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I ended up dropping out of graduate school, but the advice I was given before entering was this: Choose your advisor, not your area of focus. Your advisor sin

I ended up dropping out of graduate school, but the advice I was given before entering was this: Choose your advisor, not your area of focus. Your advisor single-handedly decides how smoothly your PhD will go, and once you have your PhD, you can decide where your career goes. Obviously, area of focus does determine a bit of your future, but within that area, optimize for a helpful advisor. Also, I am sure your university has resources, and ways you could report this behavior, but it's often very difficult to unseat/challenge university faculty, so I totally understand an unwillingness to act. I agree with the other commenter: finish what you started, get out, and focus on doing good work.

dijksterhuis 6y ago
> Choose your advisor, not your area of focus. Absolutely this. Worked on my master's dissertation with my initial supervisor. He went off to try and find funding for a year or two to get me to come back for PhD. Turned up, he passed me an ACM magazine article and asked me to have a look and see if anything stuck. Got hooked. He knows I like weird and trippy stuff ;) I'm in a bit of rubbish situation as he left his position here for greener pastures. Totally fair decision on his part from what I've gathered of the back story Now supervised by someone else and it's just not the same. Have to go over old ground quite often. So yeah, choose your supervisor wisely. If they "get you" then they'll get what you're interested in. Then they'll be able to work with you find an interesting area to study.