A personal reflection of Dr. Hendar Putranto, M. Hum. based on a very specific instance during his students’ internship report mentorship at the end of June 2026
#a micro-phenomenology of academic supervision
Over the past few days, I found myself reflecting on two students trying to complete their internship draft submission. To protect their confidentiality, I shall call them JoJo and JeJe, respectively. Whether JoJo and JeJe correspond exactly to any one individual is beside the point. They function here as phenomenological portraits through which certain patterns of students’ academic life become easier to see.
As June gave way to July, both students were entering a demanding stage of their undergraduate studies. Graduation was still some distance away, yet their internship and thesis milestones were becoming increasingly significant. Both communicated frequently with their advisor and wrote politely enough. Yet, in a pathic sense, something felt fundamentally different.
JoJo opened each exchange by acknowledging the support she had already received. Before raising new questions, she took a moment to thank her advisor for the administrative guidance that had helped her reach that point. She then asked what she should prepare for her upcoming internship defense. Her questions did not transfer responsibility to the advisor; rather, they sought guidance so that she could better prepare herself.
JeJe’s communication followed a different trajectory. Messages tended to arrive only when deadlines had become urgent, occasionally well outside what most people would regard as reasonable hours for professional correspondence. One message arrived so early that the roosters had not yet reached a consensus about whether morning had actually begun. 🐓🙂
Apologies were sincere and promptly offered. Yet the same pattern reappeared. The issue, if there was one more serious than unfamiliarity with communication etiquette, was not the absence of knowledge but the repeated failure to bring that knowledge into practice. Metaphorically speaking, her knowledge of communication ethics was not unemployed. It was chronically underemployed. 🙂
At first glance, one might conclude that this is simply a difference in personality or manners. I do not think that explanation goes far enough. Nor, for that matter, is it shallow enough to surf. 🏄🏻♂️
The deeper distinction lies in what each student attends to before acting.
JoJo’s attention appears distributed across the relationship itself. She recognizes the advisor’s prior effort, respects temporal boundaries, and positions her questions within her own responsibility as a learner. Her communication does not eliminate uncertainty; rather, it demonstrates an awareness that academic interaction is a shared practice requiring mutual respect.
JeJe’s attention, by contrast, seems increasingly absorbed by the urgency of the immediate situation. As deadlines become more pressing, the horizon of attention narrows. The advisor gradually appears less as another professional whose time also deserves protection and more as someone expected to resolve an increasingly urgent problem. Apologies follow each incident, yet apologies alone cannot substitute for transformed practice.
It was at this point that I began to suspect the issue had very little to do with communication itself. Communication merely exposed a more fundamental ethical phenomenon: the organization of attention.
Teaching communication ethics has slowly convinced me that rules are only the visible surface. Students quickly learn appropriate greetings, acceptable hours, and polite expressions. Yet knowing these conventions does not necessarily change what they notice before they write.
Yet ethical communication begins earlier than rule-following. It begins with how attention is organized. Before any message is written, attention has already begun to shape one’s moral vision, allowing some realities to call upon us while others quietly fade from view. Invisibility, after all, rarely arrives with any dramatic flourish.
When disciplined attention weakens, ethical failure rarely begins with dramatic misconduct. It often begins with much smaller phenomena: disregarded boundaries, compressed timelines, shifting responsibility, and the unnoticed fiction that another person’s hours are somehow lighter than our own.
Looking back, I no longer think the problem was communication. Communication simply became the venue where an older habit finally made itself visible. By the time the message arrived, attention had already decided what—and who—mattered enough to notice.
Perhaps that is why communication ethics cannot begin with words. It begins much earlier, with the quiet discipline of learning how to attend to another person’s world before our own urgency occupies the entire horizon.🌒
