Do Your Academic Relationships Help You Grow or Hold You Back?
Academic relationships suffer from routine miscommunication which delays research and frustrates everyone. Here are key methods & tools for repairing student-advisor relationships.
If you’re a grad student, you might be stuck in the all-too-familiar cycle: your advisor takes weeks to respond to emails, gives you nitpicky comments instead of strategic feedback, and hosts lab meetings so dull they make you question your life choices. Your lab mates are either unavailable, uninterested, or both.
And if you’re a PI? You might feel like you’re running a barely-contained chaos machine; juggling grant deadlines, teaching loads, and a dozen advisees who all need different kinds of support—but don’t always ask for it clearly.
The good news is that this kind of dysfunction isn’t personal. It’s structural. And most researchers simply don’t yet have the methods, tools or training to remedy them.
In this edition of The Scoop, we’re tackling the advisor–student relationship from both ends: why it often doesn’t work, what systems can actually help, and the actions you can take today to make things better—whether you’re a mentee or a mentor.
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Relationship problems?
The student-advisor relationship is one of the most important dynamics in academia—and often, one of the most dysfunctional. Many PhD students feel unsupported, isolated, or unsure where they stand. According to a 2019 Nature Survey, one out of every four graduate students would choose a different PI if they could. The situation is likely even more dramatic for non-doctoral students, who report even lower satisfaction across the board when it comes to supervision.
Advisors, on the other hand, are juggling overloaded calendars and lack the support and resources they need to ensure their own students’ success. The result? Misunderstandings, missed expectations, and missed opportunities. Poor mentorship has real-world implications for all parties, slowing collaboration and weakening research quality and outcomes.
But we don’t need to wait for a paradigm shift before students and advisors can efficiently produce research together. Simple, shared practices exist to help rebuild these relationships into effective research collaborations once more. Here we review the key issues in these academic relationships, and simple methods and tools that address them.
The feedback gap: Still waiting for your paper?
It’s the most common complaint from PhD students: “I sent them my paper two weeks ago and haven’t heard back.” When the feedback does arrive, it’s often too detailed or out of sync with what the student needs.
But advisors aren’t just sitting on drafts for fun. Most are operating with overflowing calendars, administrative responsibilities, and dozens of competing priorities. One researcher in South Africa estimated that it takes about 200-300 hours a year to supervise just one PhD student. This perpetual time-crunch leaves supervisors exhausted while students are invariably disappointed.
Although no one in this equation can change their workload, we can change how we work together. Starting with the basic premise of most advisor-advisee interactions: requests. Clearly defining what needs to be done is essential. When facing time constraints, prioritize real-value contributions within accepted timeframes to stay on track together.
👩🎓 Student tip: When you send work, include a focused request like:
“I’m looking for high-level feedback: do the arguments flow, is the framing clear? Please skip detailed grammar edits for now.”
👩🏫 Advisor tip: Can’t do a full review? Use a fast triage framework: structure, novelty, and readiness for submission. It’s better to provide 15% feedback on time than 100% feedback too late.
Tool to try:
🔧 Use the CRediT Taxonomy to define who’s responsible for which parts of a project. This is especially helpful to avoid blurred boundaries on multi-author papers. Or use tools like Trello or Asana for tracking project status and assigning tasks. Use them to turn “we should do this” into “who’s doing what, by when?”
Lab meetings: A weekly time sink?
Every lab has its weekly meeting—but how many of them are actually useful?
Student POV: “We just sit through one presentation a week and no one engages.”
Advisor POV: “I want students to feel connected and informed, but the format’s stale.”
There’s no one right way to run a lab meeting. Some labs stick with updates; others try new formats to keep things engaging. Rotating who leads each week can shift the dynamic, especially if students get a chance to shape the agenda. Mixing up the structure can also help meetings feel less like status reports and more like real intellectual exchange. For example, rotate between project updates and paper discussions, led by different members.
And for those who prefer to gather thoughts ahead of time, using a shared Notion board, Google Doc, or even a Slack or Discord channel to collect questions or topics can help steer the conversation in more useful directions.
In the end, the goal isn’t just to meet—it’s to connect in a way that’s actually meaningful for the group.
👨🎓 Student tip: Even if you can’t change the structure of lab meetings, you can shift how you engage with them. Try coming in with a specific question or issue you want to raise, even if it’s just in the discussion portion. If presenting, use the time to test out an idea or get early feedback on something you're stuck on—not just to give a progress report.
👩🏫 Advisor tip: Check in with your group now and then about what’s working (and what’s not) in lab meetings. Even a quick anonymous poll or casual ask can surface ideas you haven’t thought of—and it signals that you’re open to adapting.
Tool to try:
🔧 Experiment with a centralized location for collaborative notes and project tracking, like Notion, Discord, Slack or even just Google Docs. Record the meeting notes to make it more actionable and searchable.
Misaligned expectations: Am I on track?
One of the most quietly stressful parts of grad school is not knowing where you stand. Many students have no idea if they're making good progress because the expectations are often vague and unspoken.
This can feel like walking a tightrope with no safety net. Students may keep working, but without clear direction or a notion of what is “enough”. And when feedback is infrequent or only focused on immediate deliverables, it's hard to get a sense of the bigger picture. That doesn’t just make the day-to-day more stressful, but can impact long-term goals and even completion rates.
From the advisor side, what looks like neglect is often an attempt to give space. Many advisors intentionally take a hands-off approach, especially with senior students, thinking it's respectful or empowering. But without shared benchmarks or check-ins, students may end up feeling lost.
In a system where degrees are long, progress is nonlinear, and communication is often inconsistent, this mismatch can quietly erode confidence on both sides.
To ensure expectations are met, they must first be set. It’s the student’s responsibility to set goals and milestones, plan out dates and deadlines, and share this plan. The advisor can in turn review the plan, ensure its feasibility and support the student in meeting their objectives.
👨🎓 Student tip: Set milestones and progress checkpoints. Use a shared doc to list goals (e.g., lit review completed, first dataset analyzed, paper submitted, etc.). Take charge of your own plan, set meetings and request feedback.
👨🏫 Advisor tip: Ask the student to complete an Individual Development Plan (IDP) as a shared tool to align expectations. Your institution likely has its own template you can use. Or you can start with a template IDP from another university like Johns Hopkins or the University of Missouri.
Tools to try:
🔧 Develop a roadmap or long-term plan — whether a spreadsheet via Excel or Google Sheets with concrete dates & deadlines, or a simple Google Doc or Word document outlining your Individual Development Plan (IDP).
Isolation: Does your lab know what you do?
Academia is full of people working alone together. Even within the same lab, every researcher is buried in their own project with minimal overlap in methods, topics, or even reading habits. It's easy for a lab to become just a shared physical space (if even that given the popularity of remote work now!).
According to a 2023 study, 62% of students lack a “sense of belonging”, indicating isolation despite feeling generally supported by supervisors. Although it’s difficult to evaluate the real-world impact of this particular problem, it likely curbs collaboration and intellectual growth. If students and postdocs collaborate less, they won’t develop the peer learning culture that strong research environments thrive on. This throttles research progress and can put even more intellectual burden on the PI.
The key is to build camaraderie based on shared experiences and values, which provide genuinely helpful insights for all. This includes practices like structured peer review, skill sharing, encouraging rituals like sharing “lab wins”, encouraging exchanges among sub-groups or pairs, and providing ongoing structure via a shared space.
👩🎓 Student tip: Fuel your curiosity about the work of others in your lab and start asking questions. Ask lab peers to review your work. You can start small, with a single figure or a short section of writing.
👩🏫 Advisor tip: Model curiosity by encouraging questions and research sharing, which is the cornerstone of collaborative work. Set up rituals, events and opportunities for collaboration (like those listed above).
Tool to try:
🔧 Set up shared spaces like a chat channel (Slack, Discord), shared notes (Notion, Jupyter Notebooks, etc.), or shared literature libraries (Zotero or Litmaps).
Neither students nor advisors can change overnight. But both parties can take simple actions to enhance collaboration and meet their collective goals better.
PhD students: Even if you can’t instantly change your lab, you can change how you engage. Set structure where there is none. Ask for clarity where you’re lost. Remember, you’re your own project lead, and your lab is there to support you.
Advisors: Your students don’t need perfection. They need predictability, clarity, and the sense that their work matters. Small changes in how you give feedback, structure meetings, or encourage peer support can radically improve the lab experience.
💬 Got tips for improving student–advisor relationships? Drop them in the comments or reply to this email. We’d love to include your ideas in a future issue.
Resources
Empowering academic advisors: A wellness revolution at UH Hilo, Hawaiʻi CC, 2025
Sleeplessness and anxiety: PhD supervisors on toll of COVID pandemic, 2021
How scientists use Slack, 2017
Graduate survey: A love–hurt relationship, 2017
I was a terrible PhD supervisor. Don't make the same mistakes I did, 2016
How much time does it take to supervise a PhD student?, 2012