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How to Deal with an Unhelpful Dissertation Supervisor

Published by Alvin Nicolas at August 13th, 2021 , Revised On June 12, 2024

A dissertation supervisor helps students with their dissertation , advises them about the project’s requirements and aids them throughout their research. Supervisors support us through our hard times and make sure that we overcome the academic challenges thrown at us.

However, there may be times when things might get heated between students and supervisors – when both are under pressure and looking to solve a lot of problems in little time. And at that very moment, you might want to learn more about how to deal with the unhelpful dissertation supervisor.

Expect to face many problems if you come across a dissertation supervisor who is not willing to help; is rude at times and does not seem to understand you as a student and the challenging phase you’re going through.

If you find it difficult to impress your dissertation supervisor and maintain a good relationship with them, some rules will get you through this challenging time. See below for some tips on ‘How to Deal with an Unhelpful Dissertation Supervisor’.

Also Read: How to write a dissertation – Step by step guide .

Tips to Deal with an Unhelpful Supervisor

Rule # 1: communicate effectively with unhelpful dissertation supervisor .

Communication is the key. Even if your dissertation supervisor is unhelpful and does not offer any guidance, clearly mention all your dissertation-related concerns.

For example, there might be an instance when your unhelpful dissertation supervisor is in a perfect, understanding mood and could offer a workable solution to any problem you are facing despite their unhelpful nature. Keep the door of communication open at all times, and make sure to attend all meetings.

Stay determined, and you’ll be able to complete your dissertation successfully.

Rule # 2: Be Patient and Persistent with your Unhelpful Dissertation Supervisor

Getting help from a dissertation supervisor who isn’t very accommodating can be daunting. There may be times when your supervisor might not help you at all, even if you’re badly stuck with your dissertation. In times like these, try to be patient and continue with your research.

Though it might be pretty tricky for you to continue in such a situation, there is nothing much that you can do about it. Changing an unhelpful dissertation supervisor or submitting an application for a supervisor change would take up a lot of your time. You could instead invest in focusing on your dissertation.

Stay determined, and you’ll be able to complete your dissertation successfully .

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Researchprospect to the rescue then.

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Also read: How to Write a Dissertation in a Week

Rule # 3: Seek Help from Peers

When you’re finding it hard to seek guidance from your academic supervisor, get in touch with your peers. This may not sound like a great idea, but there is a chance that some of them might be in the same boat as yours.

Talk to them about the issues you’re facing in completing your dissertation and see how they can help you. Organising a group session once a week or two will help to address your dissertation-related concerns.

Discuss complicated aspects and sections of your dissertations and see how this works out for you.

If you cannot find answers to your questions, you can contact us via email – [email protected] or telecom – +44 141 628 7786. At ResearchProspect, we have Master’s to PhD qualified writers for all academic subjects so you can be confident of having your dissertation project completed to a First Class quality promptly. Click here to learn more about our ordering process .

Rule # 4: Don’t Get Emotional

When you’re stressed and tensed about your dissertation , there are chances that you’d also get emotional. You might find no one to assist and guide you in times of need. However, to emerge successfully out of this situation, you need to make sure you keep your emotions in control and not let them get the best of you.

Emotions will further ruin your situation, and you’ll gain nothing from them. Stay strong and believe in yourself. In the case where you’re working on a PhD thesis, dealing with an unhelpful dissertation supervisor becomes even more difficult.

The situation intensifies because there’s a lot at stake, and you might be left scratching your head over how to deal with an unhelpful dissertation supervisor. Regardless of the situation, do not let the emotions get the better of you.

Keep the door of communication open at all times, and make sure to attend all meetings.

Rule # 5: Stay Assertive

Staying positive during difficult times is never easy, and you need to overcome this challenge. When working on your dissertation, make sure you’re confident of the elements you’ve included in your dissertation, and be sure that you’re working in the right direction.

Staying positive and assertive will help you learn a new perspective on how you can work without help and guidance. Thus, this way, even without a supervisor, you’ll be able to produce a flawless dissertation .

Dealing with an unhelpful dissertation supervisor is a nightmare but can be managed by following the tips we have shared with you. As a student, you should focus on your work and stay determined to complete your dissertation on time .

Your main goal should be to produce a dissertation that is perfect, as well as authentic and reliable . Thus, keep your focus on writing a dissertation to help you achieve an ‘A’ grade.

Here are some comprehensive guidelines for you to understand How to Write a Great Dissertation Paper.

How can ResearchProspect Help?

ResearchProspect academics can provide much-needed academic guidance if you have not been able to get help from your dissertation supervisor. Our writers can either solve your problem or provide guidelines on how you should be approaching a certain problem so you don’t get stuck.

Stuck with complicated elements of a dissertation paper such as Dissertation Methodology , Dissertation Statistical Analysis , and Dissertation Findings & Discussion ? Our writers have years of experience in developing high-class dissertation papers. Please sit back and relax while our experts do the hard work for you. Click here to fill out our simple order form to get instant quotes .

Read More: How Bad A Dissertation Have To Be To Fail

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you do a dissertation without a supervisor.

While possible, it’s highly recommended to have a supervisor for a dissertation. A supervisor provides guidance, expertise, and feedback crucial for successful research and writing, enhancing the quality and validity of your work.

How to Cope with a Problematic PhD Supervisor

by James Hayton, PhD
January 17th, 2022

Stay up to date

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?

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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.

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Finish Your Thesis

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Turn a Hostile Thesis Supervisor into Your Closest Ally with These 5 Tips

June 21, 2016 by Dora Farkas, PhD Leave a Comment

Jeff, a fifth year PhD student, got his thesis proposal draft back from his thesis supervisor, Paul.

The feedback was discouraging, but hardly surprising.

It was full of criticism, but offered no guidance:

“This part is confusing.”

“You don’t have enough detail here.”

“I thought we talked about how to make this section better!”

Since his first year, Jeff had had a rocky relationship with his thesis supervisor.

He went into every meeting with the intention of pleasing Paul, and simply getting along.

But Paul was prone to angry outbursts, and nothing Jeff could do seemed good enough for him.

Besides doing everything his supervisor asked him to do—demands that Jeff felt were sometimes abusive—Jeff even brought back gifts from his vacations to show his appreciation.

No matter what, Paul continued to be demanding and disrespectful towards Jeff.

The harsh criticism on his thesis proposal was the last straw.

At their next meeting, Jeff decided to take a risk.

He told his thesis supervisor the truth: the work was overwhelming, and he didn’t feel like he was getting any guidance on how to finish his thesis.

Jeff was expecting Paul to burst out with anger (and maybe even expel him from the program!), but instead, something unexpected happened.

His supervisor took a deep breath and said, “I am sorry, I didn’t realize you felt that way.”

Jeff couldn’t believe his ears, and he told Paul more about how he was struggling.

Instead of the end of his graduate school career, the conversation marked a positive turning point for Jeff.

Of course, Paul’s personality didn’t change just because Jeff was honest with him.

Paul still responded with anger sometimes, but it was easier for Jeff to talk to him about his work.

Most importantly, from then on, Jeff got more meaningful feedback and learned more from their meetings.

In fact, at the next committee meeting, Paul stood up for Jeff when the other committee members were questioning the research.

After five years of hostility, Paul became one of Jeff’s strongest allies.

Jeff could hardly believe it, but there was nothing magical about this transformation.

All it took was the courage to have an honest conversation with his thesis supervisor about his challenges, and to ask for the guidance he needed to finish his thesis.

Are you struggling with a demanding thesis supervisor?

Like Jeff, you can usually turn your relationship with your supervisor around, if you follow some simple strategies.

Here are five important tips for making even the toughest supervisor your ally.

5 Steps to Turn a Your Hostile Thesis Supervisor into Your Closest Ally

Step 1:stop trying to please your thesis supervisor.

It may sound counter-intuitive, but your thesis supervisor isn’t looking for a yes-man.

What’s more, you’ll miss out on key learning opportunities if you only try to tell your supervisor what you think they want to hear .

If you’re too focused on pleasing him or her, you can lose sight of why you’re there, and what you really hope to accomplish in grad school.

Your job as a graduate student is to finish your thesis, not to please your supervisor.

Ultimately, your thesis is comprised of your own original research, and it’s up to you to stay focused on what you need to do to finish.

It’s okay to disagree with your supervisor, and sometimes it’s unavoidable.

In fact, learning to defend your conclusions in a disagreement is part of honing expertise in your field.

The key is not to avoid disagreements at all costs, but to know how—and when—to state your case clearly and respectfully.

Step 2:Come to every meeting prepared

This second point ties in closely with the first one.

The most important step to earning your supervisor’s trust, and respect, is to come to your meetings prepared.

Your supervisor has their own to-do list, and academic career, to focus on.

No matter how overwhelmed you might feel, your supervisor is at least as busy as you are.

Your work is just one of the hundred things on their mind.

Don’t expect to sit passively and let your supervisor do the facilitating.

Come to each meeting with a clear agenda, including an outline of what you want to discuss, and relevant follow-up points from your previous meeting (more on that later in the post).

If you’re organized and prepared, this will immediately get your supervisor’s attention, and help you to keep the focus on areas where you need the most help.

At every meeting, proper preparation will make it easier for your supervisor to give you the support you need.

Step 3:Leave your emotions out of the discussion and focus on the problem you want to solve

This may be the toughest tip to put into practice, but it’s one of the most important.

Every graduate student will face criticism from their supervisor, and some supervisors might be particularly blunt with their feedback.

To avoid getting defensive, keep your emotions separate from your work, and avoid taking criticism personally .

If you’re facing a problem with your supervisor, keep the discussion focused on the problem, and not your emotions about the problem or the people involved.

Describe your issue by stating the facts, and explain how this is interfering with your work.

If you bring your personal feelings into the discussion, you risk sidetracking the conversation, and creating even more conflicts.

Instead of talking about your emotions, such as frustration or anger, keep the focus on your work.

Step 4: Listen to your supervisor’s viewpoint so you understand where they are coming from

Even when you don’t agree with your supervisor, you can learn something from him or her.

Your supervisor will have their own reasons behind their viewpoint, and they’ll usually include something that you hadn’t thought of.

When you do have a disagreement, listen carefully to your supervisor’s point of view, and let them know you value their feedback.

Look at the problem from their perspective, and brainstorm about solutions that will meet both your needs.

If your supervisor feels respected and listened to, they’ll be more likely to give you the same consideration.

You might find you both have valuable suggestions that will improve your thesis in the long run.

Step 5: Always follow through on your end of the deal

All supervisors, especially the most demanding ones, want to see a clear demonstration of improvement on your end.

You’ll both be less frustrated, and more effective, if you avoid re-hashing the same problems repeatedly.

By the end of each meeting, come up with an action plan, including some concrete steps for fulfilling your obligations.

This will also help you prepare yourself for the next meeting.

Always keep your commitments, and if for some reason you are not able to, let your supervisor know as soon as possible , so you can both work on a new plan of action.

In order to build trust between you and your supervisor, demonstrate that they can count on you to keep your promises and finish what you start.

No matter where you are in your graduate studies, it’s not too late to improve your relationship with your thesis supervisor.

Don’t assume it’s a lost cause, just because you didn’t get along in the past. By staying focused on your thesis, and approaching your supervisor with honesty and respect, you can turn them into your ally in finishing your thesis.

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Dissertation Advisor 101

How to get the most from the student-supervisor relationship

By: Derek Jansen (MBA) | Expert Reviewer: Dr Eunice Rautenbach | January 2024

Many students feel a little intimidated by the idea of having to work with a research advisor (or supervisor) to complete their dissertation or thesis. Similarly, many students struggle to “connect” with their advisor and feel that the relationship is somewhat strained or awkward. But this doesn’t need to be the case!

In this post, we’ll share five tried and tested tips to help you get the most from this relationship and pave the way for a smoother dissertation writing process.

Overview: Working With Your Advisor

Clarify everyone’s roles on day one
Establish (and stick to) a regular communication cycle
Develop a clear project plan upfront
Be proactive in engaging with problems
Navigate conflict like a diplomat

1. Clarify roles on day one

Each university will have slightly different expectations, rules and norms in terms of the research advisor’s role. Similarly, each advisor will have their own unique way of doing things. So, it’s always a good idea to begin the engagement process by clearly defining the roles and expectations in your relationship.

In practical terms, we suggest that you initiate a conversation at the very start of the engagement to discuss your goals, their expectations, and how they would like to work with you. Of course, you might not like what you hear in this conversation. However, this sort of candid conversation will help you get on the same page as early as possible and set the stage for a successful partnership.

To help you get started, here are some questions that you might consider asking in your initial conversation:

How often would you like to meet and for how long?
What should I do to prepare for each meeting?
What aspects of my work will you comment on (and what won’t you cover)?
Which key decisions should I seek your approval for beforehand?
What common mistakes should I try to avoid from the outset?
How can I help make this partnership as effective as possible?
My academic goals are… Do you have any suggestions at this stage to help me achieve this?

As you can see, these types of questions help you get a clear idea of how you’ll work together and how to get the most from the relatively limited face time you’ll have.

Need a helping hand?

2. Establish a regular communication cycle

Just like in any relationship, effective communication is crucial to making the student-supervisor relationship work. So, you should aim to establish a regular meeting schedule and stick to it. Don’t cancel or reschedule appointments with your advisor at short notice, or do anything that suggests you don’t value their time. Fragile egos are not uncommon in the academic world, so it’s important to clearly demonstrate that you value and respect your supervisor’s time and effort .

Practically speaking, be sure to prepare for each meeting with a clear agenda , including your progress, challenges, and any questions you have. Be open and honest in your communication, but most importantly, be receptive to your supervisor’s feedback . Ultimately, part of their role is to tell you when you’re missing the mark. So, don’t become upset or defensive when they criticise a specific aspect of your work.

Always remember that your research advisor is criticising your work, not you personally . It’s never easy to take negative feedback, but this is all part of the learning journey that takes place alongside the research journey.

Fragile egos are not uncommon in the academic world, so it’s important to demonstrate that you value and respect your advisor’s time.

3. Have a clear project plan

Few things will impress your supervisor more than a well-articulated, realistic plan of action (aka, a project plan). Investing the time to develop this shows that you take your project (and by extension, the relationship) seriously. It also helps your supervisor understand your intended timeline, which allows the two of you to better align your schedules .

In practical terms, you need to develop a project plan with achievable goals . A detailed Gantt chart can be a great way to do this. Importantly, you’ll need to break down your thesis or dissertation into a collection of practical, manageable steps , and set clear timelines and milestones for each. Once you’ve done that, you should regularly review and adjust this plan with your supervisor to ensure that you remain on track.

Of course, it’s unlikely that you’ll stick to your plan 100% of the time (there are always unexpected twists and turns in a research project. However, this plan will lay a foundation for effective collaboration between yourself and your supervisor. An imperfect plan beats no plan at all.

4. Engage with problems proactively

One surefire way to quickly annoy your advisor is to pester them every time you run into a problem in your dissertation or thesis. Unexpected challenges are par for the course when it comes to research – how you deal with them is what makes the difference.

When you encounter a problem, resist the urge to immediately send a panicked email to your supervisor – no matter how massive the issue may seem (at the time). Instead, take a step back and assess the situation as holistically as possible. Force yourself to sit with the issue for at least a few hours to ensure that you have a clear, accurate assessment of the issue at hand. In most cases, a little time, distance and deep breathing will reveal that the problem is not the existential threat it initially seemed to be.

When contacting your supervisor, you should ideally present both the problem and one or two potential solutions . The latter is the most important part here. In other words, you need to show that you’ve engaged with the issue and applied your mind to finding potential solutions. Granted, your solutions may miss the mark. However, providing some sort of solution beats impulsively throwing the problem at your supervisor and hoping that they’ll save the day.

Simply put, mishaps and mini-crises in your research journey present an opportunity to demonstrate your initiative and problem-solving skills – not a reason to lose your cool and outsource the problem to your supervisor.

5. Navigate conflict like a diplomat

As with any partnership, there’s always the possibility of some level of disagreement or conflict arising within the student-supervisor relationship. Of course, you can drastically reduce the likelihood of this happening by implementing some of the points we mentioned earlier. Neverthless, if a serious disagreement does arise between you and your supervisor, it’s absolutely essential that you approach it with professionalism and respect . Never let it escalate into a shouting contest.

In practical terms, it’s important to communicate your concerns as they arise (don’t let things simmer for too long). Simultaneously, it’s essential that you remain open to understanding your supervisor’s perspective – don’t become entrenched in your position. After all, you are the less experienced researcher within this duo.

Keep in mind that a lot of context is lost in text-based communication , so it can often be a good idea to schedule a short call to discuss your concerns or points of contention, rather than sending a 3000-word email essay. When going this route, be sure to take the time to prepare a clear, cohesive argument beforehand – don’t just “thought vomit” on your supervisor.

In the event that you do have a significant disagreement with your advisor, remember that the goal is to find a solution that serves your project (not your ego). This often requires compromise and flexibility. A “win at all costs” mindset is definitely not suitable here. Ultimately, you need to solve the problem, while still maintaining the relationship .

If you feel that you have already exhausted all possible avenues and still can’t find an acceptable middle ground, you can of course reach out to your university to ask for their assistance. However, this should be the very last resort . Running to your university every time there’s a small disagreement will not serve you well.

Communicate your concerns as they arise and remain open to understanding your supervisor's perspective. They are the expert, after all.

Recap: Key Takeaways

To sum up, a fruitful student-supervisor relationship hinges on clear role definition , effective and regular communication , strategic planning , proactive engagement , and professional conflict resolution .

Remember, your dissertation supervisor is there to help you, but you still need to put in the work . In many cases, they’ll also be the first marker of your work, so it really pays to put in the effort and build a strong, functional relationship with them.

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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.

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My Dissertation Is Killing Me – Turning Dissertation Hell To Bliss

My dissertation is killing me! Those are the five words that are threatening to break you down. But, they are the tip of the iceberg. Your supervisor has told you that you are on the wrong track, you are stuck on the data analysis chapter, and now you are finally sure of one thing: you are going down. Giving up is not an option!

Efforts to follow your supervisor’s instructions do not seem to yield much. Indeed, you appear to be sinking deeper into confusion. My PhD supervisor hates me, and I hate my dissertation are now part of you. But you know what, enough is enough, you can get it right! Actually, professional help to help you roll over that dissertation is only a click away.

This post is crafted specifically to help you deconstruct I hate my thesis to my thesis is the best. We have helped others, and your case is no different. Come on; take a sigh of relief, and you will see everything molt right in front of your eyes.

Finishing Your Dissertation Even When You Hate It!

To finish dissertation even when you hate it so much requires only two things. One, think about the first time you enrolled for your PhD and rekindle that innate drive. To become that doctor, engineer, or sociologist of your dreams, you need to rekindle that fire. Therefore, simply keep calm and finish your dissertation.

Another thing you need to know is that your supervisor’s rating is based on how well he guides PhD students to success. It is not that he is hell-bent to make your dissertation hell. As such, think of what he said and look at it positively. For a moment, try to put aside the notion that my dissertation is bad and focus on the positive side. You will get it right. Does that work? Now follow the dissertation carefully from the start and make the next step.

Finish Your Dissertation In No Time Like A Pro

The moment you picked a dissertation topic and started the research journey, perhaps it was unclear about the mountains and valleys on the way. But hold on; no one said it was going to be a walkover. The title (Dr. or PhD) you are about to get will attract honors like a magnet everywhere you go. Therefore, it is time to work for it by replacing the notion my dissertation is killing me with a workable formula. The most outstanding formula to finish your thesis like a pro is crafting a winning structure and working on it step after step.

After crafting the structure, finishing your dissertation becomes so much simplified. And, every component you add helps to build the thesis. For example, when you write the literature review, you will understand the topic more and grasp the theoretical underpinnings related to the research questions. But this is not all. The most important thing about following the best dissertation structure is that you will be able to see how to finish dissertation from previous scholars.

Turning that Dissertation Hell into Bliss

My dissertation is killing me ! How hard is it to write a dissertation? This is the question that you should have asked before commencing the journey to write your thesis. The answer to the question is hard and simple. That is right. Writing your dissertation can turn out into a living hell if you pick the wrong topic, lack the right skills, and take the wrong approach. But now that you’ve already started, it is time to change the notion “I hate my dissertation ” to “I love it .” You can achieve this by doing two things:

Following your department’s recommendation: When you carefully follow your department’s recommendation, you will always be sure that your dissertation is on the right track. Using a sample of another well-written dissertation: Well, no matter what chapter is making your dissertation hell, having a sample as a guide can be of great help. If you have several samples, improve on the structure, and you know what? Your thesis will be a lot better!

The No-Fail Secret to Writing a Dissertation… No Need For Stress

Have you read the above strategies and wondered, I have tried all of these, and none is working? Indeed, there are many things that can stand on your way to finishing your dissertation correctly.

The time you have to finish the dissertation can be limited.

Your writing skills might be insufficient.

Your supervisor might be busy elsewhere and is offering unreliable help.

The available resources might be inadequate.

These are some of the reasons that might be fueling the argument, my dissertation is killing me , and I hate my dissertation . But no matter what is standing on your way to crafting a winning dissertation, the no-fail secret to getting it right is seeking writing help.

Why writing help? Instead of struggling to craft a standard document with a high risk of failure during defense, the writing services are cheap and will get you professional dissertations. They have professional writers who have written dozens of dissertations and made past students pass with flying colors. Even if you are writing a dissertation in 3 months, the professional writers will get you top-rated documents. You can never go wrong with them!

Whether you are wondering how to finish a PhD in 3 years or a dissertation in just three months, expert writers are there for you . With professional writers, you can put on a big smile right away: my dissertation is killing me , and post dissertation depression will be alien phrases.

That is the no-fail secret to writing the best dissertation …. no need for stress!

Eight tips to effectively supervise students during their Master's thesis

Jul 30, 2021 PhD

I am a fan of knowledge transfer between peers, teaching what I know to others and learning back from them. At University I frequently helped my fellow course mates with the material, so I was very interested in formally mentoring students when I started my PhD. Luckily my supervisor, who is really talented at this, agreed to let me help him with supervising some Master’s theses. In this article, also published as a Nature Career Column , I present eight lessons that I learned by watching him at work and trying on my own.

I supervised three Master’s students in the past year. One of them was quite good and independent, did not need a lot of guidance and could take care of most things on his own, while the other two required a fair amount of help from us, one of them even coming close to not graduating successfully. Dealing with the difficult situations is when I learned the most important lessons, but regardless of the ability of the students a common thread soon appeared.

But first, here’s a brief digression on how that happened. While I was writing a draft for this blog, I noticed an interesting article on Nature’s newsletter. While I was reading it, I felt its style was quite similar to what I usually aim for in this blog: use headlines to highlight the important points, and elaborate on those with a few paragraphs. I then noticed the author of that column was a PhD student, and I thought: “how comes she has an article there? Why can she do that? Can I do that?”. I quickly found how to do it , finished the draft and sent it to them, and, after eight rounds of review in the course of two months, the article was finally up! The editor was very responsive and we could iterate quickly on the manuscript, and the quality of the writing is so much better than what I had originally sent in. On the other hand, I sometimes felt the message was being warped a bit too much. After the editing process was finished I had to agree to an Embargo Period of six months during which Nature had the exclusive right of publishing the final version on their website. As those six months are now over, I am finally allowed to publish the final version here, too. Enjoy!

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Nature Career Column . The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02028-1 .

The lessons I learnt supervising master’s students for the first time

PhD student Emilio Dorigatti supported three junior colleagues during their degrees.

I started my PhD wanting to improve not only my scientific abilities, but also ‘soft skills’ such as communication, mentoring and project management. To this end, I joined as many social academic activities as I could find, including journal clubs, seminars, teaching assistance, hackathons, presentations and collaborations.

I am a bioinformatics PhD student at the Munich School for Data Science in Germany, jointly supervised by Bernd Bischl at the Ludwig Maximilian University Munich and Benjamin Schubert at the Helmholtz Centre Munich, the German Research Center for Environmental Health. When I went to them asking to gain some experience in communication and mentoring soft skills, they suggested that I co-supervise three of Benjamin’s master’s students.

At first, I felt out of my depth, so I simply sat in on their meetings and listened. After a few months, I began offering technical advice on programming. I then started proposing new analyses and contributions. Eventually I became comfortable enough to propose a new master’s project based on part of my PhD research; Benjamin and I are now interviewing candidates.

I gained a great deal from this experience and I am grateful to both of my supervisors for supporting me, as well as to the students for staying motivated, determined and friendly throughout. Here are some of the things I learnt about how to ensure smooth collaboration and a happy outcome for all of us.

Draft a project plan

With Benjamin and Bernd, I put together a project plan for each of the master’s students. Drafting a two-page plan that ended up resembling an extended abstract for a conference forced us to consider each project in detail and helped to ensure that it was feasible for a student to carry out in their last semester of study.

If you’re a PhD student supervising others, sit down with your own supervisor and agree on your respective responsibilities as part of the project plan. At first, you might want your supervisor to follow you closely to help keep the project on the right path, but as you gain more experience and trust, you might request more autonomy and independence.

Use the project plan to advertise the position and find a suitable student: share it online on the group’s website or on Twitter, as well as on the job board at your department. Advertise it to your students if you are teaching a related topic, and sit back and wait for applicants.

We structured the plans to include a general introduction to the research subject as well as a few key publications. We described the gap in the literature that the project aimed to close, with the proposed methodology and a breakdown of four or five tasks to be achieved during the project. My supervisors and I also agreed on and included specific qualifications that candidates should have, and formalities such as contact information, starting dates and whether a publication was expected at the end.

Benjamin and I decided to propose publishable projects, sometimes as part of a larger paper. We always list the student as one of the authors.

Meet your student regularly

I found that I met with most students for less than an hour per week, but some might require more attention. Most of the time, Benjamin joined the meeting, too. We started with the students summarizing what they had done the previous week and any issues they had encountered. We then had a discussion and brainstorming session, and agreed on possible next steps. I learnt that I do not need to solve all the student’s problems (it is their thesis, after all). Instead, Benjamin and I tried to focus on suggesting a couple of things they could try out. At the end of the meeting, we made sure it was clear what was expected for the next week.

We used the first few weeks to get the students up to speed with the topic, encouraging them to read publications listed in the plan, and a few others, to familiarize themselves with the specific methods that they would be working with. We also addressed administrative matters such as making sure that the students had accounts to access computational resources: networks, e-mail, Wi-Fi, private GitHub repositories and so on.

Encourage regular writing

Good writing takes time, especially for students who are not used to it, or who are writing in a foreign language. It is important to encourage them to write regularly, and to keep detailed notes of what should be included in the manuscript, to avoid missing key details later on. We tried to remind our students frequently how the manuscript should be structured, what chapters should be included, how long each should be, what writing style was expected, what template to use, and other specifics. We used our meetings to provide continuous feedback on the manuscript.

The first two to four weeks of the project are a good time to start writing the first chapters, including an introduction to the topic and the background knowledge. We suggested allocating the last three or four weeks to writing the remaining chapters — results and conclusions — ensuring that the manuscript forms a coherent whole, and preparing and rehearsing the presentation for the oral examination.

Probe for correct understanding

In our weekly meetings, or at other times when I was teaching, I quickly realized that asking ‘did you understand?’ or ‘is that OK?’ every five minutes is not enough. It can even be counterproductive, scaring away less-assertive students.

I learnt to relax a little and take a different approach: when I explained something, I encouraged the students to explain it back in their own words, providing detailed breakdowns of a certain task, anticipating possible problems, and so on.

Ultimately, this came down to probing for understanding of the science, rather than delivering a lecture or grilling an interviewee. Sometimes this approach helps when a student thinks they fully understand something but actually don’t. For example, one of our students was less experienced in programming than others, so for more difficult tasks, we broke the problem down and wrote a sketch of the computer code that they would fill in on their own during the week.

Adapt supervision to the student

Each student requires a different type of supervision, and we tried to adapt our styles to accommodate that. That could mean using Trello project-management boards or a shared Google Doc to record tasks; defining tasks in detail and walking through them carefully; or taking extra time to explain and to fill knowledge gaps. I tried to be supportive by reminding students that they could always send an e-mail if they were stuck on a problem for too long. One of the students found it very helpful to text brief updates outside of scheduled meetings, as a way to hold themselves accountable.

Sometimes, if we felt a student needed to be challenged, we proposed new tasks that were not in the original plan or encouraged them to follow their interest, be it diving into the literature or coming up with further experiments and research questions.

One student conducted a literature review and summarized the pros and cons of the state-of-the-art technology for a follow-up idea we had. That saved some time when we picked up the project after the student left; they learnt lots of interesting things; and the discussion section of the manuscript was much more interesting as a result.

When things go badly, make another plan

Not all projects can be successful, despite your (and your student’s) best efforts. So, as part of each project, my supervisors and I prepared a plan B (and C), working out which tasks were essential and which were just a nice addition. This included a simpler research question that required less work than the original. The initial plan for one of our projects was to compare a newly proposed method with the usual way of doing things, but the new method turned out to be much more difficult than anticipated, so we decided not to do the comparison, and just showed how the new method performed.

Halfway through the project is a good time to evaluate how likely it is that the thesis will be handed in on time and as originally planned. The top priority is to help the student graduate. That might entail either forgoing some of the tasks planned at the beginning, or obtaining an extension of a few months if possible.

Have a final feedback round

After the oral examinations, Benjamin and I met to decide the students’ final grades on the basis of the university’s rubric. We then met the students one last time to tell them our decision, going through each item in the rubric and explaining the motivation for the score we had given. We tried to recall relevant events from the past months to make each student feel the grading was fair.

We also remembered to ask the student for feedback on our supervision and to suggest things they thought we could do better.

Lastly, I encouraged those students to apply for open positions in our lab, and offered to write recommendation letters for them.

How I broke up with my supervisor.

This post, written by a PhD student, who wishes to stay anonymous, was sent to me late last year. Due to my new job, it’s taken me a long time to edit it down and make sure it doesn’t identify the student or their supervisor. I think you will find it an interesting story that highlights the tensions we all experience around the ‘finish at all costs (and on time)’ mentality.

Insitutions are feeling financial pressure to complete candidates within 4 years and put this pressure onto supervisors, who then pressure students. But s ocial media, by connecting students with each other, is giving some the courage to push back against this pressure. Supervisors might feel they are doing their best for a student by behaving as described in this post, but are they really? I’ll be interested to hear what you think in the comments.

My carefully worded email to my supervisors said I wanted to discuss our processes at the next supervision, and named that I’d been feeling disheartened and shut down , which I was sure was not their intention. Instead of the usually effusive response, the reply was ‘OK’. I cried a lot that week, and could feel myself slipping into the helpless depression that comes from feeling powerless and bullied.

As it happens I was not trying to do anything too radical with my approach to research and writing. I wanted to understand the big picture of my research field, try to learn some theory and apply it appropriately. I wanted to write about my insights on policy and current practice in relation to my topic area, based on published, scholarly literature. Basically I wanted to come out confident I had contributed something to knowledge via my topic , gained valuable skills and expertise, but still have lots more to learn. Personal growth and insight would come in parallel with the academic skills as part of the complex PhD journey.

This was not the paradigm presented to me in, what turned out to be, my final meeting with my now ex-supervisor.

Her vision of what ‘research training’ entails is to stay totally focused on your topic. My summary of her description is this: Don’t talk to anyone, don’t write anything non-academic. The topic is not what is important – all that matters is getting finished and being able then to move on to something interesting and collaborative. If I asked a question, expect to be told to find my own answer. If that answer is wrong, be sent away to come up with another one. Spend months alone with the data, going over and over until eventually a lightbulb moment happens. Don’t go to conferences, they distract you. Exclude everything else from life until it is done, because it is the piece of paper that matters, and opens doors to other opportunities.

This is the way of modern academia. It’s a game, and this is the way to play it successfully . This is how she had been supervised, with a powerful mentor who fast-tracked her to completion and a high position within a short time of arriving at the university.

This reminded me of when, aged 11, I prepared for religious confirmation, and said to my mother that I wasn’t sure if I believed in god or not. ‘Get confirmed first and think about it later’ was her reply. The process, and deep thinking or wide learning were deemed less important than the status at the end. As an 11 year old I saw the inappropriateness of my mother’s advice, but went along with it anyway. I am better now at standing up for what I believe in. (I’m still an atheist.)

In our last supervision session my request to discuss how we worked, my inability to make progress with her way of responding to my work in progress, the tears pouring down my face, were not mentioned. Instead I was given a description of how they all work when writing an article together: ‘this is shit, rewrite it’, no politeness or support, which apparently ends in an article being finished quickly.

The page from Stylish Academic Writing (Sword, 2012) describing what made a good article, which I had sent in the interests of sharing something I was reading, was mocked as being wrong and not in line with current practice. The page from Stylish Academic Writing (Sword, 2012) describing what made a good article, which I had sent in the interests of sharing something I was reading, was mocked as being wrong and not in line with current practice. If I didn’t like this approach maybe I could go to a different faculty and find a ‘feminist supervisor’, who won’t mind if I take 10 years to complete. This response showed neither an understanding of feminism nor my own intention to complete in a timely manner

The upshot of this meeting was: “No hard feelings, find a supervisor better suited to your style. I’ll sign the paperwork.”

I don’t doubt that this fast track, focus-on-the-task-and-get-finished-approach is common. It suits the hard, vocation-oriented direction universities are taking. They are businesses first, institutes of learning second. It bothers me, though. What kind of scholars is this fast-track paradigm creating? What impact is it having on the breadth of knowledge and depth of understanding, and the development of creative thinking and opportunities for excellent teachers to pass on thoughtful approaches and considerate practice?

Through social media I have learned that there are alternative ways to approach an idea , learn about a topic, publication and discussion. I know I’m not alone in my desire to learn deeply, to receive thoughtful input, to share ideas and to develop the courage to step out into the field.

Throughout Twitter has been an associate supervisor , guiding me, offering support and encouragement, the latest research about my topic. It’s provided instant community, with a hive mind to answer questions or suggest resources. It has been an important aspect of my candidature to date, and has contributed significantly to the resilience and confidence I feel as I seek a new supervisor to work with IRL to help me get finished in a timely manner, with deep learning along the way. Thanks, everyone!

Postscript 4 December 2012

I wrote the piece above just after the rift with my ex-supervisors happened, when I was full of grief, outrage, and frustration. Since then I have found new supervisors who are determined to keep me focused and finished , but are also open to a diversity of approaches and working in a way that suits me. I had been accepted to present at a conference in November, and nearly withdrew because I was feeling so disheartened, but decided to go, and shake off the previous negativity.

After my presentation I was approached by a respected academic in my field who said she liked my topic, approach, and way of thinking, and was I interested in doing a post-doc? Yes, please! While this was just a casual query, and no concrete offers have been made, as I do have to finish the PhD first, I have been buoyed by this interest and confidence, my work is progressing nicely, and I’m feeling good.

I’m glad to hear it all worked out Anonymous! How about you? Have you found yourself pressured to complete in a way that you think was detrimental to your own development as a researcher and scholar? Or do you think we need to respect the time limits that are set?

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I absolutely hate my PhD and I don’t understand the purpose of it

I am in the fifth year of my PhD and seriously depressed. In my first year of graduate school I was not funded. In my desperation for funding I chose an opportunity that came my way even though I did not like the topic. The research I would say is pretty mundane, I was providing experimental support for an FEM group. I did t have any freedom until the end of my 4th year. Also my advisor was the co-PI and the project was not in his area of expertise and he had no clue about the work being done. Whenever I get lost and ask him for advice, he would commonly uses the phrase “Do what the industry sponsor wants, keep him happy ”. I literally felt like a contract employee and not a PhD researcher. As expected the work did not yield any papers. My lab mates working on other topics (areas of my advisors expertise) get to present at academic conferences and are writing journals. When I point out this fact I get chided for comparing myself with others and that my work is “unique”. At one point my advisor himself said that the project was ill conceived. You can understand my frustration.

Now I am depressed, lost, and hardly do anything. I wake up, go to the lab and pass time. I absolutely hate my “thesis”, I don’t have anything meaningful or useful for my future career. I don’t even know the purpose of my thesis topic. initially I was scared to leave, now I feel it is too late to leave.

please advise me on what to do? Thanks.

research-topic

which are are you working in, FEM sounds like engineering? also, which country / how long is your program supposed to take? – FirefoxMetzger Commented Jan 20, 2020 at 5:13
Perhaps this comment is ill-conceived, but I'm wondering if there's likely to be any consequences to the supervisor/advisor if none of the solutions presented here manifest, and whether this could be used as bargaining power in case things turn sour. If you've done work or been committed, then you shouldn't be leaving with nothing. Especially not if someone made a mistake in the project design or neglected rather than nurtured you. – Brayton Commented Jan 20, 2020 at 9:04
Well the purpose of a PhD is not to make sense, or even to have a useful result (a result is nice to have, but secondary). PhD is a title that states that you have delivered the proof of being able to work systematically, find literature, read, and write it up, again systematically. Much like passing university is not about knowing or learning and mastering anything, but merely a proof of being able to deliver according to a strict time schedule, pass tests, perform exactly as required when required , and move on. (Also, PhD exists to have people work for free.) – Damon Commented Jan 20, 2020 at 14:34
Offtopic, but it might help you a little. Keep in mind that being a PhD student was one of the hardest period in many researchers life. You are not alone with this situation, even if the others in the lab seemingly advance faster than you. You need to follow the suggestions in the answers, but firstly: do not be affraid, you are not alone. Unfortunately, this is way more common than it should be. – SnOwl Commented Jan 20, 2020 at 17:04
1 I find it hard to imagine aproject where the co-PI "had no clue about the work being done"; if you weren't already in your fifth year, I'd advise you to get out. But under the current circumstances, your best bet is probably to (1) get counseling to deal with your depression and (2) do whatever is needed to finish your Ph.D. as quickly as possible. Item (1) will probably be a necessary prerequisite for (2) and also for subsequently repairing the damage caused by your unfortunate Ph.D. experience. – Andreas Blass Commented Jan 20, 2020 at 22:18

3 Answers 3

Now I am depressed, lost, and hardly do anything. I wake up go to the lab and pass time. I absolutely hate my “thesis”

This is the problem; you are stuck in a vicious cycle. You need to meet with your advisor and come up with a solid plan - including a timeline - for what will happen in the next year or two.

Given that it has already been 5 years, I suspect this plan should involve you finishing your current work, writing a dissertation, and graduating. But, you and your supervisor could also choose a different direction (i.e., starting a new topic or choosing a new advisor).

I don’t have anything meaningful or useful for my future career. I don’t even know the purpose of my thesis topic.

At this point it's probably time to decide what your career goals are and make sure your plans are aligned with reaching those goals.

This could mean spending 1/3 to 1/2 of your time learning skills that will be useful for an industry career, and spending the rest of your time preparing for graduation. Given your level of burn-out, I suspect this is the wiser course, but I'm just guessing.
Or, it could mean switching topics / advisors / institutions so that you will be competitive for academic positions in topics that interest you more.

2 Upvoted. The most important thing is to reflect and take a decision in a limited time. The situation is not ideal, but people get stuck at different points in their career and a PhD is a more likely phase than others to get stuck in. A decision will be liberating. – Captain Emacs Commented Jan 20, 2020 at 8:45

I am not a psychologist, and even if I was I woudn't try to diagnose over the internet, but this:

Sounds like you should seek professional help from a counselor. Even if you are not clinically depressed, a good counselor and help you work through your feelings and difficult decisions you have to make. They might help you decide to leave your PhD, so they might help you decide you should finish it having come this far, and help you develop strategies to get it done as quickly and painlessly as possible. I can't speak for your school, but we have a university counselling service here that can provide up to 8 sessions to any student or staff member for free. Have a look if your school has anything similar.

I'm going to take a slightly different approach, but bear in mind that the other answers are very right. A PHD program is challenging, and as with anything else in life taking care of your health (and mental health) should be a top priority.

That being said, my answer assumes you have evaluated that and are still intent on continuing. The challenge of a PHD program is supposed to come from working on ground breaking problems, not from your advisor's lack of support. Without further details, it's hard to say, but it does sound like he's prioritizing his career (finishing an industry sponsored project) over yours (publishing papers, working on interesting topics). And he's apparently far enough out of his areas of expertise that he can't effectively guide you. That is a recipe for frustration. Been there, done that, with an added helping of arrogance and failed commitments on the side. So, what can you do?

If there are resources offered by your graduate school that would be a good place to start. I'll list some things that helped me, although I may not recommend all of them for your situation.

Treat it like a job. You seem to be giving yourself a hard time since the research isn't working out how you think it should. Just put in the hours and emotional commitment that you would for a job and trust that eventually your advisor will hold up his or her end of the deal and help you defend.
Get a solid timeline. Already mentioned in the other answers, but I'm repeating it here since suggestion 1 doesn't really work if it turns out the research you're working on won't lead to a dissertation. At the very least you should have an approximate timeline, what problems and approaches will go into the dissertation, and what scope of work you are expected to do, and what will happen if the project continues to fail. And get it in writing.
Work with your committee. As with suggestion 2, make sure your committee is clearly aware of what work you intend to do. Make sure they consider it notable enough for a dissertation. Then, give them regular (monthly) updates - what progress has been made, what issues you've encountered, what problems need to be solved, and follow up on the rare suggestions they may give.
Take responsibility - unfortunately it sounds as though your professor may be incapable of supporting this area of research so you will need to take the initiative on ideas and experiments.

Those are just some suggestions. I would strongly encourage you to consider what exactly you want from the program, and whether you can complete it with the current level of support from your advisor ( edit : and take a week or two off to vacation, spend time with family, or whatever makes you relax before making any choices). Depending on your goals, you may very well be better off switching advisors and research areas.

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Dr. Heidi Toivonen

Psychologist

Does my supervisor hate me? A look into tensions in supervisory relationships

Previously, I have written on the topic of how to make your thesis supervision work for you . Subsequently, I’ve noticed people find my website trying to find out an answer to the question “Does my supervisor hate me?”. Trying to accommodate to these “my supervisor hates me” searches, I will here give some perspectives to the topic as someone who of course has been herself supervised in her BSc, MSc, and PhD thesis work and who is currently supervising BSc and MSc theses herself.

1. Your supervisor is just stressed

Let’s first look at what seems to me the most obvious option: Your supervisor doesn’t really hate you at all. Why might you then have gotten this impression? Well, sometimes supervisors can be very stressed because they have a lot of teaching and research duties, and life can get extremely hectic. What you perceive might be simply stress, not a personal negative feeling about you. It is easy to come across as annoyed and tense when one has too much to do. In this case, the best solution from the student point of view might be to stop asking “Does my supervisor hate me?” and forget the idea that your supervisor has something against you. Acknowledge that you’re just dealing with a stressed and tired individual.

A related unfortunate truth is also that not all academics like to supervise theses. For some, thesis supervision is merely something they have to do, not something they want to do. On my own MSc thesis journey for a long time ago, I was initially given a supervisor who seemed very enthusiastic about the research I would conduct but not so committed to the apparently annoying side tasks such as having to answer to my emails or actually treat me properly. I marched to the office of the head of the department and said I wanted a new supervisor. She took me under her own personal supervision and I completed the thesis successfully. I do not think that my supervisor hated me, but I do think he hated supervising.

Lesson learnt: Just as you as a student have to do your job, so does your supervisor. If you don’t get the guidance that you should, according to the rules of your own department, then do not just accept the situation but go ahead and try to have a conversation with your supervisor. If this doesn’t help, you can always contact someone, whether it’s the study advisor or someone higher in the departmental hierarchy (the right protocol of how to seek help in problem situations varies by university and department). In any case, even supervisors have supervisors.

2. Your supervisor has an issue

What on earth do I mean with “issue”? I don’t necessarily mean a personal issue with you as an individual, but something that is nagging at your supervisor and causing friction in the relationship between you and them. Your supervisor’s mind might be full of academic responsibilities and stressors and it is not rare for some of them to be somehow linked with your thesis work. Perhaps they had high hopes of you the student collecting quality data for their own project, and now it looks like the respondence rate of the survey is too low? Perhaps they have the idea that they would like to work on some of the theses to become a real peer reviewed paper, and this causes them to put some extra pressure on the students? Possibilities are many.

There is also the chance that the “issue” is of a more psychological quality. One time in the past, I was dealing with a situation where a mentor had not written one single word in a paper about to be published and the student was claiming that the rules of both the university and the journal where the paper was supposed to be published say that only being a supervisor doesn’t warrant an author status. I believe the student was correct and had simply spotted something that is not a rare sight in academia – a person who wants a quick and easy way to get a new paper in their CV.

In this case, the supervisory relationship never became smooth again and the student was considered by their supervisor a “difficult” person until the very end of the supervisory process. The supervisor’s answer to the question “Does my supervisor hate me?” might have been “No, but the student is annoying and demanding and stepping on my toes.” Well, this answer would not have been just and correct, and the student in question has no reason to think they did something wrong for having triggered their supervisor.

I would advise all students to look out for their rights. This is not always easy in the hierarchical systems of academia, where being young and without a PhD often equals to not having a strong voice. That being said, I have observed that the young generation of PhD students can be more straightforward and aware of their rights, to the point of announcing to their supervisors that “You will not just sign up my papers, you will work on them, too.” Working for a just and democratic academia demands actions exactly like that, but also of course structures and systems that support open and fair play.

3. Your supervisor is not the issue

The third option I would like to present here is the most unpleasant one if you’re a student. If you’re a supervisor reading this post, this is where you might be letting out a sigh of relief -finally she mentions this side of the story!

While all of the students I have supervised so far have been predominantly hard-working, motivated, polite, and pleasant to interact with, I know this is not the experience that all supervisors have with all supervisees. I do believe that if you as a supervisor treat your students with respect and acknowledge them as the smart and independent individuals they are, nothing creates better conditions for thesis success. However, the supervisor’s attitude and treatment is just one side of the coin. There are also students who assume that they have no responsibilities, only rights, to the point of them expecting that the supervisor is there to answer immediately to all of their questions and to practically write up the whole thesis for them. Cocky, challenging, and disrespectful behavior from the side of the students does exist.

For some reason, so far my mindset of “First get yourself a PhD, then you can start talking back at me” has never had to manifest in my overt behavior. That is, I’ve never had to say these words out loud to any student. Perhaps this attitude of mine is clear in my vibe without having to be verbalized in any authoritarian statements. Maybe my genuine liking of and respect for my students helps me not to get into tense situations with them.

The point is that your supervisor probably knows more about research than you do. Respect that. Listen to feedback and value the time and effort your supervisor puts into guiding you. Questioning the advise of someone who is more experienced than you are is not a sign of you being an independent critical thinker, quite the opposite. Chances are that the answer to “Does my supervisor hate me?” is not “yes” but something along the lines of “No, but they think you’re acting disrespectfully and are not putting in enough effort.”

Writing a thesis is not easy; it’s a long, independent project and it requires a lot of patience and work from the student, as well as tolerance for guidance and advise. When your supervisor sees you trying your best, they are quite likely to give off a vibe that doesn’t make you ask whether they hate you at all.

That being said, there are some supervisors out there with a fairly 1950’s authoritarian energy about them. Personally, I’ve had a supervisor announce to me in a very annoyed manner that he sees more in the data than I do. I still wonder whether my simple questions and observations about the data at hand really warranted such a strict response, or whether my supervisor simply felt intimidated, channeling this feeling into an authoritarian re-claim of their expertise. I can’t quite relate to a situation where my own self-confidence as a scholar would be so fragile that I would have to tell a student I see more things than they do. Maybe I will catch myself doing this very thing some day in the future.

The point here is that if your supervisor is acting in a way that makes you think they hate you, maybe you have to take a look in the mirror. Have you bombarded them with email questions to which Google could have provided you with the answers? Have you time after time disregarded their advice, missed your scheduled appointments, or talked back when they tried to help you? Maybe the question is not even “Does my supervisor hate me?” but “Do I hate my supervisor?”. Perhaps the case is that your supervisor really is getting annoyed with you -and maybe for a good reason. The simple cure for this situation is to acknowledge your own behavior and try to make some adjustments. I’m sure your supervisor will appreciate your open acknowledgment that you haven’t had the best of attitudes, especially if this is followed by you actually trying to be more professional and polite in the future.

4. The issue is chemistry

I know, the headline sounds so lame. One could talk about chemistry in a blog post about dating and romantic relationships, what does that term have to do with professional academic relationships? Believe me, a lot. We all know this from all corners and fields of life. Sometimes we just don’t hit it off with a person. No matter how much we try, we just never seem to have the interaction going in a way that would feel smooth and satisfying.

One of my good friends had a feeling during their MSc thesis writing that the supervisor would rather have been outside in the rain counting stones in the garden than reading any more theses. The supervisor was close to the retirement age at that point, and my friend was doing her thesis on a topic that wasn’t exactly up the alley of the said supervisor. His demeanor was bored and detached for reasons that had nothing to do with how good a student my friend was, or how good her thesis was. In addition, as a character he was very restrained and didn’t have a habit of expressing himself a lot. This was very difficult to deal with for my lively and expressive friend, who felt she didn’t get anything out of the supervision.

For fellow supervisors I would have this one piece of advice: Please do put some feeling into your work. The students can sense if you’re bored or uninterested. You can hardly expect them to be passionate about their research if you don’t model how one gets excited in academia. If you never show any positive emotion to your students, they might wander off your office asking “Does my supervisor hate me?”, even if your own sentiment for them is nothing like that at all.

That being said, sometimes chemistry issues are just too hard and go beyond quick fixes. Perhaps it can help you as a student to just accept that a thesis writing is a limited time project and when you’re finished, you will not have to tolerate your supervisor anymore? In the real working life, you will also have bosses and mentors that you don’t exactly click with either. You might just as well learn to work with such characters while you’re at the university. The whole world doesn’t revolve around your personality, after all.

5. Does my supervisor hate me? If yes, then your supervisor truly is the issue

Now that I have covered several possibilities that all have the meta-story of “your supervisor does not really hate you, something else is going on”, it’s time to look at the option that your supervisor really does have something personal against you. Unprofessional people do exist at all levels of academia. As a student, you never need to tolerate improper behavior. Tough feedback and harsh criticism, yes, but that is part of the deal. Bad behavior is not. My advise is simply to talk about the situation. If you genuinely feel your supervisor is acting in an inappropriate and unprofessional manner, then you need to open your mouth. Find out how your university and department recommends you to act in problem situations. Often, the first point of contact is a study advisor. The important thing is just to start somewhere.

Does my supervisor hate me? Take your time to think why you feel so

Before jumping into the conclusion that your supervisor hates you, I would try to understand the situation deeper. This is also a chance for you to understand yourself better. I recommend this nice blog post on resolving conflicts in academia as well as (especially if you’re a PhD student) Professor Tara Brabazon’s material on YouTube, such as this video on how to establish a professional relationship with your supervisor . With these tips, I do not mean to recommend the stance where a problematic relationship with your supervisor is entirely your fault and something to be solved only psychologically.

Learning how to confront and deal with people who truly are not doing their job in a proper manner is something you need to do in life. Seek support. In my experience, fellow supervisors, study advisers, as well as the management level of departments are mostly very eager to help out, as it is their own interest to make sure students have a good supervisory experience. Of course, this is not always so easy -especially as a PhD student you might be in a really tough spot, working in your own hard way towards a more just and open academia.

What do I do if I feel like my boss is unqualified?

It’s annoying to feel like your boss is bad at their job. But it doesn’t mean you have to quit.

[Source Photo: Getty Images]

BY Kathleen Davis 2 minute read

Welcome to Pressing Questions , Fast Company ’s work-life advice column. Every week, deputy editor Kathleen Davis, host of The New Way We Work podcast, will answer the biggest and most pressing workplace questions.

Q: What do I do if I feel like my boss is unqualified?

A: Good bosses have a lot in common: They help you grow in your career; they offer constructive feedback ; they advocate for you; and challenge you. Bad bosses come in lots of different varieties: the micromanager , the toxic, and the incompetent or unqualified.

In fact, incompetent bosses are the reason many people quit their jobs. A recent Gallup study of over 7,000 adults found that 50% quit to escape an incompetent manager.

Before I get into what to do about your incompetent or unqualified boss, you might be wondering how so many people ended up in management roles if they aren’t qualified for them. Fast Company contributor Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic wrote a whole book on the subject ( Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders ). In a nutshell, some people “ fail upwards ,” and get promoted because they are confident and charismatic—traits that we associated with leaders but can that actually detrimental to good leadership and management. Other incompetent or unqualified bosses might get there by what’s called the “Peter principle.” It’s the idea, developed by Laurence J. Peter, that people tend to rise to “a level of respective incompetence.” In other words, someone is good at their job so they keep getting promoted, but then aren’t good at being a manager. Knowing how your unqualified boss got their job doesn’t help much if you are trying to do your job better. So, here’s what you can do to manage up: 1. Ask for goals or set them yourself. All employees should have goals and every boss should help set them. But if your boss is in over their head, chances are they don’t know what you should be working on. If that’s the case, manage up by setting some goals for yourself and sharing your process at regular check ins.

2. Document and share. Keep a detailed list of everything you work on, especially big projects and successes. Set up regular check-ins and let your boss know what you are working on. If you have a new idea, share it publicly (in a meeting or a group Slack) or copy your boss’ boss. (Be careful not to go over your boss’ head by cutting them out, but including more people on an email to share ideas is fine.) This way your work will be more visible and your unqualified boss won’t hold you back as much.

3. Talk to your boss’ boss. If all else fails, have a (delicate) conversation about your frustrations with your manager’s boss. Make sure to frame it as roadblocks to your or the company’s success and offer ideas and solutions. Stay away from personal criticism.

4. Look for other opportunities at your company. Yes, sometimes quitting and looking for a different job is the best course. But if the only thing wrong is your direct manager, you can always look for opportunities for promotions or lateral moves to other departments or teams within your company.

Want some more advice on dealing with an incompetent or unqualified boss? Here you go:

Why competent workers become incompetent managers
How to advance in your career if your boss is disengaged
This is why your boss is so bad at his job
The secrets to managing your boss (no matter what type of boss you have)
How to deal with 4 types of bad bosses (or tell if you are one)

Apply to the Most Innovative Companies Awards and be recognized as an organization driving the world forward through innovation. Early-rate deadline: Friday, August 30.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kathleen Davis is Deputy Editor at FastCompany.com, Supervising Editor of Fast Company podcasts, and Host of The New Way We Work podcast. She frequently covers topics including Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, gender equity, education, economic inequality, remote work, and the future of work. More

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Discussion forum for current, past, and future students of any discipline completing post-graduate studies - taught or research.

I think my potential master thesis supervisor hates me

I feel like the supervisor I'm interested in working with hates me. I'm the only international person in the group and I feel like I have trouble getting along with the others. I don't go for lunch with them and when we do go out in the evenings, I'm left out of conversations when they talk about regional politics and I cannot contribute to the discussion.

Now, about the problem itself. I want to work on something very theoretical, he wants to wait for my grades before he gives me this topic. Fair enough. However, he keeps asking me whether I wouldn't want to work with the experimental group. It doesn't really make sense to ask me this--I clearly want to stick to theory. Does he just want me to go away?

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COMMENTS

I hate my PhD supervisors. Is it worth even continuing?
Midway through my PhD I was confident in one of my papers and felt it was worthy to submit to one of the most respected journals in the field. My supervisor said my work wasn't good enough because the journal is so great and takes only the best papers and that they themselves struggled to get work published there.
thesis
I hate my thesis and I hate my supervisor for he is one of the most manipulative and insensitive human beings I have ever met. He forced me to work on his ideas which I never liked.
How to Deal with an Unhelpful Dissertation Supervisor
In the case where you're working on a PhD thesis, dealing with an unhelpful dissertation supervisor becomes even more difficult. The situation intensifies because there's a lot at stake, and you might be left scratching your head over how to deal with an unhelpful dissertation supervisor.
How to Cope with a Problematic PhD Supervisor
"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?"
PhD: my supervisors (negative) feedback seems to harsh and is ...
A subreddit dedicated to PhDs. PhD: my supervisors (negative) feedback seems to harsh and is hampering my productivity. So I'm in my last year as a PhD student. Things have always been a little rocky from the beginning in terms of feedback, but we've managed to make it work. Usually, I have several difficulties in making sure everything is 100% ...
5 Mistakes Your Thesis Supervisor May Never Forgive
Mistake #3: Working on a side project without your supervisor's approval. While you are expected to take leadership of your thesis, if you are using your thesis supervisor's funding and resources, they still "own" the project. In addition, they are responsible for the research in their group, and they need to make sure that it is ...
5 Tips to Fix Your Relationship with Your Thesis Supervisor
5 Steps to Turn a Your Hostile Thesis Supervisor into Your Closest Ally Step 1:Stop trying to please your thesis supervisor It may sound counter-intuitive, but your thesis supervisor isn't looking for a yes-man. What's more, you'll miss out on key learning opportunities if you only try to tell your supervisor what you think they want to hear.
advisor
A few years and a few papers later, I sent my first paper as a post-doc to my French PI. This time, I had considerably more experience, I had submitted a few papers already and my PI's English, while good, was not as good as my old PhD adviser's. And yet, once more, she sent it back to me with loads of corrections.
How to get great thesis supervision
Your supervisor knows what the professor likes (and hates!) in a thesis, and can give you valuable advice that will make your thesis better.
Dissertation Advisor 101: How To Work With Your Advisor
Learn how to get the most from your relationship (or lack thereof) with your dissertation or thesis advisor, without begging.
I just submitted my thesis, and I still absolutely hate it
I just submitted my thesis, and I still absolutely hate it I made the mistake of letting my supervisor convince me to change my project early on. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, but instead I listened to him when he suggested another project he thought was more realistic and far more impactful. I regret that decision so much.
28 Questions I Wish I Had Asked When Selecting My PhD Advisor
One of the most important decisions in graduate school is selecting a research advisor.
15 things to remember if you've started to hate your PhD
All PhD students hate their thesis at one time or another. Here are 15 things to remind yourself of if you're starting to hate yours...
My Dissertation Is Killing Me: Is There A Way Out?
Efforts to follow your supervisor's instructions do not seem to yield much. Indeed, you appear to be sinking deeper into confusion. My PhD supervisor hates me, and I hate my dissertation are now part of you. But you know what, enough is enough, you can get it right! Actually, professional help to help you roll over that dissertation is only a click away.
Stuck completing master's thesis, how to overcome poor choice of topic
5 I'm in the second year of a master's program, working on a thesis. I am not getting enough help from my supervisor because he has a different methodological background from me. I am also not finding enough evidence to complete the thesis, and the topic has been very difficult to research because almost nothing is written about it. I am dreading completing this degree. What are some ...
Eight tips to effectively supervise students during their Master's thesis
I am a fan of knowledge transfer between peers, teaching what I know to others and learning back from them. At University I frequently helped my fellow course mates with the material, so I was very interested in formally mentoring students when I started my PhD. Luckily my supervisor, who is really talented at this, agreed to let me help him with supervising some Master's theses. In this ...
Hate my submitted thesis : r/PhD
Hate my submitted thesis. I just submitted my thesis last night, and I just feel really really disappointed in it. I was still editing until basically the last minute, my supervisor hasn't seen a draft of anything at all in months, and there just wasn't really time to incorporate any substantial feedback anyway.
How I broke up with my supervisor.
How I broke up with my supervisor. This post, written by a PhD student, who wishes to stay anonymous, was sent to me late last year. Due to my new job, it's taken me a long time to edit it down and make sure it doesn't identify the student or their supervisor. I think you will find it an interesting story that highlights the tensions we all experience around the 'finish at all costs (and ...
I Hate My Thesis Supervisor
The document discusses some of the challenges students may face when dealing with an unsupportive or difficult thesis supervisor. It notes that such supervisors can leave students feeling frustrated and unable to make progress, as they receive vague feedback and lack guidance. However, it then introduces HelpWriting.net as an alternative source of support that can help students overcome these ...
thesis
Now I am depressed, lost, and hardly do anything. I wake up, go to the lab and pass time. I absolutely hate my "thesis", I don't have anything meaningful or useful for my future career. I don't even know the purpose of my thesis topic. initially I was scared to leave, now I feel it is too late to leave.
Does my supervisor hate me? A look into tensions in supervisory
Trying to accommodate to these "my supervisor hates me" searches, I will here give some perspectives to the topic as someone who of course has been herself supervised in her BSc, MSc, and PhD thesis work and who is currently supervising BSc and MSc theses herself. 1. Your supervisor is just stressed. Let's first look at what seems to me ...
I hate my thesis supervisor. : r/GradSchool
I hate everyone in my department basically, I'm not the type of person to hate people either.
What do I do if I feel like my boss is unqualified?
It's annoying to feel like your boss is bad at their job. But it doesn't mean you have to quit. In fact, incompetent bosses are the reason many people quit their jobs. A recent Gallup study of ...
I think my potential master thesis supervisor hates me
I think my potential master thesis supervisor hates me I feel like the supervisor I'm interested in working with hates me. I'm the only international person in the group and I feel like I have trouble getting along with the others. I don't go for lunch with them and when we do go out in the evenings, I'm left out of conversations when they talk about regional politics and I cannot contribute ...

How to Deal with an Unhelpful Dissertation Supervisor

Tips to Deal with an Unhelpful Supervisor

Rule # 2: Be Patient and Persistent with your Unhelpful Dissertation Supervisor

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2. Don’t Push Away Negative Thoughts

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

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

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Eight tips to effectively supervise students during their Master's thesis

The lessons I learnt supervising master’s students for the first time

Draft a project plan

Meet your student regularly

Encourage regular writing

Probe for correct understanding

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When things go badly, make another plan

Have a final feedback round

How I broke up with my supervisor.

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