Patching things up with advisor? He has been avoiding me since I found a simple answer to a problem he thought would be challenging

Question

I am international STEM PhD student in the UK.

My advisor asked me to try and attempt a question that he has been thinking about for more than five years. He was always very encouraging, but wasn't confident that I would be able to solve it. I wasn't very confident either.

It turned out to be much simpler than expected (and the simplicity of the solution was perhaps his blind spot). I managed to solve it. Since I told him about my solution, he has turned markedly cold towards me, hardly ever replying to emails and appearing a little aloof/defensive during meetings.

I am not a mind-reader, and hence wouldn't like to speculate on why he is acting this way. What are some things that I could do to make him like me again/not screw up my job application? He has collaborators at the very top places, and I'd love to do a postdoc with them.

I have thought about offering him co-authorship, playing up his contribution to the project, etc. But all of these attempts could backfire, as he may feel insulted, etc.

Like I said, I think he is in general a very decent person, and has always been encouraging towards me.

Answer 1

I'd guess offering him co-authorship is a mistake as he might take it as condescending, plus the usual reasons.

I'd guess the advisor is disappointed in themself, not in you. That can be hard to accept. Acting badly in such a situation is common enough.

It is hard to suggest that a student act like the adult in the room, but that may be what you are faced with. Let me suggest two alternatives, with the first recommended over the second.

If you have good relations with another faculty member who also has good relations with the advisor, seek advice from them. They may, actually, be able to be an intermediary. It is also good to have someone on the faculty knowledgeable about such things in case things really fall apart.

The second is to ask for a sit-down with the advisor and start off with "Where are we? How can we move forward?"

Congratulations on finding the insight to solve the problem. If it has been hanging about for several years it is likely an important contribution. Your solution method may be more important than the question itself, actually, as can be true in pure math.

Answer 2

With the caveat that any answer to this question is a bold attempt at mind-reading, I will humbly add my two cents.

It is not uncommon for academics in STEM fields to have a pet question, on which they hang a (usually over-optimistic) internal belief that when they finally find (and publish) a solution, they would be able to upgrade their academic and even social standings among their peers.

From that point of view, having a younger and less experienced person solve the problem, is hard to reckon with, and even more so if the solution was simple (or seems to be simple in hind-sight).

It is very possible that you advisor is confused by this turn of events, for several reasons, including potentially a perception that his very ability to advise you in your studies is now in question.

My advice therefore would be to:

1. Give your advisor the time he needs to come to terms with the new situation. If your advisor is a decent person, he won't hold a grudge against you for long, and would be happy to recommend you to their peers. As long as you don't take advantage of the situation, your advisor will finally come to the correct conclusion which is you should not be blamed or accused for finding the solution.

2. Think of all the different ways this person has been good and kind to you and how that attitude has contributed to your PhD's experience so far. Find the time(s) and place(s) to express your favorable view of him, and your gratefulness for his kindness.

3. Keep up your academic work and consult your advisor as you did before - This will help signal that nothing's changed from your side, and that you would like to restore the routine. If he doesn't immediately reply - simply remind him that you want to keep advancing your work and that his inputs would be appreciated.

HTH!

Answer 3

Unless there's some context not specified in the question, the advisor's reaction is not normal.

If they didn't think you had some chance of solving this problem, they were setting you up for failure, which is awful. Now that you have solved it, they should rejoice and be congratulatory, glad that you have together* cracked a long-standing problem. Arguably an advisor's greatest success lies in their students going beyond where they have gone.

You are self-aware enough to resist speculating; so do consider that the apparent distance might be unconnected to this incident. You are in the best position to judge this.

*As others have pointed out, many of us would view this as a joint success shared between you and the advisor. There's a high chance that the advisor sees it the same way, and they could be greatly offended by you suggesting co-authorship.

Since your primary question is about what to do, I suggest you don't bring up this solution for a while. Let them decide where/when to publish it, while you focus on other research areas (assuming this wasn't your only research problem). Attend meetings (if that's a thing), interact normally, keep doing your work and wait to see if there's any change in their outlook towards you.

Answer 4

I would follow the advice from @mhopeng's comment, prepare a draft of an article with two names of the authors and submit it to your advisor for approval. From the ethical point of view, he seems to have made significant contribution to the matter, and you may be mistaken about what is "a norm in your field". Let him explain it to you if it is indeed not "a norm in your field". If he declines co-authorship, at least you will have offered it to him.

Answer 5

Other answers have done a good job of capturing how your advisor may reasonably be feeling, and that your advisor "should" be able to maturely handle those feelings and treat you fairly, but in terms of reality it is helpful to accept that,

1. everyone has feelings,
2. feelings are not always rational,
3. even someone who tries to objectively handle irrational feelings may struggle, it is simply not always easy,
4. doing some small things to help your professor resolve their feelings in a productive way will lead to the maximum happiness for you.

So I agree that your current thoughts about what you can do for your professor will probably backfire, because they are pretty transparent and sort of rub it in your professor's face that you solved the problem and not them.

I have thought about offering him co-authorship, playing up his contribution to the project, etc. But all of these attempts could backfire, as he may feel insulted, etc.

Instead, use the Ben Franklin effect. Find something your professor can do/provide for you that you want/need, and ask your professor for it as a favor. The key is that it must be absolutely sincere, the more serious it is the better.

The good news is that this shouldn't really be that hard, because you do seem to think your professor is good at their job, and it's part of your professor's job to teach you (and your job to learn) (both math and non-math things like collaboration, publishing, etc.), so you should be able to identify some area where your professor is particularly strong (best if they are proud of being strong in this area) and you aren't that strong and ask them to help you.

The best part is that this is, once again, absolutely sincere. You are not just inflating your professor's ego to soothe them, you should actually get something of value out of this, and that it has a side effect of reaffirming your professor's self-worth and re-establishing the teacher-student relationship is also nice. This means that even if your professor recognizes what you are doing it's almost impossible to resist the effects because they are just natural outcomes of things that are true.

Answer 6

To provide a slightly different point of view - if your field is a slightly more experimental or engineering related one, maybe the problem is a different one? Maybe you (in your inexperience with the specific challenge) have oversimplified the problem and have "solved" an easy case, or produced a solution that will not really work in practice?

I see this happen quite frequently in applied CS - advisor poses a challenge to student, motivated student disappears for a couple of weeks to return with a glorious "I have solved X by applying well-known method Y", only for the advisor to point out that this straight-forward solution really only applies in highly idealised special circumstances - and that the goal is more to think about how to do it with practical complications A, B, and C in mind.

With that in mind, maybe the "coldness" you perceive is more disappointment that you have not really grasped the problem yet. Or, alternatively, the meeting when you presented your solution has not gone well, and what you are experiencing now is the aftermath of you discarding the limitations your advisor wanted to you to teach about.

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Just to make clear, I don't know if that's happened, it could certainly also be the case that OP's solution is great and the advisor is being unreasonable. I just wanted to raise this as an alternative possibility and it's up to OP to decide if that's possibly the problem here.

Answer 7

Well, I'm glad you cracked the problem set by your project supervisor, whether by luck, determination or genius.

I'd say most students are underestimated by their PhD supervisors. Academics often evaluate people by their everyday manner rather than by their actual output and younger people always seem too happy-go-lucky to older people.

Firstly, look at the bright side of your situation. The supervisor has not gone into indignant denial of the validity of your solution. So he is at least sane.

One way to get things "back on track", i.e. both you and your professor standing beside each other and facing a common challenge, is to look at the implications of your solution for the technology in question.

Obviously, your supervisor will have thought more about this than you: you say he's fancied this problem for a few years. But that is no reason why you should enter his study limp-armed and begging for pointers to the next summit. You must also start to think about the implications of your (and take modest pride in that word) solution for the branch of science/technology concerned.

Give this matter some reflection time just as you lie into bed at night. Hopefully some ideas will flush out in the days that follow. Then schedule a meeting with the supervisor and present your ideas - or lack of them - to him for the extraction of maximum benefit from your (plural) recent advance.

He will probably have a positively critical approach to your ideas and advance some useful ones of his own. Either way you should both be back together in joint conspiracy against the often secretive world of natural philosophy.

Answer 8

I think @ScottSeidman may be on to something here.

Feels like we may be missing important info about the interaction that you didn't notice, or didn't think is important. Also, even though this is in the US, you might mention the cultural background of your advisor to help us rule out underlying cultural sensitivities.

More details are also needed about how exactly you told them about your solution. If it was as a surprise in a group meeting and you said "Oh it's easy!" then that could really have been a serious faux pas for some "old style" professors, whether they are from another culture or not.

Instead, in a private meeting, something like "Professor, I think I may have found a way forward" only, along with the first half of your solution, pointing the way would have been the appropriate way forward for some.

This way you feel them out carefully, to see if they want your solution to work or not.

Some professors may help you complete it, even encourage you by saying "you're almost there, what's next?" and, believe it or not, others may say "No. You're completely wrong. That can never work" at which point you create the appearance of disappointment and simply drop it.

Later, they will "discover" the solution themselves and appear to forget your contribution. This happens all the time though much more so in context where Confucian influence is afoot, at least in my experience.