Hi,

We shouldn't speak about our assumptions, but let people's deeds speak for themselves. However, psychologists advice it's good to trust our intuition/gut feeling, which makes things a bit complicated, especially when under stress.

So, how would you deal with a general gut feeling that your supervisor doesn't exactly wants you to fail, but to succeed less than others. For instance have you ever felt that if you have a good idea for a project they would try to make you focus on other things, in order to give/discuss this idea with others later on? Or misguide you while working on something, having you focused on solving not very important aspects of the research problem? Or that you don't have the same level of guidance (clear steps, meeting summaries, literature), but at the end the shown outcome would be that it takes you more time to finish or even continue with something, or that the supervisor might even be happy if you don't provide new input during a week. Or that s/he doesn't seem supportive/happy when you thought and solved something by yourself, but does with others. Instead, the general feeling would be that comments/reactions would accumulate to a minimization of your efforts - is this a way to make students try harder and become better and better or what exactly? Or how would you deal with a situation where your mistakes are treated as 'we lost time' (i.e. 1.5 week, for something that initially was 'not urgent' but later on became, and not because of your fault. But then, when it comes to others there are no blaming comments for months lost because of their mistakes/training or because the supervisor wasn't really there. Or say, you expressed concerns about things they responded with high confidence, and later they correct them,either without mentioning something, or if they do, without telling 'it seems you were right' - which, well, is not that important to hear, but I guess it makes sense to expect it when in a good collaboration.

So how would you deal with the above? Would you express your concerns to your supervisor, initially, and, say if the responses were something like 'you see ghosts' or 'yes the same happened to me when I was in X lab when my supervisor and colleagues did Y', would you swallow it and continue or you would further express your concerns to co-supervisors and other students?

I don't know how, but the outcome is right now to doubt myself, being unable to make a decision or continue with confidence and trust in myself. I generally feel that my work/effort is going to be minimized. I'm at the very beginning - I don't know if my gut feeling makes sense or whether it's normal thoughts that we all have?

Any advice is welcome - just be honest and share your thoughts/experiences.