How to handle one doctoral supervisor being unhappy over a doctoral student's preference for the other supervisor? For my doctoral programme, I have 2 supervisors: 1 academic (i.e. a professor) and the other an industrial.
Over the past few years I've found that my industrial supervisor isn't really able to contribute to my research that much. It's not that he isn't smart or anything like that, its just that he doesn't seem interested in me producing actual research and would rather I just implement existing literature or settle for something that doesn't fulfill my research aims.
I don't really want to go into too much detail but essentially my industrial supervisor has a low opinion of me because from their perspective it seems like I just do whatever my academic supervisor tells me. This isn't true at all.
Before knowing this (he told me himself in no uncertain terms) I felt like I could respect my industrial supervisor and talk to him about my work but now I don't really want to talk to him unless I have to.
What is the best way to deal with my situation?
For context, the current contact arrangements are that I speak/video call my industrial supervisor every weekday. With my academic supervisor its a back and forth email chain with a video call when we can't express things in an email. Prior to COVID, I would work at my industrial supervisor's company everyday and have to arrange skype calls from the office to my academic supervisor. This was difficult to do, so I only really spoke to him once a month and saw him in person every other month (its a 600km round trip).
While there are lots of ways to go about this, one is to have your primary (academic) advisor intervene in some way with the other person. The industrial person needs to understand that your doctoral research comes first and shouldn't be compromised.
But, this assumes a few things that might not be true. First is that the industrial person can't put a veto on your work somehow. But better that the two &quot;senior&quot; people have a discussion about priorities than you fighting with a more senior person.
But analyze the situation before taking any advice, including this one. It is you that is at risk.
And, for what it's worth, your preference for the academic advisor is certainly appropriate.