This chapter opens with a memory of my time as a PhD student between 1968-73 when I got the degree and my first lectureship. The core of the chapter covers the concept of contrastive rhetoric and its centrality to my story and to the research conducted on doctoral students and their supervision. In the last section the focus is again the autobiographical reflection on 1968-73 but drawing out the positives and briefly speculating about the unfortunate lack of an autoethnographic database. It is over fifty years since I got my PhD at Edinburgh (Delamont, 1973). I had dreadful supervision: neglectful, unhelpful, ignorant and sexist. In this chapter I reflect on how I was supervised, how I supervise my own students, and how these experiences relate to the data from the research project. ‘My supervisor was hopeless’ was a near-universal verdict reported in the data my colleagues and I gathered in our research on social science PhD students and their supervisors in Anthropology, Human Geography and several interdisciplinary areas such as Urban Studies. Whether the supervisor was in his or her sixties and had been a PhD student in the 1950s or was under 35 and had completed their theses in the 1970s or 1980s, or any age in between, they told us their own supervision had been deficient. They were resolved and determined to do the task differently and better. The interview transcripts were full of this classic example of contrastive rhetoric.