@mwt
Do you mean supervisors or PI?
The PhD advisors are there as a third party employed by our institute to help PhDs with mental health stuff but also if there is tensions between the PI and PhD student for example. Many other things as well but you can imagine how having an unbiased third party can help when there are tensions between PI and PhD.

@TheStrugglingScientists I assume when you say PI, you mean the person that the student is working on their thesis for? In my institute these are called thesis advisors, and PI stands for "principal investigator" which doesn't necessarily have to do with students. Maybe "supervisor" is the best way to put it as an all-rounder term.

@TheStrugglingScientists @mwt The naming will probably be different between countries, universities, and disciplines. PIs are usually used in fields where grant funding is common (like medicine research in the US) and indicate the person who received the funding. Some of them are advisors, some of them aren’t. At least in my experience, the lines between supervisor, PI, and advisor were blurred because the person who was supervising me as part of my paid work was also my program advisor (I.e., the person making sure that I was loving through the program and fulfilling grad requirements) and thesis chair (I.e., the person in charge of my final exam). If we are strictly talking about asking for advice and suggestions on how to navigate the program and the job market, I believe that older students (both pre-docs and post-docs) have been 10000 times more helpful than my advisor.