mnemosune

Thanks for your response Jasper. I'll try to give some more details. At my school you only have one supervisor for the MA thesis as far as I know. This is why I never brought it up with the second prof. I always framed my interactions with her as getting extra feedback because she specialized in my time period and my supervisor specialized in the subject matter. And the fact that my supervisor was less available then I would have wanted because of her administrative duties. My supervisor was definitely aware that I was getting help from the other professor as I often mentioned it in my meetings with her and also repeatedly sent drafts to both of them. The second professor's help mainly consisted of reading and commenting on my drafts and helping me to flesh out some of my ideas. When I sent my final draft to both professors for a final read-through before officially handing it in my supervisor wrote back that "I'm happy to look at this and give you quick feedback. Prof. X has been very kind to give you advice on this all term, but since I am supervising the MA paper I think we should let her off the hook at this point. I don't want to impose too much. Usually, students have only one professor read the MA paper." At this point I didn't seek any more help from the other professor. This was the only time that my supervisor ever directly mentioned anything about this matter. I would say that the main things that I did wrong in this situation was not be clear with the second professor about her role. She apparently thought that she was acting as a secondary supervisor but as I didn't even know that such a thing was an option I never thought that it was necessary to clarify that it wasn't the case. I think that the second professor went to talk to my supervisor about jointly grading my paper and that is where the trouble started. My supervisor was offended that I was getting so much assistance from another professor and the second professor was offended that she had given me so much of her time without being an official part of my paper. The second professor has been a huge help to me in preparing PhD applications. She has always been supportive of my chances though she doesn't sugar coat how difficult it will be. Only with this new development has she started to be very negative about my chances. So I think that if I can smooth things over regarding this then things will still be ok but as of right now that isn't looking particularly likely. I sent a letter to my supervisor asking to meet with her but she is one of the most infuriatingly indirect people I have even met so I don't know how it will go. I am going to try to be concillatory but I have a feeling I am just going to get the whole "You're a grad student now you should have known" spiel. Thanks for your help. It helps just to talk about this with other grad students.

So I just found out that two of my profs are mad at me because I unintentionally misled one of them into thinking they were acting as a secondary supervisor for my MA thesis. My supervisor is also the graduate chair so she was really busy this year and wasn't able to give me very much time so I started having another prof who specialized in my time period work with me on my paper. So because I "got too much help" by getting feedback from both of them I have been told that my adviser is really mad and probably won't write me an LOR at all (she hasn't told me any of this, I have only gotten this secondhand) and the other professor said that she will write me an LOR but "will have to include this incident". When I met with her and she let me know of this matter (I had been blissfully unaware that there were any problems at all until yesterday) she was very grave about my grad school chances at this point. So my question is, should I have her write the letter even though she will include details about how I "got too much help" or should I get another professor to write one? There is a prof whose course I took who seemed to like me enough but then I won't have any LORs from anyone who worked with me on my MA thesis and I am worried that this will look really bad. Is it better to have a LOR with lots of specifics but one bad item or a more general LOR that has nothing bad?