Imagine being a PhD student who has a supervisor on the verge of retirement. The supervisor claims that he’s putting off retirement to help you, but you don’t feel like he’s helping you at all.

Would you quit, stick it out with this supervisor, or request a different supervisor?

In this story, one PhD student is facing this exact dilemma. He seems to be leaning towards quitting, but the director of the doctoral school is willing to let him switch supervisors and seems to think it would be a shame for him to give up on his research now.

What should he do? Let’s read the whole story to decide.

I have finally lost respect/trust for my supervisor

A little summary, i’m doing a PhD in STEM, building a simulation code, I will finish my 3rd year next month, and will be extending 1 more year because i don’t exactly have the best supervisor in the world and i realize today that i have lost all respect, trust, patience for my supervisor.

A good friend once told me that the longer you do you PhD, the more trust and respect your supervisor should have for you, the more the supervisor will view you as a fellow researcher and that’s a good thing.

For my case it is the complete opposite.

His supervisor is very hands off.

I only have one supervisor and i’m also the only PhD student that he has to supervise. He’s planning on retiring soon actually and told me that the reason he’s still here is because he wants to help me finish.

But he’s not exactly helping, he’s not exactly supervising either.

Since the beginning, i felt something was wrong, never a proper meeting, never a progress report. The only time he gets properly updated on what i do is last year when I presented my work at a “Doctoral Day”, i saw him in the audience, squinting his eyes as i present.

3 months later he came in and ask me why are we doing this research, i have seen memes about this and never thought it would actually happen to me.

The supervisor is even relying on AI for help.

He does drop in my office randomly once in a while for a few minutes, ask me how i’m doing.

I try my best to explain my problem.

He left saying he’ll look into it, never looks into it, if he does give me a response … it’s an AI generated response. I found out the response was AI generated because i ask chatgpt the same question i asked him and chatgpt’s answer is completely identical to his, down to the bullet points and the equations.

OP couldn’t take it anymore.

I told him two weeks ago that i wanted to quit because i felt too burnout from having to do this entire thesis alone, every problem i face would take me months to solve because i have literally noone i can rely on for help.

I broke down as i told him that, i just couldn’t stop my tears.

And the first thing he said was “if you don’t think i can help you then i can resign and pass you onto somebody else”.

I was speechless. It was cold what he said, logical but cold and not a single sorry.

He finds his supervisor’s questions annoying.

Since that day, he has been checking in a bit more, but these check-ins are never fruitful, i still have to solve my own issues, he’s still lost whenever i try to explain him something as simple as A = B doesn’t mean B = A (we had an argument about that like last month).

Today, he came in and ask me which code i’ve been using and if i can send him the equations i use in the code.

The thing is i have been using the same code the guy before me was using and he was also the director of that thesis (which defended 6 months before i started mine so it’s not like a thesis from 10 years ago).

He thinks the professor is clueless.

It’s not a sudden change, it’s something that has been building up for nearly 3 years, little bit of resentment whenever he promised he would help but didn’t, when he was supposed to give feedbacks but didn’t, the disappointment i get thinking that he might be able to help me only to realize he forgets about it as soon as he leaves my office, the fact that he is always there in his office but is always on the phone with somebody instead of checking in on me.

I realize that i start having an attitude whenever he would come in recently (not visibly btw). Like i don’t immediately look to him to say hi, because my brain is thinking “gosh what is here for this time”, so there is a bit of a delay in just saying hello. And when he leaves with a promise of looking into my problem, i just secretly roll my eyes like hell yeah you would.

I do not trust that he could give me any worthy, grounded, basic scientific feedbacks for my thesis, meaning i could be writing a bs equation and he wouldn’t recognize just how fundamentally wrong it is.

Whenever I suggest something, i don’t know if he’s agreeing because it is a good idea or because he has no idea what i’m talking about.

He’s not sure what to do.

I told my best friend about quitting.

My friend went out of his way and brought up my situation to the doctoral school.

The director of the doctoral school (who is, fortunately, also a member of the annual committee to check on my progress) really doesn’t want me to quit, he thinks my work is good and it would be a pity to quit now, so he offers to help me change supervisor if i want but i have to decide if i do and come talk to him myself.

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I can’t decide, i don’t want to bother anyone, i don’t know how feasible this is, whether it will create awkwardness between us. And also i’m scared that noone would want to take on a last-year student who they barely know and now have to be responsible for.

He shouldn’t quit. Push the hesitation aside and get a different supervisor.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who figured out how to stop his manager from constantly stealing his phone charger.

Let’s see if Reddit agrees.

The professor probably doesn’t know how to help.

This person thinks it’s important to find a different advisor.

Another person points out extremes when it comes to supervisors.

But this person thinks OP is expecting too much.

I’m not an academic, and I don’t have a PhD. I feel like I barely understand the world that’s being discussed in this story, but from an outsider’s perspective, the obvious answer seems to be to switch supervisors.

If the director of the doctoral school believes in him and his research so much that he’s encouraging him to switch supervisors, than that probably means something. He should take that seriously.

The current supervisor is older and ready to retire. It makes sense that he’d be more hands off, partly because he wants to retire, and partly because he doesn’t quite understand the research.

It would be a shame for him to give up on his research because of a clueless supervisor.