How to deal with an arrogant advisor My advisor is a highly regarded scientist in his field. However, that also made him a very arrogant person. I have two things I desperately need help with:


Research projects
My advisor becomes more and more picky about research projects. He only wants to work on "important" projects and he only trust what is in his toolbox. New methods, new ideas, and trendy topics are usually considered either useless or non-essential to him, therefore I have never got a chance to work with him on anything that is trendy and more publishable. On the other hand, he is incapable of doing anything ground-breaking, as he would wish, at this point which push his students to work on their own.
Student management
My advisor really cherishes his time, therefore makes sure to never spend it too much on his students. And he hates to waste his time talking to people who are apparently not in his league. His students usually fall into this category. You can definitely tell when you go to talk to him and didn't prepare anything "interesting" or "important", he will put up this tired and impatient face. Therefore these days he chooses to collaborate with other professors not his students. Besides the science, he rarely helps student getting postdocs and couldn't care less about paper editing for his students.


I know most of you would suggest to switch, but is there a way or any soft skill to make this advisor-student relation work? Other than becoming an expert within his league in a short-period of time?
Okay, he doesn't like to chit chat with students, and he is conservative in his choice of topics and methods.  He's not proactive about arranging postdocs and he doesn't edit his students' manuscripts.  None of these things strike me as deal breakers, necessarily, but of course you'd have to weigh these things against what he has in the plus column.

But speaking of pluses, all I got from your post is that he is a highly regarded scientist in his field.

I suggest you take the next couple of months to try to find the pluses.  Find out what his strengths are.  See if you can figure out what makes him tick.

One of my best memories of my advisor is that once, on a long drive to the airport, he told me his memories of staving off hunger by working as a translator for the U.S. army in postwar Japan.