Writing Course
How to cope with a problematic phd supervisor.
- by James Hayton, PhD
- January 17th, 2022
How to write your PhD thesis (Online course starts 6th November)
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?
How to write your PhD thesis (Online course)
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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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All the text on this site (and every word of every video script) is written by me, personally, because I enjoy writing. I enjoy the challenges of thinking deeply and finding the right words to express my ideas. I do not advocate for the use of AI in academic research and writing, except for very limited use cases.
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