lightly-toasted

Oof. Four days after posting this he passed away. Everything happened way faster than anyone was expecting, so everyone was caught a bit off-guard, and late August is also the time when everyone is away on vacation/nothing gets done, so it's been hard to deal with feeling "fallen through the cracks" + sadness over losing a good mentor and supervisor... I guess there's not much to do other than try and muddle through the best we can.

Thanks all for the thoughtful advice and anecdotes. Re: finding a replacement "on-paper" supervisor, it's not clear to me at the moment how much say I'll have in the process (I guess I'll find out soon) but if I had to choose who to approach in the department, should I prioritize someone whose research aligns more closely to my thesis, or someone with whom I have a stronger pre-existing working relationship? Unfortunately the two groups don't have any overlap. I don't have any immediate plans to continue on to a PhD, and if I were to change my mind in the future it's questionable whether or not I'd want to stay in this subfield, anyway.

Long-time lurker, first-time poster - it sucks that I'm doing so under such unfortunate circumstances, but here we are. I just learned today that the supervisor for my MSc (which I have been working on for a couple years, currently writing up and preparing to defend) is being transferred to hospice care after a year+ of cancer treatment. He has been in and out of hospital for the past couple months so the writing was already on the wall, but we all tried to keep a positive, hopeful outlook - but things are not going well. On the academic/administrative level: I have a meeting scheduled with my department head and graduate chair in a few days, presumably to discuss what happens next, including, I assume, alternate supervision. I'm a little worried because our group is very small and already a bit of an oddball in the department - my supervisor was our only PI and no other faculty members really deal much with our research area. I have a couple other mentors/contacts in my field I would be comfortable going to for informal advice, but they are all outside the department/at a different institution altogether, so would only be able to do so in an "unofficial" capacity (and not able to, say, chair my committee or whatever). I'm definitely not going to be able to get a reference from him, unless my interviewers are cool with ouija board as a method of communication. Has anyone else here ever had to deal with such a thing (an abrupt change in supervision at the late stages of your degree)? How did/does it go? What happens to the funding that I'm getting from his grants (and any future plans for conference travel, etc that we may have had)? I know that these answers will varying based on the institution and individual circumstances, but I'm just trying to get an idea of generally what to expect based on others' experiences. On a human level: My supervisor was not perfect but is an eminently decent human being who took his duties as a teacher/mentor to his students very seriously. This blows. tl;dr: What happens when your supervisor suddenly can't supervise you anymore, and you're supposed to be finishing your thesis in the next couple months? Also, fuck cancer.