{
  "video_id": "reddit_1vmhks7",
  "channel_slug": "MachineLearning",
  "channel_handle": "r/MachineLearning",
  "title": "Would you choose a PhD advisor who gives you complete freedom but almost no guidance? [D]",
  "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/1vmhks7/would_you_choose_a_phd_advisor_who_gives_you/",
  "external_url": null,
  "upload_date": "20260812",
  "published_at": "2026-08-12T15:36:44+00:00",
  "transcript": "It’s an ML PhD with secure funding for 4–5 years and a senior, respected advisor. You get almost complete freedom to choose your own topics, projects, and collaborations, with very little micromanagement.  \nThe downside is that the advisor is also very hands-off. You should expect little guidance, feedback, or technical input. In practice, you would mostly be on your own.  \nWould you see that as a dream setup because of the freedom, or as a dealbreaker because of the lack of mentorship?\n\n\n\n--- Top Comments ---\n\n\n[178 upvotes] Depends on student's style. Both me and my wife got our PhDs under the same advisor. He had to behave differently for us. My wife required regular check-ins and more help with shaping a project, but she was extremely consistent with her output.\n\nI, on the other hand, was described as \"unguidable\". I would disappear for months at a time, am extremely bursty in my output and I either got nothing done for a month or got a significant publishable result in a weekend.\n\nIf he had treated me like my wife, I would've struggled and just come off as lazy and useless. If he had treated my wife as me, she would've floundered with lack of direction and come off as ineffective.\n\nYou should be asking what style YOU prefer. Neither is objectively superior.\n\nIn my opinion, the actual red flag is a supervisor who is so rigid in their ways that they can't adapt to the student's style even a little -- your success depends on a bilateral relationship between student and advisor. I am sure people will disagree, but this is my perspective based on my grad school experience.\n\n[24 upvotes] It's difficult to say, every candidate needs varying levels of supervision. For my ML PhD, my supervisor was very hands on in the first third, the second third i had more autonomy to the last third pretty much dictating the research (with guidance). I prefer that setup, and it worked well for me. However, some people prefer different supervision - so the question really is only yours to answer, what do you prefer?\n\n[14 upvotes] NO. Do not do it. Every paper that I produced, I produced essentially alone with minimal guidance. My supervisor did not have the expertise in my domain to even provide meaningful guidance and was, at the time, supervising nearly 20 students. It was, at times,  a disaster. The stakes always felt incredibly high and it takes awhile to really figure out what's going on in the field and how to generate meaningful research.\n\n[13 upvotes] That's my case, it sucks. He's a good man and his guidance in the publishing process is invaluable, but I'm completely on my own when actually doing research, like 100%.\n\nIt's way more brainwork when you have to estimate the usefullness of the theory, of the approach and doing experiment design completely on your own because your supervisor has lost a track of what you're doing soon after the beginning.\n\nIf you are susceptible to procrastination, depression, anxiety and such things it won't work for you well. If you aren't, it might have its own benefits like being more ready to lead research projects, but you have to push through a way bigger amount of work.",
  "transcript_chars": 3151,
  "ingested_at": "2026-08-13T01:30:09.263925+00:00",
  "source": "reddit",
  "yt_meta": {
    "score": 85,
    "upvote_ratio": 0.94,
    "num_comments": 48,
    "author": "Hope999991",
    "is_self": true
  }
}