[teekert]

I also did a PhD and this is all true. I realized many of these things years later.

I think many of these points come down to confidence. When you are in the trenches, you really, really do know a lot, and you know it in incredible detail. In fact, in your career, if you leave academia you will probably never know a unique small "thing" in such detail ever again simply because you will have to make something as opposed to studying it. Not even your professor knows everything about what you do, and so she may give advice that seems to contradict what you think. It is vital that you trust yourself enough to speak up. Yes, the professor is really smart, and knows more than you, but she didn't spend 3 weeks in the lab wrestling with some optical setup like you did and you know some things better then her, better than anyone in fact. It's hard to admit, I know.

Also, you may really have wrong assumptions about the progress you're going to make in the project. You may feel very bad after a year of messing around while the prof thinks you're doing well. Talk about these feelings. The prof knows what's normal, you on the other hand may think you're the next Einstein (and assume Einstein wrote something great every other month) and constantly disappoint yourself.

[dj_mc_merlin]

Similar to learning software engineering on the job. Once you're leaving the baby level you stop being able to take the more senior engineers' word as golden. You will know some things better temporarily due to recent intense exposure. The tricky part is figuring out when that's true and when others can see something you can't. This never leaves you I guess.

[patrick451]

> It is vital that you trust yourself enough to speak up. Yes, the professor is really smart, and knows more than you, but she didn't spend 3 weeks in the lab wrestling with some optical setup like you did and you know some things better then her, better than anyone in fact. It's hard to admit, I know.

It's really not. It was obvious to me about 9 months in that my advisor really didn't know all that much. The professors who really seemed to have technical chops were either new faculty still trying to get tenure, or the rare iconoclast who didn't play the game and had a single grad student. The tenured professors with large research labs were frankly better politicians than they were scientists.

[lambdatronics]

>It is vital that you trust yourself enough to speak up. Yes, the professor is really smart, and knows more than you, but she didn't spend 3 weeks in the lab wrestling with some optical setup like you did and you know some things better then her, better than anyone in fact.

Amen to that! It's better to have the discussion than to silently disagree (well, assuming your thesis advisor isn't a raging narcissist, and assuming you are sufficiently tactful about speaking up) because there's a chance you are mistaken & the feedback would be helpful.

>You may feel very bad after a year of messing around while the prof thinks you're doing well. Talk about these feelings.

Another one that I wish I had known (again, needs caveats about unhealthy advisors, though). It's easy to underestimate the scale of a task as a grad student (the devil is in the details), and to therefore bite off more than you can chew & feel guilty for choking.

[teekert]

I agree, I was fortunate to have a very nice prof, really dedicated to the development of his PhD students, who saw the importance of social events and tried to have some fun himself, eager to roll up his sleeves and help in the lab, he enjoyed it. He was a bit further in his career with no need to publish or perish anymore.

That's also an advice I give to aspiring PhD students, look for a warm place, talk to the other PhD students about the working atmosphere. You don't want to end up a "measurement slave", as one of the 4 PhDs that (and I quote a prof during a talk) "was burned on this subject".