======= Date Modified 16 34 2009 11:34:08 =======
Hello!

While many of you seem to have been very lucky with your supervisors and the quality of supervision, I was wondering whether there's also others here on the forum that were less lucky in that respect. How do you get on and what's your strategies for getting useful feedback?

I'm pretty much on my own with my project. While my supervisor generally seems to think that my project is worthwile, he doesn't really engage at all with what I do and rarely has any kind of feedback to offer. He has sometimes been critical about my approach and ideas, but in a way that made me think his concern was to test whether I have any reasons at all to do x rather than offering genuine feedback/criticism -- which all in all is not really helpful. Furthermore, the things that immediately concern my project are not really part of his expertise, and so I'm generally not very motivated to ask him for advice. I sometimes have given him stuff to read but he rarely reads anything I give to him. Methodologically he is of no help either, I'm afraid. I've recently managed to publish a paper, and it seems to me he thinks I'm fine by myself, so he's even less interested in what I do.

I've anticipated this situation before I started my phd, and the reason I'm putting up with this is that I'm thinking whatever the situation, it's me who's got to do the phd in the end, and even a perfect supervision won't change the fact that the phd is my own independent piece of research, and I have to take responsibility for what I'm doing. I thought that it's quite common that the phd-situation is not perfect and if it's not supervision then there's most of the time other aspects that add to the challenges of the research.

I haven't changed my opinion on this, but at times I admit I'm getting somewhat envious of those who've got great supervision and are nicely integrated in some research group etc., and I feel my learning process would be so much more efficient if my supervision was a bit different. On the other hand, it's probably motivated me more to teach myself stuff, given me a lot of freedom to shape my research project, enabled me to read very widely and generally be quite independent, but still I'm pining for critical, constructive, supportive, coherent and thoughtful feedback/criticism.

My general strategy so far has been to look for feedback or answers elsewhere, but it's of course not so unproblematic to ask complete strangers for advice on research matters. I've been to a summer school, which was enormously helpful. So far I've only presented on one conference, but that was a side-project rather than my actual work.

Anyone else in a similar situation? How do you feel about it and what are your coping strategies?

Appreciate any input.

I feel for you Apple. My supervisor is lovely, but we meet very rarely, about once every 6 months for a proper meeting, although she is always available on email. I think I do prefer to work quite independently. The problem is, she says my writing is very good, but I know whenever I give her anything, she doesn't actually read it through. I am dreading the day when she turns round and says, "well I've actually read this properly now - and its awful".

I also have the issue that she doens't help out methodologically - she has designed an analysis technique, yet I have to learn how to use it from her book, rather than herself. And I also struggle, in that she knows so little about my project, when she does offer advice, it tends to be wrong and lead me down the wrong path, she just doesn't know what I am doing! - this has got me into trouble twice, losing me several months of work each time, so I am now just ignoring her and doing what I think is right, because that, in the end has always been what she thinks I should have done, even though she shot it down when I first mentioned it. :-s

I have no real tips on how to get around this. I am hoping just to finishe the data collection, write it all up and then give it to someone else who will read through it for me and spot the holes.

thanks a lot sneaks, it's amazing how comforting it is to know others are in the same situation. Can really relate to your situation. Hopefully we both find someone willing and able to comment constructively at some point.. sigh.

What I would say is that my sup suddenly does become interested if I do work that impacts her e.g. she can suddenly see a networking or grant opportunity available. I have now worked out that if I do this type of work she is more willing to read stuff, BUT obviously not always easy to do!

Hi Apple - I'm in a very similar situation! It is really frustrating to have a meeting and not come away with any useful feedback, and with the feeling that they haven't even read what you wrote... Because I've been feeling so adrift, I've started to look for help from other people, to make sure I'm still making sense. I'm pretty independent too, but it's nice to know you're not making stuff up! So when I read something that seems like a great piece of research, with a method that I really like, I write to the main author - and people have been surprisingly willing to help. I've had 3 or 4 really nice academics read through my work and make some great comments, which has helped a lot. Other than that, I can only wish you luck, and let you know that you are not alone dealing with this...

======= Date Modified 17 Dec 2009 05:40:42 =======
Hi Kezia! Thanks so much for posting, I really think I know what you mean. It's very encouraging to hear that you were successful in asking other academics for advice! What kind of stuff have you sent them, chapters, research proposals, sketchy ideas? I have been thinking about that too but was a bit uncertain whether it's an "accepted" practice and whether people are generally ok with such requests.. and then many here on the forum have pointed out the risk of your work getting "stolen" (although I'm not sure my ideas are so grand for this to be an immediate risk, but it's probably also worth thinking about). And generally I think I'm also wondering how much of a draft is it allowed to be, so that others are still willing to comment rather than prefer to just cringe in private, if you know what I mean..

Recently I managed to get one prof from a different uni interested in a side project of mine (a conference paper on a not-immediate-phd topic) and sent her a manuscript, she promised to comment, let's see if it'll happen, but I really hope so. I've yet to ask outsiders about my actual phd project though.

Many thanks for sharing your experiences!

Hi again! No problem :-) I have been sending a brief (5-6) page version of my research proposal (I've done a pretty wide literature review, so I'm fairly confident that I'm making a little bit of sense...) - first I email and say what I liked about their work, and then ask if they'd be willing to help out, and if they say yes, then I send my paper. I'm still in my first year, and haven't thought too much about people stealing my ideas as yet! That said, I probably wouldn't send it out to anyone - I've picked academics who wrote great articles, but generally from a different angle, so they know a lot about what I'm trying to do, but it's not really their thing. I made sure that it was presentable - a nicely written piece of work, even though I specified it was a draft - so they could see where I was going, and hopefully point out things I had missed. So far it has been really useful for me - the people who have replied have made some very insightful comments, and helped me to narrow down my focus a lot. I've found that younger academics, especially those who have completed their PhDs in the last 5 years, have tended to be most helpful (maybe because they remember the stress??).
I've also done a similar thing to you, working with a different professor from my university for a journal publication. I figure it can't hurt to learn from as many people as possible...
Good luck!

Hello Apple,
I can completely relate to where you are coming from. I'm currently writing up, but my 3 years to getting to this stage has been difficult tricky and fraught with supervisors being difficult. I've had 3 supervisors over the course of my phd; the first only took me on so she got the top student of the UG course and there was no project outline so I've had to cook my phd project up myself. This is good as I get to research what interests me, on the other hand its bad as none of my supervisors understand the project or have any expertise in it. The first supervisor got rid of me at the end of my first year; I was making ok progress but the project wasn't what she wanted to supervise and hardly had time for meetings. Supervisors 2 & 3 I'm still with but I've had to cope with one moving university's to the other end of the country and the other naffed off on maternity leave for almost all my 3rd year. I will admit my 2nd supervisor does his best and always tries to answer his e-mail but it is difficult; he is also the only one making any effort to read my thesis chapters. My 3rd supervisor couldn't care less about me; but as she is my main supervisor i have to put up with her; hell I even didn't get invited to her groups xmas meal that how much they care.  The only thing I can say is keep being persist ant on the e-mail and with meetings and make them commit to targets i.e. they will have read X by Y date. The one thing I've found really useful is to have a mentor outside of the department, mine isn't even in the uni system that gets your general subject area who you can moan to and potentially be used as a proof reader. It helps if you really need some feedback and you don't think its going to be coming from your supervisor.
I hope this helps. Keep your chin up, it does come to an end eventually. :-)

======= Date Modified 17 Dec 2009 19:15:33 =======
Thanks yellowtreble, it's good to hear that you've come so far despite all the difficulties with supervision! I've already made some new year's resolutions with regard to being more active at networking and trying to get feedback from other academics. At the moment feeling rather low though and not very confident about my project and its future, but hope that taking a break for Christmas will put things into perspective. Thanks very much for your input!