I can say from first and second-hand experience that a hard part of supervising a PhD or Masters student in research (there are many) is taking someone who lies at one end of the bird-frog spectrum and pushing them to acquire the skills they need from the other end. To get to the point of pursuing research in the first place, you’re likely to be either someone technically skilled who can easily work out the fine details of a problem and habitually focuses on examples or someone who has enough of an appreciation for the overarching ideas to be motivated to build them further—it sounds like you are/were of the latter variety. If you don’t acquire some skills and perspective from the other end, you’ll inevitably drive yourself into a dead end: in the former case, one risks sinking much time into elaborating specific cases while missing a general result that simplifies matters; in the latter, one can work for a long time on a false claim because there is insufficient grounding in verifiable cases.
At the start of a research career, a responsible supervisor must push their student to be independent, but there is a compromise between giving space and giving guidance. It seems like your adviser wasn’t paying close enough attention to your work to see that you hadn’t done the basics, which is how you ended up spending so long on this without realising that you didn’t have an ‘empirical’ basis for what you were trying to prove in the first place. The fact that you weren’t getting pushback on your reluctance to read references also seems like a red flag.
All this is to say that a moral of the story could be for PhD supervisors (who, by the way, almost universally get not specific training for that role): just because a student is confident doesn’t mean they have everything it takes to do research, and you need to make sure that they aren’t wasting their time.
I can say from first and second-hand experience that a hard part of supervising a PhD or Masters student in research (there are many) is taking someone who lies at one end of the bird-frog spectrum and pushing them to acquire the skills they need from the other end. To get to the point of pursuing research in the first place, you’re likely to be either someone technically skilled who can easily work out the fine details of a problem and habitually focuses on examples or someone who has enough of an appreciation for the overarching ideas to be motivated to build them further—it sounds like you are/were of the latter variety. If you don’t acquire some skills and perspective from the other end, you’ll inevitably drive yourself into a dead end: in the former case, one risks sinking much time into elaborating specific cases while missing a general result that simplifies matters; in the latter, one can work for a long time on a false claim because there is insufficient grounding in verifiable cases.
At the start of a research career, a responsible supervisor must push their student to be independent, but there is a compromise between giving space and giving guidance. It seems like your adviser wasn’t paying close enough attention to your work to see that you hadn’t done the basics, which is how you ended up spending so long on this without realising that you didn’t have an ‘empirical’ basis for what you were trying to prove in the first place. The fact that you weren’t getting pushback on your reluctance to read references also seems like a red flag.
All this is to say that a moral of the story could be for PhD supervisors (who, by the way, almost universally get not specific training for that role): just because a student is confident doesn’t mean they have everything it takes to do research, and you need to make sure that they aren’t wasting their time.