drafting the phd

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I know of one particular case where a maths professor was involved in supervising an economics PhD. And on your example in fact, a friend of mine did a PhD in image processing, and was supervised by someone attached to an applied maths department. It's entirely possible that the narrow focus of a PhD may indeed find a specialist in another department, or that a specific topic might technically fall under one department but be able to supervised by others. I don't see why this is so surprising.

There's a published paper somewhere that states that one of the examiners will ask a candidate; "Why are you working with Prof X?/Why do you select him?/ Why him not someone else?" That will be interesting if Prof X has nothing to do with the candidate's field.

My supervisor herself asked me to get ready for the question :wink:

Reply 21

sj27

Original post by kka25

Sorry, I don't see the relevance of this comment? The examples I gave above are obviously not ones where the supervisors have "nothing to do with" the candidate's field. Some economics PhDs are almost entirely maths, for example.

Reply 22

kka25

Original post by sj27

What the paper meant I think was, some of these examiners would generalize and say that although X overlaps with Y, X doesn't have much depth to say what's on Y, let alone extending the field; so why work with Prof in field X then?

Reply 23

Craghyrax

Original post by fairytalegonebad

no. but i love my topic.

Ok so the worst case scenario is that your current supervisor decides she can't be bothered to supervise you anymore. While that would suck, I don't think she can make you quit your PhD so long as you are progressing and clearly working. If that happened the department would be expected to give you a different supervisor instead. And from what it sounds like, practically anybody else they have would be better than her. So try not to stress.

Do you have any kind of department hand book stipulating the rights you have as a supervisee, how many meetings you're meant to have with your supervisor and so on?
Also I would encourage you to speak to other students supervised by the same woman to see what experiences they have. If all of you are having the same bad experience then you'd have a strong case for going to the head of department and complaining.

Reply 24

Jake22

Original post by kka25

Interesting. How did your supervisor manage to do that? Surely the PhD student is working in a different area, unrelated to your supervisor's area?

No. By different department - I meant a different university; the same subject. He met him at a conference and he is working in a pretty related area.

It is far away enough from project that I don't understand all of the details and soforth but I have a vague idea of it.

(edited 11 years ago)

Reply 25

flying plum

I think it's not necessarily correct to say that there is going to only be one person in the whole University who could supervise your PhD. So many studies are multi-disciplinary nowadays, that there could be maybe 10 people who could supervise you, all of who will have an emphasis in a different area of your thesis.

Mine for example, is a law PhD, but I plan to conduct empirical work (at the moment this oscillates around interviews or ethnography depending on how much i worry about time), and so I have two supervisors, one whom is a lawyer, the other is a sociologist. But there is also a lot of legal theory, which my law supervisor happens to be good as he did philosophy prior to going into law, but could easily not know the detail. And there are other aspects, such a sociology of law which comes into it, which neither supervisor is a particular expert on.

The emphasis and direction of my thesis is going one way in part because of my supervision. If i had ended up at UCL, I know my supervisor there would have sent me off in a very different direction, because his specialty is human rights and equality rights, so that would have been a much stronger focus...

Reply 26

Craghyrax

Yeh I think people are far too restrictive with how they see supervision. There are many cases where a student goes somewhere to work with a particular person, and that person then moves to another University. In these cases someone else from the original University often takes over, and the student is fine. There is a lot more to supervision than subject knowledge. The PhD student will anyway know more about their specialism than any supervisor they could have, because they are charting new territory. A lot of important aspects of supervision are to do with attitude, support and practical advice. Its not all subject specific.