Uncomfortable realisation.

[baratron]

Hmm. Lately I have been thinking about "the ideal" supervisor-student relationship, for various reasons. Essentially, I want to go on with research next year, so I need to find someone to be my supervisor. And because I have to pay my own fees, I am in the fortunate position of being able to go to a particular academic who does research I'm interested in and say "Do you want to have me as a student?", rather than having to find someone with a studentship in an approximately related discipline and being stuck with whatever project that studentship has been set up to fund, as well as whatever personality happens to have the funding. (In retrospect, I realise that sentence alone should tell you why so many PhD students end up failing or dropping out before completion :/ ).

The relationship I had with my last research supervisor was So Utterly Broken that I don't actually know what a healthy supervisor-student relationship is supposed to look like. Are you supposed to be scared of your supervisor, or supposed to go out to the pub with them? Are you supposed to avoid their office like the plague, or invite them & their partner/s round for dinner with you and your partner/s? Are you supposed to be friends?

I posted the following as a comment in a custom-locked post, but I think it could do with being a post in its own right. Text in italics by aquaeri.

My vision of the ideal supervisor/mentor/personal tutor is of someone who doesn't teach so much as help the student/mentoree find the best ways for them to learn, and improve as a human being overall. It's of necessity a very personal and intimate kind of relationship, and both what the student can gain and how the supervisor can provide it depend entirely on the specific individuals, thus you may learn very different things from different supervisors, and have to do very different things (and yourself gain very different kinds of insight) supervising different students.

This is making me sad. I agree with what you say about the ideal relationship, but it's further emphasising how utterly, utterly, utterly broken my relationship with my ex-supervisor was. It wasn't just broken, it was fucked up beyond all recognition. And part of the problem was me, and part of the problem was my depression - but a lot of the problem was HIM. He wasn't an easy person to get along with. None of his students found him easy, although most of the others found him easier. (They, at least, were interested in watching football and could talk to him about that.)

I was scared of him when I started the studentship. I assumed it would eventually ease, but it didn't - it got worse. He would shout at me for not knowing things that he thought should have been obvious - never mind that I wasn't him, and had a different background. The less I understood, the more afraid of him I got, and the more I would avoid him, and the less work I did. It became a vicious spiral, each time getting worse and worse and worse. The one person who should have been helping me to learn more and get more confident in my own abilities was the one person I couldn't actually bear to see. The more upset and vulnerable I was, the more I had to avoid him because just a couple of cross words could reduce me to tears. It got to the point where, even though the normal route for getting from the lift to my office would have taken me past his, I walked the long way round the building to avoid it (unless I knew for certain that he wasn't in). And although his office was next to the nearest women's toilet, I would go to the other side of the building so as to not risk seeing him.

He had no concept of human emotion. He couldn't understand that I had feelings and wasn't just a brain on a stick. He didn't understand that someone who is absolutely terrified of punishment will lie without thinking. (I pretty much never lie in everyday life, but things like "I know what I'm doing!" and "Of course I've done some work!" came out of my mouth automatically). He just about got that depression was a medical problem rather than only a "weakness", but thought that if I had a medical problem I should be at home ill rather than trying to work - when I was so badly depressed I thought I was never going to get better, and my brain in that state was the best I was ever going to have. I thought that I would give up the PhD on medical grounds, go home, and that would be the end of all of my hopes and ambitions. I would never get better, and no one else would ever give me another chance.

Neither of us had ever been taught what a supervisor-student relationship was supposed to be like. I had a booklet, but it didn't really set out a list of rights and responsibilities or anything like that. I don't believe there was any written rule that said I had the right to be treated with dignity and respect. I was a student - in other words, disposable.

Part of me has always blamed myself for the relationship being so awkward. If only I'd been a better student. If only I'd been a stronger person and not "given in" to the depression. If only I'd been less stubborn. If only I'd tried harder to get along with him. Blah de blah de blah. I think this is the first time I've ever realised that it really was unfixable and it wasn't (entirely) my fault.

And it's certainly one of the first times I've ever realised that he should have tried harder to fix things. He had access to university resources that I didn't. He could have actually found someone to teach me the stuff I didn't know and needed to know rather than expecting me to teach it all to myself from a book. He could have traded students with another supervisor, or got me co-supervised, or something like that. He could have thought about my learning style and abilities rather than making me feel like a failure for not meeting his.

And now I feel horrible, because it makes me feel that I really did waste several years of my life. I learnt a lot about myself, sure. But sometimes I think the emotional scars will never go away.

Comments

[ludy]

i'm sorry that it was so difficult for you Love

I'm sorry, that does sound very painful

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

If it's any consolation, your "relationship" with your PhD supervisor bears a remarkable similarity to my "relationship" with the professor who was sort-of but not really my supervisor during my first lectureship. And believe me, I spend a lot of time feeling like I wasted those five years. And I can indulge in even more self-pity, because I think "failed" PhD students have a better chance of doing another PhD under better circumstances than a lecturer has of establishing a decent academic career once they've screwed up their first attempt.

I also have to keep reminding myself of the positives: I learnt a lot about myself, I did learn quite a lot about teaching and supervising, the remotely decent people at the uni who knew much about my situation don't think it was remotely "my fault" and that really, I ended up the scapegoat for a bit of an overall disaster (much of it not really involving me) allowing other people to emerge relatively unscathed.

I think you're probably going to need to process (or whatever you call it) this experience to the point where the emotional scars help you - protect you from having it happen to you again, recognising the danger signs, motivating you to work out what you do want the supervisor relationship to be like and not giving up until you get it.

I do think some people should not be supervisors. I don't think anyone should not be a student, but that's the power imbalance thing again. I think my "supervisor" was probably perfectly okay for some people, but clearly not me. (I do think there is a somewhat limited range of people he's suitable for.) It's possible your "supervisor" was right over into the "shouldn't supervise" camp.

Explicit talk about student rights and the student-supervisor relationship is fairly recent, I think. And even to the extent that it's getting recognised, and at least some places have little seminars and courses for potential supervisors, the counter-pull: that having grad students bring prestige, that being able to attract the funding that can be offered to potential students doesn't remotely correlate with being a good supervisor, etc, means that this is going to be messy and dangerous territory for those of us who place stronger demands on our supervisors for quite some time.

****

I realise that I had a lot of luck and perhaps even privilege finding my PhD supervisor. Firstly, I worked with that group as a tech for a year. I mainly applied for the tech job because my mother worked nearby in the same building and said "you should apply for that job, they're good people". Then I discovered, getting to know the PhD students (while I was thinking about applying for my own PhD) that several of them had begun PhD projects elsewhere in the university, found themselves with disastrous supervisors, and ended up transferring to this group (one actually called it a "refugee camp for broken PhD students".) It drove home to me that in a lot of cases, a good supervisor-student relationship could completely outweigh any initial lack of interest the student might have had in that supervisor's research.

I also noticed that although sexism issues were only rarely mentioned explicitly, there were very obvious gender patterns in functional and dysfunctional supervisor-student relationships. I have since heard a few stories about female supervisors who female students in particular should avoid, but they are rare.

In general, my short-cut advice: look at who your potential supervisor collaborates and co-authors papers with. Look at the gender breakdown, anything you can learn about the reputations of those people, etc. Do they even have grad students? (!!) How many papers a year? Are they pushing their way onto papers as Big Lab Boss and Money-getter, when really there's no earthly way they could really have been involved in that many research projects? Are they happy to collaborate on papers with people more obscure than themselves, spreading the wealth around? You can learn a lot, and I guess that's why potential students aren't told about it :-/.

Re: I'm sorry, that does sound very painful

[baratron.livejournal.com]

I've been looking for an old post of mine for well over an hour. I'm almost at the point of thinking I'd imagined the whole thing, except that I'm absolutely positive it exists somewhere. Not only can I not find the post by going through my posts one by one, I can't find it by searching my saved comments in email. And I have all the comments I've made since June 2004 saved, and I'm certain the post was relatively recent. Gah!

Your short-cut advice is not hugely surprising to who I am now, but would have utterly shocked me at the age of 21. Most people on my course who wanted to do PhDs just went round the department asking likely-sounding potential supervisors if they had funding. Most of us didn't want to apply to go somewhere else because we were happy and settled at Imperial. Checking out what the people were like in terms of looking at their research record? Wouldn't even have thought of that. We just went with the immediately obvious information: are they friendly? Do they seem able to teach? Can we read their handwriting? *sigh*

I was assigned my undergraduate research supervisor D by pure chance (there was a long list of research titles, you picked three that you could stand to do and then one got assigned to you). The project was interesting enough, and I got on pretty well with D despite not understanding a word of his third year lecture course (!). For a PhD, I wanted to work with D, J or I, but none of them had funding available because of a severe attack of Politics. (The post I cannot find talked a bit about that). So I figured I'd do a taught Masters and reapply the next year, but I hadn't absolutely committed to the Masters because I didn't need to. As a result, my application went back into a central pool and I was randomly phoned by R who had a vacancy to fill. The project as it was proposed sounded like something I was qualified to do, and R seemed okay that first day... Also, D phoned him up and said he seemed like a reasonable person to work for. And I thought "It's the same university, what could possibly go wrong?". Little did I know that as simple a thing as moving a few hundred metres across campus could make the difference between being happy & supported and being abjectly miserable...

This is not the post I wanted (http://baratron.livejournal.com/554095.html), and I know you've seen it before, but I thought it was worth linking to anyway. As is my comment (http://aquaeri.livejournal.com/37955.html?thread=399683#t399683) on an older post of yours.

Re: I'm sorry, that does sound very painful

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I'm really glad that however much you feel that time was wasted, you have made a lot of progress and I don't think it's going to happen to you again. And that is a Very Good Thing.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

It sounds awful. *hugs*

[brooksmoses]

The relationship I had with my last research supervisor was So Utterly Broken that I don't actually know what a healthy supervisor-student relationship is supposed to look like. Are you supposed to be scared of your supervisor, or supposed to go out to the pub with them? Are you supposed to avoid their office like the plague, or invite them & their partner/s round for dinner with you and your partner/s? Are you supposed to be friends?

I think my relationship with my Ph.D. supervisor was pretty healthy.

What it matched most, for me, was a father/adult-son sort of relationship. Some of that's quite possibly because I was at a point where I had a hole in my life that was that shape (having lost my real father some four years prior), but I think it's perhaps a reasonable model.

He saw his job in that relationship as fundamentally being to help me (and his other students) be successful. That took a lot of shapes at different times; sometimes it meant challenging me with difficult goals, but other times it meant looking at the situation when I got in a rut of depression and saying, "Look, this conference paper isn't happening; we should cancel that and be done with it rather than you beating your head against it." (It also meant that his reaction in that case was genuine concern, not anger or guilt at me for not accomplishing things.)

One of the interesting little points I remember is that, while he had undergraduates refer to him as "Dr. Lastname", he always had his graduate students refer to him by his first name -- on grounds that we were intellectual colleagues. He stated frequently that he expected us to know more about our thesis topic than he did, because the whole point of a Ph.D. is to focus on something and become one of the world's top experts on that particular tiny topic.

So, yeah. Often, when I gave talks, I'd talk to him afterwards. He always made a point of focusing on what went well, on making it clear that he thought I'd done a good job. One of the things he tended to poke me about was, "You could have answered that question a lot more strongly; you know his assumption is wrong and should say so." And before the talks, we usually did things where I gave a practice version to him and the other students, with lots of review comments and other things. And, yes, he'd ask hard questions and pointed questions and point out weaknesses, but he was respectful about it, and his approach was all about making the final presentation stronger and being ready to address people's doubts and questions.

Socially, we didn't do much outside work. In years when he wasn't horrendously busy, there was an annual group gathering and party at his house. And, when out of town at conferences, about a third of the time we'd be doing dinner and such together, though more frequently he was off with people he was meeting with, and I was off with other students and recent graduates.

I think that's most of what I can think of.

(Oh, and yes; even with all that there were some times when I took the other hallway rather than walking by his office -- because I was feeling guilty about not having gotten things done that week and didn't want to give him the opportunity to ask how it was coming. That was a lot of my baggage, though; see also depression and unproductiveness. And there were just as many times when I'd go to see if he was in his office and had a moment to share an interesting result or talk through some confusing problem.)

[brooksmoses]

With all of the above comment said, I think there was one way that my advisor-student relationship ended up failing me.

I was doing a research project on computational fluid dynamics. My advisor had done a bit of that sort of work, but mostly indirectly, and was primarily an experimentalist, with a good heavy dose of theory. This turned out to mean that he found an excellent research problem for me to work on, which had some practical application and also happened to be a place where the theory for the computational work was very poorly worked out and needed to be improved.

The problem, though, was that neither of us had significant experience in actually doing the nuts-and-bolts programming work of doing computational fluid dynamics, and that I wasn't being directly advised by someone who knew that sort of thing and knew the full scope of what I was doing.

As a result, the path of my Ph.D. started out with a plan that we'd do things A, B, and C, each of which would be worth a journal article. And a couple of years later, I was far enough along on A to get a conference paper on it, but didn't have the results to do a journal paper. So, we scaled back the goals a little bit, and continued along, thinking for several years that it would be done in considerably less than a year. Eventually about seven years later we fairly significantly cut back the goals for what A was going to be, and tied that off and got a dissertation out of it -- having realized that it was actually a quite significant amount of work.

The problems with this were twofold. First, that was rather a bit longer than a Ph.D. ought to have taken, in both of our opinions. And there were a couple of years in the middle where I don't think I learned a significant lot from my research, though I did do some side projects that turned out to be rather more significant. A particular problem with this was that, by the time I was done, I was sick of the field and wanted to do something entirely different for a year or two, and who knows if I'll get back into it.

The second problem was that I didn't publish any journal articles during my Ph.D. work, and not a vast lot of conference papers either. We were always aiming at having A be the first paper, and thus spent several years with the plan of "we just need to get some solid results from the end of this and we can publish", where those results were much farther off than we thought. In retrospect, and with a better view of the field now than I had then, it would have been entirely reasonable to have published a theory paper without the results, and followed up later. Or to have had far more modest goals for the first paper, such that it could have been achieved in the first half of my graduate career.

So, yeah. That's sort of a cautionary tale, I guess.