Been hearing a lot of complaints lately that some supervisors are only nice to you before you choose them and once you're in the lab, they are not the same as when they first talked to you.

How many people suffer from having to borrow materials from lab nearby within the same building? Do some supervisors not allow you to buy what you need for financial reasons?

Anyone would like to share experience?
How can you make sure that these won't happen? (or you can't really, you'll only know when you start?)

Unfortunately you can't make sure it won't happen as who you get is a lottery! This is when inside knowledge is useful or the reputation of the supervisor is useful to consider. If you know anyone who can give you an honest opinion of the supervisor that would be great so you can consider your options carefully and see if you can get along and work with them.

The initial settling in period is often called the "honeymoon" period when your supervisor is nice to you as you get used to your new environment and doing your PhD but then cranks it up a gear and starts demanding results immediately and you see their true personality. There is nothing much you can do about this but if you had prior warning at least you'd be prepared for it! It also depends on the supervisor as some are nice to you if you are doing their pet project but couldn't careless if you are not and just want your results at the end (i.e. publications!!!)

I was lucky that getting lab consumables was not a problem but I have heard of labs where the budget is dependent on the supervisor and had to be costed to a project so getting consumables/equipment was more difficult and problematic in some cases if you've got a difficult supervisor. If the equipment is expensive it is common to share it between departments but this should not be a problem as there will be arrangements for sharing it.

Hope this helps as getting a good supervisor will make things easier as PhDs are tough enough without them adding to your problems!!!

During my MSc I actually had the opposite problem: people stealing stuff from our lab! I never had to beg, borrow or steal anything but this was probably because we were using a relatively cheap model organism, and I learned that this really does make a difference as it frees up a lot of money for other things. By contrast the mouse people seemed to be constantly sending circular emails round the department asking if anyone had a reagent, enzyme or antibody that they could have a bit of.

Funding is a factor and I'm told that as younger supervisors tend to have less of it their students find they have greater financial constraints when planning work. Mine was young but got around the limited funding by not doing mouse work. However, working on animal models other than mice seems to affect the chances of being published in a good journal, so it's definitely something to think about. Ideally I'd go for a two-model system- zebrafish, chick, xenopus for testing out ideas quickly and cheaply, and mouse for looking into any positive results a bit more and getting data the better journals will consider publishing... actually, my best bet would be to go for a ridiculously well-funded lab but those are thin on the ground these days ;) Seriously, work on non-rodents has its benefits and it could be something to look into.