I'm I'm 10 months into a full time PhD now. I did my undergrad at the same university and my supervisor is the head of school.

I think I have a bit of a problem with putting him on a pedestal. I look up to him and admire him so much it actually affects our relationship. When we have supervision meetings he reminds me that we should be having a two way conversation about theoretical and methodological ideas and I feel a lot of pressure on me to take the lead though I don't feel qualified to. I'm relatively confident (well as with most people I expect my confidence fluctuates) with others in the school I can talk confidently about my research and my ideas but when it comes to my supervisor I always feel I come across as passive and lacking in my own ideas. I don't want this to go on as to be honest it's a little embarrassing I just can't help feeling that there is a huge gap between where I am and where he is as an extremely prominent academic in my field!

I'm just looking for some advice or comments from people who might have been in a similar scenario or from those who have great relationships with their supervisors and any tips they might have.

Thanks for reading x

Hi there,

My best advice would be to write down any discussion points you want to raise during your meeting, a list of your progress or what you have been doing (including interesting topics, ideas, theories or articles you have come across and what you think of them). It will help you to structure your discussion, especially if you feel anxious at the time and will prevent the "I should have said this" or "I forgot to say that".

Yes, he is a senior academic respected in his field but in your first few months he should lead/encourage your trains of thoughts. All of this is to be enhanced and even learned or during your doctoral studies. What i often say to new students:
Year 1: your supervisor is the expert, he/she probably knows more about the subject area than you do. You are here to learn about how to do research, how to be a researcher, how to analyse and how to ask research questions
Year 2: you'll start to achieve the same level of knowldge about your project
Year 3: it is YOUR project and you are likely to know more about him/her
Viva day: for what may be a brief moment you are the world leading expert in the topic discussed in your thesis.

Don't despair, relax during your meeting, prepare your discussion points, try to put across the same ideas you communicate to your peers.

Let us know how you get on,
Best of luck

I agree with the post above. Write things down prior to the meeting. I'm also 10 months into my PhD and whilst my supervisor isn't as senior as yours (he's a very young PI) I also got nerves in my first few months when we had meetings. What really helped is sitting down the night before and just writing about the things I wanted to say/discuss with him. And a concise, bullet-pointed list of objectives agreed from our previous meeting, what I'd achieved and if things weren't working as planned then an outline of my approach to troubleshooting them.

Supervisors will always appreciate this level of preparation and it shows you're taking things seriously. So it helps you prepare but it also impresses your supervisor.

Thanks very much to you both, your comments are incredibly helpful!

I should also apologise for my poor spelling, grammar and punctuation in that first post, I was a bit rushed!

I always go to supervision meetings with an agenda, though this is very brief and just covers things I'd like to update my supervisor on or topics for discussion i.e. 'readings', 'course x', 'seminar x'. My intention with this was to use this a guide to elaborate from but I'm noticing that this isn't working for me. The idea to go prepared with a list of progress, topics I've read and my thoughts on them and aims and objectives in the context of previously meetings are all things I think would really help me. As you say 'charmlessman' these not only help to prepare but impress!

I'm not seeing my supervisor for another 2 weeks and I'm presenting at an event next week. I'm looking to our next meeting now (more than I was before anyway) where I'm going to present him with a list of what I've been doing and what I've read, presented so that if I do get flustered or things go off topic I have what I want to cover in writing.

Thanks so much for this, I can't believe this is not something I've been doing already and really glad I asked for help on this! Will let you know how I get on.

GM x