I was wondering if anyone has faced communication breakdown with supervisors where you feel you want to honestly know if your supervisor is genuinely interested in seeing you through the Phd process. I know the that in the UK, the Phd pass percentage has decreased at least in my university although this dos not reflect the number of
PhDs being awarded after resubmission and revision which is my situation. But,I can already feel my supervisor is not looking forwarded to see me successful. I know he has his favorites (local UK students whose success will get him more professional accolades than helping an international student like me). Everytime I visit him, I get perfunctory and mild supportive statements like 'just because you are resubmitting, does not mean you will pass" or well....try your best'. I mean this makes me furious especially when he knows me for four years and knows how badly i need to finish Phd! Makes me want to ask him directly his intentions so I can probably just change the supervisor. How do I have this kind of conversation? At the end of the day, because I am on a visa, I need his support in every step of my Phd. Imagine I cannot even apply for a visa without his initial signatures!

I am planning to meet him on Tuesday unannounced so I can just be sarcastic and he is not ready with his prepared answers and ask him indirectly what conversation he was having with my internal examiner on the day of my viva as I had seen them chat in his office an hour earlier. I really want to find out if he was forewarned that I won't be pass the thesis and I'll get an R & R? Is that even allowed professionally where examiners and supervisors talk to each other before the student's viva? In that case, should I just give up right now and not bother so everybody (except me) is happy! I am quite miserable and even if I know I can definitely boost up my next submission, I still feel I cannot trust him anymore.

Why would your supervisor want you to fail? It won't look good on his record.

I am not entirely sure why you are pinning this on nationality!

Perfectly normal for supervisor to talk to examiners before viva- they are possibly friends. Even if he knew you were going to get R&R, what did you want him to do?

Approaching someone unannounced so you can be sarcastic will not help you.

I concur, that approach is not going to help. That will just make you sound petulant.
The student is responsible for their thesis - this process is meant to be about proving you're ready to be an independent researcher.

Hello Ganesha!

Don't make the situation more difficult than it is. Just approach your supervisor and politely ask him/her for more support. This is what I did. In fact, my supervisor was amazing after the viva. She did everything possible to help me improve my work, even seeing me for long meetings after she was supposed to go home for the day.

No, it s certainly not a matter of nationality. I know at least 4 people in my department who received an R&R and they are British.

By the way, I recently watched a video provided on the website of my university. The video was made this year, and the speaker says that R&R is in fact very common! 'Almost as common as minor corrections nowadays!' That's what he said.

It looks like in the last 4 years or so, things have turned much more difficult for PhD students. This is not my observation, other people have expressed similar thoughts. It was much easier getting a PhD 6 or 10 years ago, before 'theses on the internet' became mandatory. Now, the internet makes it easier for researchers to find and judge a thesis; and naturally, supervisors and examiners do not want to associate themselves with a bad thesis. That is why, in my opinion, we hear about all these R&Rs.

Remember, R&R is an opportunity to improve your work. It's not a punishment. It's a gift. Otherwise, if you associated yourself with a bad thesis, your academic future would be over.

I am not saying that a thesis that requires resubmission is bad. But it is not as good as it should be. Your examiners probably know that you can do better. That's why they challenge you.

Good luck with everything! PM me if you need anything.

Mara Sp.

Hi Ganesha

I did have an issue with a supervisor who I knew didn't have belief in my ability to complete. In the end, they got a job at another university and said that they would continue with my supervision. I wasn't convinced that they would give me the support that I needed, so I wrote a very polite email, thanking them for all their support. I then outlined very clearly what support I would need over the next year. I explained that I completely understood given their new position if they didn't feel they could give me that support. I basically made it so detailed that I gave them the option of getting out. They said they couldnt fulfil what I needed and that it might be advisable to look for another supervisor which I did. Was possibly the best thing I did. My confidence, sense of ownership and general feeling towards my Phd have improved so much.

I think maybe you didn't mean you wanted to be 'sarcastic'??? For me, it was of upmost importance to be civil and ensure things were left on a positive note. Academia is a very small world and you never know when you will bump into someone and who else they know. Be careful about how you approach things. I first drafted the email without an addressee and redrafted a few times making sure the tone was right. Don't send or do anything in anger or haste. But I do think you need an honest answer at this point.

Good luck and I hope you get the support that you need. As Mara said, feel free to PM me if you need anything else.

Thank you all ..I do feel a bit positive especially after what glowworm suggests to be very formal and professional. So far I have not antagonized my supervisor but my problem at this stage of my Phd is such that i need very serious conversation about my prospects of passing after R and R. And he is not anymore going to be able to help because none of his past students had this problem. And he lacks the experience and the confidence to deal with something like this and that really really frustrates me. Infact, in many ways, he got me into this because of the section on ethics! My supervisors did not alert me at all to anonymize my informants something that they were reading for the last two years since I was writing! If only they had warned me I would had a different outcome. Of course, I anonymized some bits like location of my research because I have like 40 informants in my thesis-it was impossible to anonymize all of them and I totally missed it while writing up but that it's why supervisors should do their jobs-pick up on less obvious things. Ahhh....drives me mad. The examiner made a big thing out of this. Thanking my stars that day I did not fail outright. In any case, I had submitted in a rush as well. No rest.....straight 18 months after fieldwork and submitted it!

Treeoflife-I requested for extension from my supervisors but they were convinced it's okay to submit! I was not. I knew I needed three more months and Could have easily submitted in September . Local British students who started with me are still submitting as we speak, and I had to submit even if I knew it was not ready. It's discrimination in every possible way if looked from this point of view. The supervisors support their favorites and will go out of their way to remove people like us as we are competitive especially in the job market. My supervisors are dishonest with me. They just wanted my money through the fee route-and now I am of no use to them.

Or maybe it's because your funding and visa will run out and they wanted to ensure you would finish before then, knowing that UK students can often get funding from parents or partner to finish?

All the international students I know are encouraged to submit by 3.5 years so that they should have 6 months of extra funding whilst waiting for viva and corrections. Actually UK students are too, but most don't, and then end up working for an extra year without funding. This is not discrimination. This is sensible planning on the supervisors' part for the international students.

And honestly speaking, 9/13 students in my lab are international students, and some of these people are my closest friends, but they are not competitors to me... they are not even close.

Obviously supervisors take on international students for the money, and maybe they are due it, because most are a lot of extra work in comparison to UK students. For instance, I have spent 6 hours working on a Sunday when I really didn't want to be working today, and 3 of those hours were spent reviewing a thesis introduction for one of my international friends. It probably would have taken me an hour if it was a British student.

Treeoflife-

no...the supervisors can give extension and the international student can then apply for more time from the university and subsequently the home office will then have to give visa extension to International students based on what the university has been told by the supervisors. My uni' immigration office told me that at this stage, I can get indefinite extension with the support of my supervisors. In my case, my supervisors said they CANNOT SUPERVISE ME ANYMORE. that was the end of the matter, I cannot argue. If I were a local student, surely I would have got support indefinitely and not be forced into submitting a trash thesis. If they wanted to, they could have supported me and given at least three more months-that's all I needed.

international students land up paying four times the money local students pay for Phd. In that sense, to be facing incompetent supervisors is unacceptable.

I am the rare international student who has got R & R outcome in my school. Most of the R & R are local British/EU students who submit after 4-5 years of joining the program (this is in social sciences where supposedly British students are expected to have an advantage over non-english speaking students like myself). I am ashamed as I have let down international students in my department who are superior not only in English writing than local students, but are also great leaders and high achievers in their own country. Unfortunately, I am none of those....I feel awful.

I think you need to get away from the mindset that international students don't receive R & Rs and focus on what can be changed. There are many students who have passed PhDs and done well with R & Rs on this forum. Your PhD is unique to you, and your result is not (or should not) be dependent on your student status; but rather, the quality of your work.

R&Rs don't mean that you aren't intelligent, or won't do well in life. They just mean that major revisions are needed for this piece, take this as a learning experience. In regards to your supervisors, you need to get in contact with a student union that can help you through this process and other areas of the graduate school so you can succeed.

I understand where you are coming from in relation to funding/costs etc as I am an international student myself and its horrible that your supervisors refuse to see you through this process, that's unacceptable.

However, you have to take some responsibility as well, such as your comment about the anonymity of your informants, that really shocked me. Didn't you fill out an ethics application where you had to claim that all participants are anonymous? This wasn't something my supervisors told me, but rather, something I knew of when filling out the application. I'm also not sure why you would expect your supervisors to correct these in your thesis, did they explicitly know that you had not changed the names? 40 informants is a lot (well done, by the way in recruiting that many!) and your supervisors would not be as intimate with the data collection details as you would be.

Seek help from your graduate student union to find out your options of supervision, if your supervisors refuse to help you, someone else should take over. The uni does have a duty to you as a student.

Also, the extension you requested, did you already have an extension? You should be allowed 6 months from the 3 years?

Well, I can definitely sympathise with you, Ganesha. Being somewhere in the middle is also awkward. I am an EU in status. This means that I have no visa to worry about, but it also means that I have money issues to consider (I come from a poor European country), so, I can't stay a student for ever. There were times that I were that {} close to drop out of the course.

I wish you luck and please remember to take one thing at a time. Also, try to maintain your sanity, as this is difficult in our situation. The best day of my life post-viva was the moment I realized that, you know what? I don't care what others think about me. It takes guts to ignore toxic personalities in life. But when we ignore such people, the result is very therapeutic!

Ganesha, my heart goes out to you. The frustration (which is justified in my opinion) is palpable from your post. I think though you have to approach your supervisor with a level head. Don’t go in to start world war 3! I think Glowworm gave very good advice on how to approach your supervisor. I have done something similar. As you know, I got major corrections at the end of October which we’re actually hoping will be done by Christmas but I really had to push for that. I made it very clear in a very polite manner that I had to have this done by Christmas for financial and personal reasons. So why not take that approach with your supervisor? Find out when his office hours are and go in, knock on his door, and explain that you have to have this resubmitted by whatever date (so give them a deadline) and then I think their attitude should improve because as someone else pointed out supervisors, departments and universities do not want PhD projects to fail. It looks bad for them so I think putting the polite but firm deadline there (I have to be finished by X date) will make him sit up and take notice a bit more.

I think the international vs local student debate is a bit of a side issue maybe so try not get wound up about that. It’s likely draining your energy and not helping you concentrate. I am not in the UK but I do have sympathy for what you say because I do think international students are often used just for their money.

You have my empathy, Ganesha. I know how horrible it is having your project thrown back in your face. You will get there though. Set a deadline not just for you but for your supervisor and make clear it has to be done by that date and there can be no excuses. Say that you need to have it done for financial and personal reasons. All the very best.

Rendering informants anonymous is basic. It's not even academic almost, it's just common sense. Reading this together with your post on being 'held back' intellectually by your institution makes me think you might need to step back and change your perspective on a number of things.