My supervisor is kinda bullying me
So short story, I'm 6 months into my PhD. I'm doing it in the UK in a STEM area. The first three months were good, I was feeling I was slowly progressing, there seemed to be an understanding between my supervisor and me, and flexibility and openness. We are collaborating between disciplines but things seemed alright and he seemed to be happy about learning about a new topic.
Three months afterwards, he told me I needed to write a conference paper asap, which I did, and shortly afterwards during a meeting he exploded and told me I wasn't doing science at all and that I was just wasting his time doing qualitative stuff and that he couldn't do this anymore, amongst other things.
I almost cried, but thought maybe I wasn't doing as well as I should and started to present more ideas, study more about his topic of expertise and changed the scope of the research to please him. But now I'm stressed. Before every meeting I get very anxious, one day he loves my ideas and he seems excited about my progress, the next he thinks I'm going very slow, that the project is boring and throws passive aggressive comments. It's having an impact on my health. I have always wanted to get a PhD and I'm genuinely interested in the topic because as I mentioned it's interdisciplinary. It's a lifetime opportunity for me to learn new skills and potentially improve my quality of life (I'm not from the UK and got a scholarship to pursue the PhD).
Thanks for reading. Please be kind.
Posted Apr 2, 2026, 10:46 PM UTC