What do people exactly mean when they say "PhD supervisors guide their PhD students in their research" I am a statistics PhD student, and I just want to know what do people exactly mean when they say &quot;PhD supervisors guide their PhD students in their research&quot;.
My supervisor is a Statistician. He has a master's and a PhD in statistics. His area of research is analysis of open-ended survey questions. Him and his past graduate students has worked on basic machine learning algorithms like KNN, SVM, etc to analyze open-ended survey responses. None of his previous research had involved applying a sophisticated deep learning based language models (e.g. Transformer, RNN ,LSTM) to analyze open-ended survey questions. He is in general not an expert in natural language processing (e.g. like those natural language processing professors from computer science department).
When I was starting my PhD program, I asked my supervisor about my general research direction, and my supervisor gave me a list of papers for me to read, and told me that this is where my research is heading. All of these papers were computer science papers on deep neural language models in natural language processing (which has no hint of analyzing survey open-ended responses). I got slightly confused and asked my supervisor that whether I am to apply these state-of-the-art natural language processing models to analyze open-ended survey responses. My supervisor told me that I won't be analyzing open-ended survey questions like he does.
So I read those papers, came up with research questions, and ran experiments and tried to make publications all of which were failures. I can't really discuss any technically of my work with my supervisor even at a broad level because he lacks the general knowledge about the field (e.g. he told me one day that he has never heard of the words like &quot;syntax&quot; and &quot;semantics&quot; before. These are all basic terminologies that any one in natural language processing community understands). I can't discuss technicality of my work with any of other faculty members / phd students in my department neither because the type of research I am doing mainly concerns with computer science and they don't do this type of research. It also took my supervisor quite sometime to understand that I need an access to good computing resource to be able to carry out a quality research. I'd really hate say this but these things tell me that he in general does not understand how natural language processing field works, and what natural language processing research entails.
So far the &quot;guidance&quot; I received from my supervisors over the past 5 semesters are:

the list of papers that he gave me to read while I was starting out in the PhD program
writing help with my publication drafts.

I would like to ask anyone who reads this posts if this is the right level of &quot;guidance&quot; that I am to expect as a PhD student, and whether I am entitled for more &quot;guidance&quot; than this from my supervisor. I personally feel that doing a research in natural languae processing / artificial intelligence all by myself in isolation is very risky and that I am not receiving adaquate supervision from my supervisor, but I might be wrong in that. Maybe I am bad as a researcher, or maybe I am just not good enough to make any publications. So I am just very confused about my situation and myself.
Could my lack of performance as a researcher be due to the lack of supervision I am receiving? or is this level of superivison normal for PhD students?
Thank you,
I'm in mathematics, in the U.S.
For me, &quot;advisors guide their students&quot; means giving advice on reasonable projects, to say the least. And advice on what may work, or fail. And weekly feedback on what has happened so far.
Although I do encourage my students to think about whatever comes into their minds, &quot;good (naive) ideas&quot; is/are not the same thing as &quot;good PhD project&quot;. So we (collectively) negotiate a middle ground.
I do understand that there are some models of &quot;advisor&quot; in which the &quot;advisor&quot; does essentially nothing, apart from eventually signing... I do not understand this. And I do not believe anyone who claims that PhD students are somehow supposed to do something, unaided, which more serious people have cared enough to try to understand/resolve, but have failed.