supervision can make or break your postgraduate experience, you should not just become happy
that someone has accepted you as your PhD student.
You must also try to find out whether or not that person is suitable for you.
In this video, I'm going to show you seven signs of a PhD supervisor, which you might
want to avoid and we are starting right after this short break.
Hello and welcome to my channel.
My name is Tahir And if this is your first time, please hit the subscribe button and
also the notification bell to get notified whenever I post a new video on this channel
every Tuesday and Friday.
So before I talk on this topic, I would like to mention that a supervisor can be a male
supervisor or a female supervisor, but I will be using words for male supervisor in this
video.
So when you are Trying to secure your PhD admission.
Normally you select anyone from the department as your PhD supervisor and start communicating
with that person.
But this is not the way you should be doing this because University and your PhD supervisor,
they are trying to figure out whether you are suitable for this program.
In the same manner you should also be trying to figure out whether that person is suitable
for you or not.
Most of the time, it is not a person who is good or bad.
Most of the time the problem is for compatibility.
But there are few things you can ask the previous PhD students of that person are you can even
send an email to your potential PhD supervisor asking some questions, and I have a separate
video for that what questions you must ask your PhD supervisor before joining him.
So, keep this in mind that we are not judging anyone as a good or bad person.
We are just trying to figure out some of the qualities which appear supervisor should not
have every PhD supervisor is different every PhD student is different.
And a person even though he has these qualities, he might have some other very good qualities
which we are not talking about in this video.
So you should also keep this in mind.
Now the last thing before I talk about these seven signs is that the first of this is only
for engineering disciplines.
I have seen this trend in recent years and I wanted to warn my subscribers who are engineers,
and might think of doing PhD in the future.
So they should be mindful of these type of people.
And this might also be applicable to some other disciplines.
The rest of the six signs which I'm going to show you are applicable to any discipline
and stick around till the end of this video because the last two signs are the deal breakers.
And if your supervisor has any of these two attributes, then you must avoid them.
person as your PhD supervisor.
So let's start.
So the first sign is that this person did his PhD immediately after his undergraduate.
And then he started supervising the students and there is an end.
He was an average student during his undergraduate know the problem here is that if the person
is a top student or gold medalist or a topper in the university, then it is normal for these
kind of students to go into academia, they have a proven track record, they are very
capable most of the times they are so smart that they know more than the one who are working
in engineering, but if a person is an average student, and then he decides to go to PhD,
and then he starts supervising PhD engineering students, then there is an issue because this
person does not know how an engineering project is carried out and what it takes to design
and develop an engineering product.
And bring it to the market.
So, these type of people, they are just looking for an easy life.
They think that if they do PhD, then their life will be easy because they will somehow
get a job in academia, they have some relationship with the top university professors and as
I have mentioned already in one of my other videos, that most of the academic jobs, they
are advertised after they have selected someone.
So therefore, these are those kind of people they have some good relationship with some
high option they get a job and then they start a very easy and very charming life is starting.
There is one key symptom of these idiots and you can immediately recognize them, you will
find them saying that I am a perfectionist, and if an engineer says this to you, I am
a perfectionist.
And he has no industrial experience.
He has not seen any industry and he was An average student then he has the full potential
to make your life miserable during a PhD because no experiment is perfect.
No research paper is perfect.
And no PhD thesis is perfect.
So this perfectionist can destroy five years of your life.
No second symptom is that he criticizes a lot, but ignores your good work.
No.
Again, there are two things a positive criticism from PhD supervisor is always welcome.
But the second part is more important that he ignores your good work.
If he does, so, then the benefit from his poor positive criticism will be less than
the D motivation you will get from ignoring your good work and that will be extremely
harmful for your PhD because you need a little bit of appreciation for your small successes
in the beginning, you will not do PhD immediately.
There will be some Similar successes you will get during first few years and then you will
eventually get a PhD.
Now again, there is a key symptom of these people.
And what is that, although he will criticize you or not, he will ignore your good work.
But at the same time, he will never give you any actionable or a step by step advice.
You can ask his previous students whether that person is of this type or not.
Now, the third sign is that he stays extremely formal and inside his shell.
I'm not saying that you should start developing some personal relationship with your PhD supervisor
because that is not good either.
But this person will always try to speak very short sentences.
He will not give you any detailed or any specific instructions, he will leave it completely
up to you.
He will not even laugh with you on it.
anything because he is in an inferiority complex, he's not competent, and he thinks that he
might say something stupid.
Now, there is also one key symptom of this person as well, which is, if for any reason
he has to talk on any complex issue or any complex concept, he will talk on that subject
very casually.
And he will try to show you that you should already know about this, although it's a very
complex topic.
So this is a key symptom of this person.
Now, the next point is that he will not reply to your technical emails in his email.
So, let's say you ask him any specific details of an experiment you are trying to do, or
any specific concept and you send him an email, a very detailed email, so his reply would
be okay in the next meeting, we will talk about this, come to my office tomorrow at
9pm and we will discuss Something like that he will never reply to your email in detail,
because he is concerned that you might disclose this information later on to someone and he
might have said something very stupid.
So he will always try to discuss in person instead of replying to your email.
Number five is also very critical and a very good sign of a PhD supervisor you must avoid
is that he will not introduce you to other scientists and researchers.
And he does this because he values you low.
He's interested in his own growth not in your carrier growth and he does not see you as
his future colleague.
So therefore, he does not introduce you to other researchers or scientists or other professors
in the university.
Now the last two points.
These are very important and you must look these beforehand and you can easily do this
without even talking To his students.
And if you find that he has these two attributes, then you must award this person because these
are very critical.
The number one is that he must have publications in recent years with an overall impact factor
of greater than five, at least, and the sermon and the last point you must check before joining
this person is that he must have at least five students finishing their PhD under his
supervision in less than five years period.
So there must be some students he already has supervised.
You don't want to be his first student.
And now you might ask that if nobody joins him, then Oh, he will get students.
Well, there are other people who are less intelligent than you and who have not watched
this video.
So there are a lot of other students he will get and when he gets some experience and he
has some publications, then you might be able to join that type of person.
So this is it for this video.
Now the last important thing is that there must be some signs of a good supervisor as
well.
Now I want to make a video about seven signs of a good PhD supervisor.
But I will not do that until I get 1000 likes or dislikes on this video.
So whether you like this video or you dislike this video, please put the thumbs up or thumbs
down on this video.
And if I get thousand likes and dislikes and I can easily achieve this number if you share
this video to your other PhD colleagues, and if I get this I will make a video about seven
signs of a good PhD supervisor and I hope you will enjoy that video as well.
So thanks for watching, and see you next time.