An Extremely Micromanaging PhD Supervisor Is a Disaster for Your PhD Journey
Unfortunately, I ended up with this kind of supervisor, and it has been the most mentally torturous three years of my life so far. Every morning, he would stand in the lab watching what time you arrived, and if you were even one minute late, he would immediately send an email criticizing you. He held meetings every single day, demanding detailed reports on the previous day’s workload and the plan for the current day, making sure you spent every day working nonstop like a mule. Before every Christmas holiday, he would pile on work so that you could never truly rest throughout the year.
After I signed up for training on an instrument, he even went to the trainer and said that I did not need training for that model. He monitored every material and every piece of equipment in the lab every day — even a speck of dust left in the wrong place could become evidence of your “poor performance.” It was not enough to complete the tasks he assigned; you also had to do them exactly in the way he wanted.
What is strange is that despite such extreme strictness, our lab has produced no publications and secured no new funding for several years. Burnt-out and mentally broken students have become the lab’s biggest “output” in recent years.