Hi guys,

I have a relatively new supervisor and I am her first PhD student. She is usually quite helpful and it is easy to get face time with her. I usually see her every 1-2 weeks and she is also fast with emails plus helpful when dealing with other issues.

The problem is I sometimes have trouble getting her to talk about my work. Literally, I try to talk about something I am doing and need help with but she takes a tangent and suddenly we are talking about a grant application. Try and bring the conversation back to my problem, talking about a paper she wants to write. Or research she wants to do, or what equipment she would like to have. Usually, in like a 30minute conversation I might get her to talk about my work for 5 or so minutes but recently it has become a lot harder. Sometimes it feels like everything she wants to talk about does not involve my work. Like assuming that I know what I am doing when really, I have no clue. It doesn't help that no-one else in my uni has any experience in my area, so there isn't anyone else I can go to with technical issues.

Normally this is okay but I am having some issues at the minute with equipment and what direction I should be taking (as the equipment isn't sensitive enough for what I originally planned). I have had about 4 months of equipment issues with minimal usable data and I am getting worried. I just want her advice, she is already giving me time, why can't she talk about my problems, not the future??

Sorry about the rant. But do you have any advice on how to manage your supervisor?

this is not good; does she respond to emails? Have you tried to email to her an agenda and discuss the main points through email?

rewt, there are three immediate reasons I can think of as to why she is engaging in such obvious avoidance techniques.
She is either not interested in your work, unable to understand your work and unwilling to admit it or she doesn't want to get involved because she sees that as your responsibility to figure it out.
Either way, this passive aggressive approach is extremely unhelpful. I would not allow her to indulge in that. Dont let her witter on for 25 minutes on her own stuff. Learn some assertiveness techniques to force her hand. Personally. I would flush her out by making my questions progressively more focussed and then if needed I would directly ask her if she was following my line of reason. That would at least help you rule out one of the three. I would then ask her directly if she thought I should be resolving these problems myself. Then I would have my answer as to the reason for her behaviour. The difficulty then starts when you have to resolve the problem but you need to know what her problem is first.

Sorry for the rant, it is was an odd day yesterday. Most of the time my supervisor is really good about giving feedback, helping with administration, and general supervision. She just doesn't want to talk about methodologies.

To be honest, my project is my supervisor's idea and it could open a new sub-field if successful. However, I can't make a key substrate in high enough quantities to follow the initial methodology, therefore I need to change something. The easiest way is to move to goal posts and prove 4/5ths of the concept by different methods, which should be enough for my thesis. But I can't do that final fifth without some new expensive equipment, therefore, we can't get that AAA+ paper that directly leads to a lot of further work or we even possibly get gazumped. So really she wants the initial idea to work so that it helps her career but doesn't want to hear that we can't do it.

Fortunately, I have got my second supervisor (who is more of a formality than an actual supervisor) to organize an official meeting for all of us about my transfer report. I have sent a draft version of my transfer to both of them, were it says the initial method didn't work - I am changing. I am hoping that I can make it real to her in that meeting, so that she starts helping me.

BTW: My two supervisors are very good friends in real life, which might be good or bad.

PS: I tried emailing her directly about my methodology issues to her, but she usually cc'es someone else in with the reply saying "so and so might have something that might be useful for INSERT SOME RANDOM IDEA". Via email, she deflects and results in me having more work, so I have stopped emailing about this