Working with Your Supervisor 57
particular, he did not seem to grasp the importance of questioning, scepticism, and
independence.
Hasrim had difficulty accepting that this previous work was untypical of ‘real’
research, and to the end of his candidature he was resentful. He was thus reluctant
to be fully intellectually engaged in his work, instead behaving more as a research
assistant who should refer all questions to me for a decision, even non-issues such
as whether to read a paper that was highly regarded in the area. He could become
especially frustrated when he felt that I knew the answer to a question but expected
him to try to figure it out for himself—which, from my perspective, was a quite rea-
sonable expectation of a student who wishes to mature into a critical, independent
thinker! In the end, Hasrim did complete a thesis, but it was relatively weak, and
he could have finished at least a year sooner had he accepted that doing research
involved him showing initiative (and working in a sustained way).
A fundamental problem was Hasrim’s inability to accept that a PhD was not
what he had expected, and thus the relationships and responsibilities were not what
he had planned for. Many students are in some ways surprised by the kind of work
a PhD involves—for example, it can be more grinding, day-to-day, than they an-
ticipate—but doing a PhD can be rewarding in unexpected ways, and a flexible
attitude towards your PhD will help you to shape it well and to adapt to problems
and opportunities.
It is incredibly important to be honest about progress, or lack of it, most critically
with yourself. My student Delia got into serious difficulties late in her PhD because
she concealed her lack of progress from me and her other supervisor, for example,
by presenting hypothesized results and computer-based simulations—that is, the
expected outcomes of experiments—as if they were actual results that she had ob-
served. (Had she kept a careful logbook, this problem might have been detected
before she reached a crisis, but such logbooks are not used in every discipline.) Part
of the problem was that she was deceiving herself; she ‘knew’ what the results of
an experiment would be and that she was being held up by problems in the appara-
tus; that is, she thought that the experiment would run properly someday and these
results would be observed. In this mindset, we, her supervisors, had become an ad-
versary (something like a landlord seeking to collect rent) who must be stalled and
deceived and avoided at all costs. When eventually the true state of affairs became
obvious, we were able to put her back on track towards her PhD, or rather, towards
a much narrower PhD than we had originally anticipated. Her lack of engagement
with us, when her problems first arose, meant that she came dangerously close to
failure and certainly did not achieve her potential.
I don’t understand this habit of hiding problems from a supervisor—it cuts off
the possibility of getting help. I suppose it is a kind of fear of failure, a typical ego-
protecting behaviour, but it reflects a confusion between the supervisor as a mentor
and supervisor as an authority figure. Principally supervisors are the former, and
for an experienced mentor some failure is hardly a surprise; we all fail sometimes.
Concealing it helps no-one.
The cases of Hasrim and Delia concern problems that lay substantially with the
student. Other cases of relationship failure lie with the supervisor. For example,