h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's going badly. They want to throw me out of the program... not because of anything I actually ever did but because my petty academic advisor who is always convinced I am too stupid to be able to do or understand anything and my dad got into a fight awhile back because he didn't like we got his boss the chair to sign a form he de facto refused to sign by not being available for any meetings or his office hours since the deadline was looming closer and if we'd waited til he got back to us it would have been too late. So he's been retaliating at me ever since because lacking the maturity of most common adults he can't get over being made wrong or proven wrong. So the latest was he called me insane and was gleeful that now, just now, right toward the tail end of my degree I failed a course then retook it but still had low marks (in that course). He got to get in my face and yell at me about how dangerous and unsafe I must be (it was a lecture I'd failed, not a lab), and go on about how much of a screwup he thought I was (at everything, not just the course I'd failed but in general for being mediocre instead of Straight A's) for refusing to just give up and not listening to his 'advice' each semester to never take anything hard, that he thinks everything is too difficult for me, and why haven't I changed majors yet?
I really, really should have gotten a different advisor earlier but it reminded me a bit much of how my father treated me so I put up with it for far longer than I should have.

Can you still get a new advisor? If it's possible then do it. Can you complain about him somewhere to make sure they don't throw you out?

Seek more advice, Thorn


lil x

Lil, Tav, Dmitri, it's a good thing I've just about gotten every other course out of the way to this point except for his ones. That leaves me with a couple options... none of which are entirely desirable but all of which will be more realistic than trying to get him to admit he was wrong or to redact any sort of bogus accusations. It's just unfortunate that he seems dead set on presenting me as being unfit to do things through using the convenient emotionally turbo charged hot-button buzzword of "safety". I can't publically discuss it in any greater detail on here but yeah, of those options one of them would be to get a different advisor.

He brought in the boss of his boss's boss.
And she got to see for herself that my transcript said one thing while he was insisting another. And asked me about my research and said that the research was good instead of bad which is what he had kept always telling me (to not do research, to quit, to change majors, to please not do science at all, etc.). And I think I'll get to have a new different advisor. And basically admitted that my former advisor was not comfortable dealing with handicapped/disabled students.

Good work, thorn!

That reminds me of a chemistry prof where I used to teach. He kept insisting certain students weren't doing well, when the only reason was that they were foreign, and he was too slow on the uptake to communicate with people who had accents.

That's pretty bad. Did he get in trouble at some point?

Nah, since it was a private school. But we got the students some help - er, me. ESL paper-writing help, and voila - better grades.