one of the most important thing during your PhD is your relationship with your
PhD supervisor in this video I am going to highlight five key mistakes which
students mostly do while communicating with their PhD supervisor so let's get
started hello my name is Tahir Yaqub and if this is your first time please hit
the subscribe button and also the notification bell to get notified
whenever I post a brand new YouTube video on this channel on every Tuesday
and Friday so the first thing is never say anything disrespectful to your PhD
supervisor this looks very straightforward and mostly this mistake
happens unintentionally I am making this video in Australia and Australia is a
multicultural society and there is a multicultural aspect which I want to
highlight here so let's say you are doing PhD in Australia and you are not a
native English speaker so when you try to communicate with your supervisor in
an email or direct communication the selection of words is very important so
in particular when you are writing an email so text cannot communicate the
correct tone if you are not paying attention so if you are good at
communication and you pay attention while writing email that is fine and
both verbally you will not do this mistake and the second thing is there
are some cultural issues for example sir is a word of respect all around the
globe but in Australia Australian preferred to call with the first name so
if you call your supervisor sir it might look a bit stiff but if you call it
again and again or you might feel uncomfortable while talking to you I am
NOT saying that sir is a word of disrespect I am just saying that you
should understand the culture and the point is that you cannot assume that the
people you are encountering they share your core values now the second point is
you should never say it cannot be done this is wrong for many reasons first of
all discipline this statement is applicable to two different situations
one is that this cannot be done within a time frame the second is that this
cannot be done in an absolute sense you should not say this in any of these
situations because in PhD there are deadlines you have to face those
deadlines and you have to meet those deadlines you cannot say this cannot be
done because PhD is not a self-paced program and the people who believe it is
a self-paced program they become more and more passive more and more lazy as
the time goes by and they never finish their PhD so super wise there would be
worried about you if you say this cannot be done and the second thing is that for
example a supervisor says that you complete this task by that time and you
cannot finish it you know that you won't be able to finish it so what you should
do is you should think in your mind that I would be able to finish at least 80%
of this task so you should say to your supervisor I am confident that I will
finish 80% so this is not a yes this is not a no but this is a good statement
now let's take another example let us say that your supervisor asked you to
try a new experiment and you say no no it cannot be done you are not in a
position to say that because you have not tried you have not tested so how can
you say that this cannot be done and the second important thing is this will not
preserve your feeling of competence we want to preserve your feeling of
competence you should feel competent about you that
you can do your can-do attitude is very good and we also want your supervisor to
believe in you that you can do this so this is also wrong in many ways that it
cannot be done now the third important thing is that you should never ever tell
your supervisor about your personal matters about your family problems about
your problems with your partner about you about your financial issues because
telling someone about your personal problems is always considered as a
weakness you should realize that your relationship with your supervisor is
purely professional at the very least what the supervisor will do is that he
or she will never recommend for any opportunity because he or she
will think that you are emotionally a weak person so this is not a good thing
no the fourth important thing is a situation can come when your supervisor
asks you about something do you know this for example I give you
control engineering engineering example that if your supervisor asked you do you
know matlin MATLAB is a common software and you would think in your mind if you
say no what the supervisor will think about you that this guy does not know
even this very common software this approach you feel in your mind and then
you say yes I know this while actually you don't know that so this is
absolutely wrong and this problem can lead to a very complex problems later on
this looks very simple but it is not there are few things few issues in
related to this the first issue is that your supervisor will now expect that you
know MATLAB and he might ask you to do something and now you have to learn
first and then do that and you won't be able to deliver within a specific time
which is in the mind of your supervisor and now he will become passive because
he will think that you are not very passionate about your PhD so this is the
least important thing that you will not fulfill his or her expectations the most
important thing is if you say something like that you will lose the honesty
truth and honesty does matter in any relationship no actually you lied to
your supervisor and it will shake your integrity because eventually he or she
will know that you don't know MATLAB you don't know this thing whatever the thing
is so therefore be honest be straightforward upfront what you know or
what you don't know you can tell your supervisor for example I don't know
MATLAB because I work in Scilab which is a very closed software to MATLAB and you
can do almost everything in Scilab which is open source software so say something
like that no the last thing the first thing when you start your PS
the supervisor most quarterly will give you a paper to read or something to read
and then you start reading and then you read one paper two papers ten papers and
you don't understand and you don't understand and you don't tell your
supervisor that you don't understand anything of these papers a stage will
come when you will get frustrated and know where you supervisor says to you
read this thing you would say reading is not very helpful and reading is useless
I couldn't get anything up out of this reading now this is probably the most
serious thing you will ever say to your supervisor listen guys PhD is all about
reading and if you become allergic to reading at some point and you express
this to your supervisor then you should not be doing your PhD
full stop because PhD is all about reading reading is the blood and oxygen
of your PhD and you should read you should willing to read in one of my
previous videos I explained the importance of reading that if you are
trying to publish your paper in a journal you must read read read a stage
will come when you will feel that you are now ready to publish in that journal
so I will put a link here of that video so you can watch that video so this is
the most important thing you should avoid saying to your supervisor because
this is one of the key things about the students who never finish their PhD
supervisor give them something to read and they come back without reading so
the good thing to do at this point is if a supervisor gives you something to read
you read it whatever you understand you make notes and then know
means that you make notes on your diary and then when you go back into the next
meeting you explain to your supervisor whatever you understood out of that
paper that is the best approach he will feel the motivation he will feel your
passion although you didn't understand that correctly but that is one of the
best thing you can ever do to impress your supervisor to read something to
make notes and to discuss with your supervisor what you understand so I hope
that you will take care of about these few mistakes and you will be careful
what to say what not to say and I would like to see your comments so please
comment in this video if you have any question I answer all the questions on
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more videos of this kind thanks for watching
see you next time