Part2.

This person also sets such a bad professional example- tells me to take a break (obviously not knowing that my average workday the last two months has probably been about 4 hours). Uses teaching as an excuse for not having published (or done) own research and not having read my work - even for not attending my 'upgrade' talk (despite that I can check the timetable to prove there's no teaching). Only ever comes in certain days (but doesn't admit it openly) and for want of a better word, is lazy. In addition, makes me feel that I can't admit any stress/problem whatsoever - reasons: 1) previously mocked my casual "ugh this software stresses me out!" 2) asked "is it still continuing, your problem?" in reference to a long-term condition that I'd never really discussed beyond a declaration at the beginning of first year. 3) told me all about another student's confidential business while she was away.

But back to the actual research, I think it'd take a miracle to complete a thesis within the next 14 months (which for financial reasons I would HAVE to do) since I still have no rationale and no defendable analysis of the current work, and no plans for the next phase (supervisors won't discuss any ideas - I just get something like "stick to this replication" whenever I try to bring it up - incidentally the study isn't a replication of the paper they always refer to, it just includes variables mentioned in the paper's introduction).

I have little to no opportunity to gain skills elsewhere (two temp RA positions (elsewhere within same dept.) and one external workshop application refused by supervisors), all I have is one conference presentation under my belt, and that didn't even go very well.

Hi guys,

A warning - this thread is likely to descend into me just moaning!

I feel as though I want to quit my PhD. Previously I've said this a couple of times but lately that thought has been so prominent. I actually feel as though, if I had anywhere else to go/anything else to do, I would leave.

(isn't there a saying like "I have a reason not to leave but no reason to stay"?)

My research is a mess (to paraphrase a visiting scholar). It was a project proposed by my supervisors, which I applied to work with....little did I know that they had pretty much no rationale for carrying out the main proposed study. There are things that, in hindsight, I would have changed, but I felt so pressured/rushed to start data collection that there's no way I could have spotted those things (especially with these supervisors).

My supervisors each have a separate 'area' - these areas only converge in my project. The problem is that neither seems to have even a basic understanding of the concepts involved from the other person's 'area' and very little desire to discuss things together. I think it has been around 18 months since I last saw them in the same room at the same time. Simple tasks like scheduling meetings are such a nightmare that I have actually had nightmares about it.

The one I meet regularly with treats me awfully (all the things that don't sound too bad because, once or twice aren't bad, but it has become such a disgusting pattern). Always late, always changing their mind about when we are meeting. Changes the subject and interrupts all the time. Never gives a thought-through answer to any question, never brings a notebook (and instead chooses to scrawl on mine), never gives practical advice (I've in fact been unofficially supervising their masters student because the student can't get any lab help - but it's at a point where I don't actually have the knowledge needed to help).

The hugest fear of course is getting to the runway but crash-landing, so to speak. It would be the worst thing ever to fail at the end after so much work.

But I have so many fears.

One is that there are serious flaws in my methodology that my supervisors either won't point out/will point out when it's too late to fix them.

One is that I won't be able to write up my findings in any logical order (questioning already whether the two experiments I have actually fit together in any meaningful way).

Perhaps the most deep-rooted fear is in fact a fact: my topic, which was a proposal before I was even in the department, is a hybrid which was cobbled-together by two researchers who know nothing of each others' areas...and don't care to listen/remember things I tell each of them about the other aspect of the work...

Wolff, W. (1933). Über die kontrasterregende Wirkung der transformierten Farben. Psychological Research, 18(1), 90-97.

I found it on springerlink but cannot access:

I know the feeling! I've also gradually lost trust for my main supervisor after a huge string of "Ask [other PhD student]", "Ask the tech support"...it isn't the fact that she doesn't know the answer to whatever question/problem I want to discuss - it's the fact that she doesn't seem to want to even discuss it. It's always an immediate half-assed referral to someone else, yet when I bypass her (the middle-man?) she'll ask why I didn't ask for her opinion....

Unfortunately I don't have advice for how to deal with it, but if it helps at all, there's two of us over here in the same kind of boat...and it's beyond draining!

(all my library ever says is "No full text available")

Does anyone have access:

Nature 313, 310 - 313 (24 January 1985); doi:10.1038/313310a0
Induction by cyclic GMP of cationic conductance in plasma membrane of retinal rod outer segment
EVGENIY E. FESENKO, STANISLAV S. KOLESNIKOV & ARKADIY L. LYUBARSKY

Lenna x

Hi guys,

Hopefully there are other people who feel like this too. It's not just that there aren't enough hours in the week to get stuff done, it's that I can't even seem to use the time I have.

If I added up the time I'd spent working (minus, of course, the time I spend daydreaming and messing about) at the end of the week, I doubt it would even be as much as someone who does their PhD part-time. And I try, I really do. But it's so rare that I can actually sit and focus on anything. Even lab work doesn't happen sometimes because, for instance, I'll find that a participant doesn't show up, or someone else has booked what I need, and instead of re-allocating the time to something else productive, I just waste it.

I'm sure some of the time I count as messing about does involve some mulling-over (subconsciously or otherwise!) of concepts/analyses etc, but really...

Does anyone have advice or just similar feeling?

For context, just over half of my planned experiments incorporate electrophysiological measures, and the rest don't - partly due to incompatibility between the electrophysiology lab and the type of measures and manipulations that are required in those studies.

The experiments of course are linked together by the overall topic (I'm investigating two variants of a certain phenomena), and the aim of studying those variants in parallel with one another which has rarely been done previously, and some variables are investigated across all the experiments (I guess you could say each experiment has the phenomena, together, and those variables plus something unique)

One of my supervisors' comments has led me to doubt whether the one completed and one-under-planning studies which do not incorporate electrophysiology have a place in my thesis - or can be made to 'fit' with the electrophysiology findings. This person is very much "not physiology=not interested" though...

Am I justified in thinking that content is a priority and that methods are to fit the content (and that illustrating the differences in methods/results is valuable too) and trying to be convinced that he is only saying these things because the 'other' parts of my work are not so interesting to him?

Can anyone recommend me any resources on how to easily set up formatting in word? I've recently mastered contents pages...

But as I sit, formatting each of my headings individually into APA format....I think to myself, there has GOT to be a quicker way to do this!

I feel like maybe these are things I should have been taught in school or something :P

I completed my UG degree *only* a few months before starting my PhD (in fact graduated in the same week as my interview).

Despite having been asked a lot of times, I can't say 'what it was like' doing this rather than doing a Masters/working/etc in between...The thing is that I've experienced a couple of people (one in particular) who see it as grounds for really condescending comments, and I wondered if anyone else had had something similar?

In my view, why on earth would someone who'd worked in an unrelated-to-research job for 8 years before doing an MRes and then beginning a PhD feel the need to act superior (in a research context) to someone who had begun their PhD in an unrelated topic in just the same month..? In terms of an academic/research career, aren't we both relatively rookies?

What a whinge... Lenna x

About every two minutes, recently...

I'm at a similar stage and the same kind of thing happens to me almost every day. I don't know if that's any comfort but hopefully it does improve!! :)

How do I prepare for a week with 13 teaching sessions, when I normally do less than half of that, and haven’t done any at all for about 5 weeks/over christmas.

I've had no official instructions whatsoever for four of the sessions and feel like I don't know what I'm supposed to do (one lecturer has not even told me the date and time and location of the session I'm to TA for - I happened to find this info by accident)

There’s no preparatory materials for those sessions at all. Some of the sessions are third year dissertation statistics drop-ins too, which is rather too unpredictable for me.

Tuesday's hours are back-to-back with no break all day.

One of the sessions is co-teaching with a different person than who I was original scheduled with, and from general consensus, is likely to consistently patronise me for not yet having my PhD (despite me only having started it last year), and the rest of the co-teaching sessions are with people I’ve never met before.

Conveniently the zero-prep ones, where I’m most likely to mess up, are the ones in the presence of someone who doesn’t already know me, and will judge me as less competent than I really am if I do mess up due to being unable to prepare.

And also I have ridiculous anxiety which is an interacting variable making all of these things worse.

How do you cope with this nonsense?

Lenna x