Mousadik S, and Zvinavashe A (2021) Managing up: how to communicate effectively with your PhD adviser. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03703-z . Accessed 15 Feb 2022

The Wellbeing Thesis (2022) Managing your supervisor. https://thewellbeingthesis.org.uk/using-the-resources-available/managing-your-supervisor/ . Accessed 20 Feb 2022

Eley A, Jennings R (2005) Effective postgraduate supervision: improving the student/supervisor relationship. McGraw-Hill Education (UK), London, UK

Hockey J (1996) A contractual solution to problems in the supervision of PhD degrees in the UK. Stud High Educ 21(3):359–371

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Zoë J. Ayres

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Ayres, Z.J. (2022). Perhaps It’s Not You It’s Them: PhD Student-Supervisor Relationships. In: Managing your Mental Health during your PhD. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14194-2_9

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14194-2_9

Published : 15 September 2022

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-031-14193-5

Online ISBN : 978-3-031-14194-2

eBook Packages : Biomedical and Life Sciences Biomedical and Life Sciences (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

15 things to remember if you’ve started to hate your PhD

Jun 1, 2021

Have you checked out the rest of  The PhD Knowledge Base ? It’s home to hundreds more free resources and guides, written especially for PhD students. 

It’s entirely normal to hate your PhD from time to time. The further you travel on the PhD journey, the more you start to resent the thesis. 

That’s natural – spend years working on something, often with little immediate reward, and it natural that you will start to crumble. 

Here we’ve put together a list of 15 things to remind yourself of if you’re started to lose motivation. They’ll remind you of all that’s special about your thesis and, hopefully, inject some enthusiasm back into your relationship with it. 

Interested in group workshops, cohort-courses and a free PhD learning & support community? 

The team behind The PhD Proofreaders have launched The PhD People, a free learning and community platform for PhD students. Connect, share and learn with other students, and boost your skills with cohort-based workshops and courses.

1. you should work less.

I find that most people fall into one of two camps.

There are those who throw themselves into their work, always chained to their desk and never feeling like they’re on top of things.

Then there are those who get easily distracted, putting things off to the last minute and feeling guilty that they’re always a little behind.

In both cases the outcome is the same: long hours spent working, with the fatigue and the stress that comes with it.

But what about doing less work? What about being more selective with your time, and more selective with what’s on your to do list, such that you didn’t have as much to do at all?

It means accepting that your value and output is not measured on the basis of how many hours you put in, or how much work you get done. It’s measured instead on the quality of the work, and on the level of focus you can achieve.

So if you find yourself burning the candle at both ends, ask yourself whether what you really need to do is work less.

2. Don’t Push Away Negative Thoughts

3. remember that your phd is trying to drown you, 4. routines come and go.

For many, the simplest way of making the PhD journey more manageable is to develop consistent routines. 

For me, that involves going on a morning walk, exercising a few times a week, getting my emails and admin done first thing in the morning, and going to bed at roughly the same time.

But it’s easy to slip out of routines. We may be away from home, or the holiday season may disrupt our daily rhythm.

Whatever it is, we can start to drop the good habits we carefully nurture and start to pick up unhealthy ones – we might start exercising less, eating more processed foods, or staying up late.

When that happens to me, I can quickly start to feel anxious about whatever it is I’m working on. That makes sense; if routines introduce stability into our lives, it’s logical that disrupting those routines can mean we feel ungrounded and out of sorts.

If you can relate this holiday season, go easy on yourself. Like everything in life, this is temporary. As long as you’re conscious of what good routines looks like, and as long as you’re conscious that you’re temporarily departing from them, it won’t be long before you get back into healthy habits once the thing disrupting your routine has passed.

5. Ask Yourself: Are You Biting Off More Than You Can Chew?

6. set your intentions, 7. embrace the crappy drafts, 8. remind yourself that phds are hard.

Finding your PhD hard is kind of the point.

Repeat after me: if you’re finding your PhD hard it doesn’t mean you’re a failure, it means you’re doing it right.

9. Keep failing

10. remember that you’re never going to please everyone, 11. you’re going to get criticised, 12. don’t focus (too much) on the problems, 13. you have to admit when you’re wrong, 14. ask yourself: am i a perfectionist.

Most of the PhD students I talk to are perfectionists. You probably are too. 

With perfectionism comes a desire to have control over day-to-day life, knowledge of what’s going to happen in the short term, and the certainty that the PhD thesis will be, well, perfect. 

And then along comes coronavirus. 

Your day-to-day life has been disrupted as you work from home and away from you normal routines, you’ve got no way of knowing what will happen in the short or long term, and you may worry that your thesis will be sub-optimal as you step away from fieldwork, labs and supervisors.

The perfectionist in you is panicking, right? 

Perfectionism is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it can fill you with drive, passion, dedication and motivation. It can inspire you to try your hardest and do your best. It’s likely what got you on to your PhD programme in the first place. 

But at the same time, it has a dark side. For as much as it can inspire, it can lead to panic. Anxiety, worry and dread often follow in the footsteps of perfectionism, such that when you lose control over your reality, or when you get things wrong, make mistakes or produce something sub-optimal, you panic. What starts off as a simple mistake can quickly become the end of the world.

Part of the challenge of doing a PhD, and particularly in the current context, is learning to embrace imperfection and recognising that sub-optimal does not necessarily mean failure. Managing perfectionism involves reminding yourself that you’re only human, and that humans face stresses, make mistakes and sometimes struggle to produce their best work. Even the brightest and most competent of people have off days. 

The more you can remind yourself of that, the better equipped you’ll be to deal with what life throws at you and your thesis. 

15. Lastly, Remember That It’s Okay Not To Be Productive

Your PhD thesis. All on one page.

Use our free PhD structure template to quickly visualise every element of your thesis. 

Share this:

Thanks for the encouragement and all… but, I keep failing, and I understand it is a process. But because of my failures I’m about to be fired from my PhD. :( It is hard, yes. I keep messing up and failing, yes. I’m getting fired, yes.

Thanks for the kind words. I hope things work out for you.

Submit a Comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Search The PhD Knowledge Base

Most popular articles from the phd knowlege base.

The PhD Knowledge Base Categories

• Your PhD and Covid
• Mastering your theory and literature review chapters
• How to structure and write every chapter of the PhD
• How to stay motivated and productive
• Techniques to improve your writing and fluency
• Advice on maintaining good mental health
• Resources designed for non-native English speakers
• PhD Writing Template
• Explore our back-catalogue of motivational advice

Stack Exchange Network

Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow , the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.

Q&A for work

Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search.

Is it normal for a PhD advisor not to read a student's thesis?

I am scheduled to defend my thesis in February. I've been sending my advisor bits and pieces of my thesis, but he hasn't been replying to my emails. Is this normal, and can I still graduate even if he doesn't read my thesis?

All of the papers in the thesis have already been written, so he knows what's in the main body, and I've just been sending him parts of the introduction/literature review.

• 2 Have you talked to him about it? Are you sure he doesn't read it, or does je simply not give feedback? Did you actually ask for feedback? Some professors don't care too much about the general parts, or they might think that is solely your part. –  Mark Commented Dec 19, 2017 at 22:25
• @Mark I asked him "what do you think?" I haven't seen him in person for a while (we don't have regular meetings, and it's the end of term) so I haven't talked to him about it. –  user84811 Commented Dec 19, 2017 at 22:44
• 2 @user84881 I suggest you discuss (in person or per mail) how he handles that part of thesis writing, as in papers, or in a way that you write a first (full) draft of the thesis, which he can then look at in order to give (general) feedback. Alternatively/additionally, check with former PhD students of him, if you know any, how they did it. –  Mark Commented Dec 19, 2017 at 22:56
• Is it "normal" as in "happens with some regularity"? Yes. Is it "normal" as in "appropriate"? Well, let's say I have a low opinion of advisors that are "hands-off" to the point that you can't get advice out of them even if you ask explicitly for it. –  nengel Commented Dec 20, 2017 at 6:56
• 1 What country is this? The roles of PhD advisor and committee in Italy differ from those in Germany. –  henning no longer feeds AI Commented Dec 20, 2017 at 8:46

2 Answers 2

" All of the papers in the thesis have already been written, so he knows what's in the main body, and I've just been sending him parts of the introduction/literature review. "

If this is the case, then indeed it is reasonable (and possibly normal) not to read evolving drafts of the "thesis". Since the thesis is basically done, and now you simply wrap the papers up to have a "thesis".

I don't think it is essential for scholars to read carefully introductory parts of their students' dissertations, assuming they already read the papers on which the thesis is based. The papers are much more important than a "thesis", which is mostly an internal document nowadays (this is subject specific though, and I'm sure some commenters here would find my answer blasphemous. But I stand behind my position: a thesis is not something important once the papers were written and published or checked).

• 4 I agree with this since you are essentially doing a sandwich thesis. If you were my student so would pay very little attention to the intro and lit review. I don't think either of my husband's co-chairs read his. Given that, I would just ask for a check-in meeting to game out how he wants to handle the next 2 months to make sure. Basically the rule should be "no surprises" for either of you. –  Dawn Commented Dec 20, 2017 at 2:01

It would be abnormal under almost any system for the dissertation advisor not to read a student's dissertation. However, how closely and in how much of a timely fashion the reading is done will depend on the circumstances and the individuals involved.

In some educational systems, the supervisor is part of the faculty committee that reviews and evaluates the dissertation. Under such a system, it is basically mandatory that the advisor read the document, since they are supposed to judge its quality. Normally, the advisor does not wait for the final version to do this; rather, they read earlier drafts, and only once the advisor is reasonably satisfied with the quality of the dissertation is the near-final version passed on to other members of the examining committee, so that an oral defense can be scheduled.

In other systems, the student's advisor is explicitly not part of the group that evaluates the dissertation. In this case, it is conceivable that the advisor may take a very "hands-off" approach to the production of the actual written document, leaving that basically to the student. Whether this is a reasonable attitude for the advisor to take depends to a large extent on whether final approval is really a rubber stamp. If there is a real possibility that the student may not pass, then the advisor should absolutely take steps to assist the student in getting their dissertation into an acceptable form.

Personally, I feel that whatever the system, the advisor should be fully available to assist the student, if the student makes it clear that they want help. However, some advisors, under some systems do not feel the same way. That's unfortunate, but at the dissertation writing stage, it's too late to switch to a more cooperative advisor.

• 1 But the advisor possibly already read the papers. Why would he need to read basically the same text? –  Dilworth Commented Dec 19, 2017 at 22:55
• 1 Even when a dissertation is constructed largely out of previously published work, the whole thing generally needs to be re-edited for clarity, stylistic appropriateness, and notational consistency. –  Buzz Commented Dec 19, 2017 at 22:57
• 1 Why? If the papers are published, they will be the texts that need editing etc., and they will be the long lasting contribution left for science. Not some internal document that few read nowadays. In any case, it's not the advisor job to stylistically edit the text. There are more important things to be done by professors –  Dilworth Commented Dec 19, 2017 at 22:58
• 3 @Dilworth In principle, the dissertation is supposed to be a free-standing document. In the sciences particularly, it is unlikely to be read by pretty much anyone after it is approved, but the traditional requirements remain. –  Buzz Commented Dec 19, 2017 at 23:02
• 1 Indeed, this is the tradition. I claim that these days it has not much rationale, besides being a nice tradition. –  Dilworth Commented Dec 19, 2017 at 23:03

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for browse other questions tagged thesis ..

• Featured on Meta
• Site maintenance - Mon, Sept 16 2024, 21:00 UTC to Tue, Sept 17 2024, 2:00...
• User activation: Learnings and opportunities
• Join Stack Overflow’s CEO and me for the first Stack IRL Community Event in...

Hot Network Questions

• Was Willy Wonka correct when he accused Charlie of stealing Fizzy Lifting Drinks?
• Did Queen (or Freddie Mercury) really not like Star Wars?
• Should I change advisors because mine doesn't object to publishing at MDPI?
• Why is the area covered by 1 steradian (in a sphere) circular in shape?
• How to make conditions work in Which?
• Paying a parking fine when I don't trust the recipient
• For glacier winds to exist, are circulation cells needed?
• How to prove that the Greek cross tiles the plane?
• HHL Phase estimation step on non-eigenvector
• How is switching of measurement ranges in instruments, like oscilloscopes, realized nowadays?
• How does conservation of energy work with time dilation?
• What is the unit for 'magnitude' in terms of the Isophotal diameter of a galaxy?
• "Tail -f" on symlink that points to a file on another drive has interval stops, but not when tailing the original file
• Extremely authentic and crystal clear hadiths on k!lling dogs - how do we come to peace with it?
• Is Produce Flame a spell that the caster casts upon themself?
• Taylor Swift - Use of "them" in her text "she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them"
• Why is resonance such a widespread phenomenon?
• How will the Polaris Dawn cabin pressure and oxygen partial pressure dovetail with that of their EVA suits? (100% oxygen?)
• Should I write an email to a Latino teacher working in the US in English or Spanish?
• What came of the Trump campaign's complaint to the FEC that Harris 'stole' (or at least illegally received) Biden's funding?
• jq - ip addr show in tabular format
• Big Transition of Binary Counting in perspective of IEEE754 floating point
• Is it a correct rendering of Acts 1,24 when the New World Translation puts in „Jehovah“ instead of Lord?
• Why does documentation take a large storage?