Hi.

I'm about 9 months into my PHD program, of a four year program. I am technically a supervisor of a Professor, but one of his postdocs is working as my effective supervisor, and this post is about the latter "supervisor".

What I'm trying to figure out is if this is me not coping with the PHD, or if he actually is… an asshole.

First my background: I have a masters in theoretical *blank*, and am working now on Computational *blank*. Not a completely new field, but alot to learn. If I were to be my supervisor I would have given me six months to read up on both the new theoretical parts of my work and get to know the computational side (we have an existing code), and then with a good basis get to do the real science.

Unfortunately I only got 1 month of this before my supervisor started asking about how I should start implementing the first set of modifications of the code. This then in my mind made me start doing a sloppy implementation of only partially learned methods/theory. Then three months later he wanted to know if I had finished the first set of modifications, I said I had but that I hadn't gotten through data analysis or a test case. At this point he went mental, yelling about how he wanted us to push for a publication and that he didn't want any of my "ridiculous excuses".

The last few months have been more of this, I am trying to learn everything I feel i don't know, while also working on the code (the actual test case has been a really annoyance as I am simply stuck). What does not help is him coming by and pestering me about the fact that he wants a publication, and that it is "way overdue", distracting me from actually getting the work done.

The last straw came this week, where I had to attend 7 hours of lectures every day of a mandatory course for all PHD students. In this week I made no progress in my science work, as I actually did the student part of "PHD student", and this brought on another of his mental outbursts where he basically threatens with "you're being paid to work…", implying that I should watch out…

So the reason I think this is not just me tackling the hard work of a PHD, is that I see no other of my first year PHD students being pestered of doing publications this early, a lot of people don't have their publications before their third year even. He also keeps comparing me to another PHD student who got publications on his first year, however I'd like to point out that he did the exact same thing for his masters as for his PHD, essentially giving him 2 extra years, a fact that is beyond my supervisor to comprehend.

Ok, this was a gigantic post, sorry about that, I just felt the need to write it down. Any comments? Is this the norm of supervisor behavior?