So, do any of you have a good supervisor? What is s/he like?

I had two good supers. One was young and I was her first PhD student. She read everything I wrote, gave me loads of feedback, and was overall very supportive. The other was my head of school, she was really experienced, and knew a lot about structure and how to finish a project on time. Together, they covered every angle.

Mine is a similar situ to Mattfabs, except my less experienced one who reads all my things is older, and my super experienced professor one (who I don't think reads my work in detail but it's OK) is pretty young (40s). She gives more oversight, more the bigger picture. My main (less experienced one) is very supportive, always replies to emails in good time, and gives detailed feedback.They are both good and sort of compliment one another.

What sparks this thread, Hugh?

My supervisors are very supportive and positive, give feedback quickly (and they seem to go through everything in detail and spot tiny things), plus they are approachable when I need to talk or can't do something. I don't feel worried about going to them with stuff because they are not authoritarian and will try to help me find a way round things. Hope things are ok with you, Hugh.

Thanks all for sharing :)

I don't know if this helps... I was having issues myself a few months a go. Supervisor related. (See previous threads by me this year). And now things are 100x better. There is hope!

No problem - it's just really hard to put into words... months of negative stuff, feeling it wasn't working out how I wanted it to, feeling annoyed/disappointed with them... myself, and academia!

I wrote down a few notes about a) what upset me/caused negative feelings, b) why I thought this might be, and c) how I would respond/how I wanted to appear to others going forward - a sort of strategy. That helped.

Sometimes, I was comparing the relationship I had with them to other working relationships I'd had in the past (more successful ones in my view). When it really got better was when I somehow let go off all of my expectations that I had of academia, my supervisors, the student-supervisory relationship - and just decided to make the best of my situation - even if it wasn't how I'd imagined it should be, or how it might have been if I'd done X, or worked with X supervisor.

I can't really explain how I did that/how it happened. I think it was a bit like if I didn't I would spiral further down and really not make the most of my PhD experience. Things are so much better now - it is unbelievable.

I'm not sure if this helps. Feel free to PM me if you want to talk about specifics of your situation or mine. : )