I’m a PhD student with a male supervisor (not main supervisor). I’ve noticed recently that he keeps staring at me everytime he walks past my desk. He seems to be walking past my desk more frequently too, sometime walking by slowly and looking at me. We make eye contact a lot. He has approached me to simply ask “if you ever wanna chat we can always go for a coffee” I brushed him off a bit saying that I’m still early in my project and I don’t really have anything to update him on, as I assumed he meant he wanted a project update. However, he said I don’t have to have much to update but that if I just wanted to chat we could. He has then asked the same thing again on a different occasion. I emailed him recently to arrange a catch up about my project, which he agreed to. The email was typical of a supervisor/student, “hey, would you be available for a catch up next week?” although this was our first meeting as I have only recently started.
One week after arranging this meeting, I was having lunch by myself and he walks in, looks at me for a moment, but with his eyes kind of narrowed like he’s thinking about something as he’s looking at me, I say hello, he does an awkward wave, waving his hand down by his side but doesn’t say hi. I think there may have been one other person in the lunch room. He gets a drink then heads back to the door. But before he leaves, he turns around and says “actually myname, I just wanted to ask if anything’s wrong, did something bad happen? I was taken aback and said no, I just wanted to give you an update on my project. He then seemed relieved and said he just wanted to know the “tone” of the meeting. Does this seem like an excuse to come up to me or was he checking to see if the meeting was to talk about something more personal?
It seems very strange and I haven’t had this type of interaction with any other supervisor. Surely he wouldn’t need to check the tone of our meeting, of course it’s about my project, he’s my supervisor?! , what else would it be about, and if it were something bad I would have mentioned in the email. During the meeting he brought a water bottle, and had his phone propped up on the water bottle, and on the screen was picture of who I assume was him and his wife. It was an incredibly odd thing to do. Since then, he’s been looking at me, there was a moment where we locked eyes for a few seconds, but it was really odd, and felt very intense to the point I had to look away. Because of the eye contact and looks when we met for the meeting it was definitely awkward to begin with, I think we both definitely feel there is some tension. Sometimes he’ll come into his work area which is behind mine and just potter around for a minute before leaving, and I’ll catch him looking at me.
Today he sent an email as I was on my way into work, saying: Hoping you could help me out with a quick favour... would you please be able to take out the orange bin in my lab bay area? manager says it needs taking out for a visit (I must have missed the other day) and I'm WFH today and have no one else I can ask... I'd really owe you one!
Sorry for the wall of text. I don’t have an interest in anything with this person, but for the sake of my career etc, I would like to know what, if anything is going on.