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I think an important caveat is that, at least in American academia, your advisor should not have the same role as a supervisor, depending on the field and research arrangements. As a PhD student, you are expected to have care and motivation for your own research and situation: as sokoloff points out, the idea is that the student pushes and the advisor guides. You can, and in many cases are expected, to disagree with your advisor, and your advisor should not have complete control over what you are doing and how you do it. Similarly, it is usually seen as the student's responsibility to do what they need to finish their research and degree, not the advisor's responsibility to manage it. Ideally, an advisor is more of a mentor and senior collaborator than a supervisor. Some situations I have known: - A student who talked to many of their committee members as much as or more than to their advisor, and generally took their advisor's views on their research as suggestions to be weighed against their own and their committee members' views. In this case I actually think there could have been a reasonable complaint that some of their committee members paid more attention to the student's research than that of their own students. (A distinguishing factor here may be that the student was writing and receiving their own grants and fellowships, and was publishing papers and presenting at conferences on their own, however.) - A student who disagreed with their advisor on a number of work, approach, neglect, and other questions, and switched to having another committee member as their advisor shortly before defending. (This student was supported by their old advisor's grants or by TAships, I believe.) - A student where their committee disagreed with their advisor on dissertation readiness and pushed the advisor to allow a defense. (This student was entirely supported by their advisor's grants, and continued to work with their advisor after graduating. The advisor did not see the disagreements as attacks, but as an expected part of academic collaboration.) - A student who outright had a nominal advisor (for departmental politics reasons) who had little role at all in their work, and who worked almost entirely with a committee member. While I have never worked in industry, I assume that if your supervisor tells you to do something, you can't simply disagree and have this be the right choice, and you similarly can't decide to ignore your supervisor and do something else, or change supervisors on your own accord. In academia with advisors, the situation is different. Depending on funding situations, an advisor may actually have very little formal authority over a student at all. |
Friends in math and political science certainly had experiences like the ones you described, but they would be fairly unusual in a wet-lab field, where students (and postdocs) are largely expected to work on an advisor’s grant. This is especially true when the experiments are expensive: a committee member would need to be generous indeed to put up tens of thousands of dollars for (say) an fMRI study.