I find the assumption that the PhD scares people away a bit arrogant, if they didn't confirm that this is the case. Some people have the problem that they define themselves almost exclusively with the PhD and their work and have basically nothing else to talk about. When I'm out and talk to a girl, we spent maybe 2 min talking about jobs. That's the stuff we spent all day with and I don't necessarily need to spend my whole private time talking about it. I'm honest, if a girl's only thing to talk about is academia (not saying that it is like that in your case), then I would probably be not interested as well. That has absolutely nothing to do with intimidation. Even if I do a PhD myself, I am not necessarily interested in your PhD work as a e.g. psychologist. I am out for fun.

I hardly believe that the problem is caused by a PhD. I have several female friends who are PhD students and none of them has a boyfriend that works in academia or did a PhD and several of them got a new boyfriend after starting their PhD. Why would that not work? You do a job like everybody else does. He works at the company, you at the university. I don't see why that is a problem. I don't believe that the guy who went to work with a company after the bachelor is less intelligent than you are, so why would one be intimidated?

Depends on the PI. In my opinion (!), it can make a difference. For instance, I was at a job interview for a gradschool that had 8 open positions and got over 150 applicants, which I was told is not even the tip of the iceberg. Chances are high that there are so many qualified applicants that they prefer someone who didn't have a break. However, there are several PhD students here in the forum who worked out of academia for several years and returned later to pursue a PhD. Therefore, it's definitely possible.

Any special reason why you took a 2-3 years break when you finished your master in 2013? It might also depend on your explanation for that. It won't make it easier, that's for sure ;)

Regarding the review : Forget it. I never heard of anything like that in science. I highly doubt that you get through the peer review process, no matter how good it is. This is done by scientists who proved to be experts in the field. With just your name on it, it will most certainly not pass. If you can get your name on a paper, great, but review is not really an option.

In general, I agree with you awsoci. Of course supervisors are humans too ;)

Nevertheless, it is more about the fact that he claims to do stuff and doesn't do it, even though he has the option to drop it due to the circumstances. It's okay if you are not able to correct a thesis under these circumstances but then stop insisting on holding back submission until you are done with the corrections or at least initiate the appropriate steps for a extension. It is also suspicious if he is correcting other people's work at the moment.

The job thing is always annoying and adds pressure but you have to do it like this. Otherwise you are jobless for months.

Ah okay. I was not familiar with the term "literature review". So far, I just saw two types of theses. The "traditional" one that basically was one long paper (introduction, material&methods, results, discussion) and the "article compilation format" where a introduction is followed by the published papers and manuscripts and a conclusion chapter in the end. These article compilation theses were in total rather short and often not more than 100 pages, while the traditional ones were sometimes up to 300 pages (of course comparable subjects). In Sweden, almost everyone did it in the article compilation format, as their PhD often takes 5 years or longer resulting in at least 2 publications and often several manuscripts that are not yet published (which is quite a lot for that field of biological science). I always considered the article compilation as less work, as you already have papers and manuscripts written and just copy/paste them into the thesis.

Thanks for the info !

Can somebody explain to me what the difference between a literature review and a general introduction is? Why do you have to put a lot of introduction in data chapters? Is it due to the fact that they are basically papers or is that a general feature?