QUORA: My advisor is very relaxed with me. He always says that you have made good progress but I’ve still not published anything. How can he be …

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My answer to My advisor is very relaxed with me. He always says that you have made good progress but I’ve still not…

Answer by Enna Morgan:

Your advisor or your Professor? If advisor, then he is relaxed because his salary or performance review is not affected by your actual progress, therefore he has no vested interest. He could be saying that just to be encouraging. His job is to keep you on track with your academic program, not your specific course goals, that is your professor’s job.

If it is your Professor, then his impetus for saying this could be one of many:

he is being kind and encouraging, and perhaps feels that given time, you will step up and produce.

he has other protégés who are performing, and one that is not, will not affect his overall ‘rating.’

he is well established in his academic standing as a professor and one student’s performance will not affect that status

he perhaps knows your repertoire and knows that patience and encouragement is what is needed to get you to the objective (assuming he cares)

he knows you well, and perhaps does not feel that you have what it takes to make the grade, so he is not investing his time and energy in pushing you

He is pushing retirement and does not care, or he is a ‘soft’ teacher and does not as yet understand his role to his students….or is still figuring out his pedagogical approach

With any of the above situations, what is extant that your performance does not affect this person, so they have no great impetus to push you, or to acknowledge and address the fact that you have not performed according to the course expectation….or maybe it is you who is stressing about what you may have been made to believe is an expected standard of performance.

Remember that most of our anxieties exist only in our minds, and how we see a situation is not necessarily how it appears to others. It is literally all in our head 🙂

The above possibilities are all just hypotheticals, so do not take them to heart, but perhaps they could provide some mental fodder for introspection.