Hi emeroz,

I was my supervisor's first PhD student, and I can tell you that he is terrible. I'm not sure if it's because I'm his first student or because of his personality, but I didn't trust his knowledge and his way of supervision. I had a second supervisor, a senior professor, who is very smart although still a bad supervisor, but at least he really knew his stuff. I would always meet them separately, and in all occasions I would be told something different so I would always trust the professor. I would suggest you get a second, much more experienced supervisor who's had a history of supervising PhD students previously with success.

Sorry in advance for the long post ahead.

I started working whilst writing my PhD thesis (in the UK) and although it’s been really tough working in my job in the day and on my thesis at night, I finally finished my thesis. Since I left university to start work, my supervisor has slightly changed and he is not as friendly as he used to be, although not rude. He is known for being more interested in the work that his students do for his own benefit rather than the benefit of the student’s PhD, and therefore as smart as he is, he is not that good in supervising students.

Anyway, my viva is in two weeks and as most people, I’m extremely nervous and the more I read, the more I feel there is still a lot to learn before going in the viva and I feel that there are lots of questions that the external examiner can ask such as “Why haven’t you done this to test that?” and I don’t think I have an answer to that. My supervisor has chosen an external examiner from Italy, who works in the same discipline but in a different field. While he knows about some of the things I did in my work, he doesn’t know a lot about the other things, which I consider to be the main part of my thesis. I’m afraid he’s going to focus on the things he knows, which I consider to be not a main part of my thesis at all, and leave the main parts in my thesis which he doesn’t know much about. He looks like he publishes a lot of journal papers, much more than my supervisor, and in 2017 alone he published around 10 journal papers. Also, my internal examiner doesn’t know much about my work but he is really nice and he was my examiner for the MPhil/PhD upgrade viva. He didn’t really give me a hard time and I used the advice he’s given me to finish my final thesis.

My supervisor and his wife are my external examiner’s friends and after the viva, they are going to show him around in the UK in the weekend and then my supervisor is flying back with him to Italy to give a short course in his university. Also my supervisor and the external examiner recently wrote a book chapter together so they know each other very well. Do you think the external examiner can fail his friend’s student? I recently sent a soft copy of my thesis to my external examiner and he sounded friendly in his email reply, saying that he will enjoy reading my thesis, which put me at ease slightly. However, I noticed a few typos and grammatical mistakes (less than 10) recently which worried me slightly.

Any advice on the whole situation would be highly appreciated as I think I’m freaking out a bit.