Ady,

Many thanks for your reply. I'm really glad to hear I'm not alone! Re: the relevance issue, I have an astrophysicist College colleague that constantly gives me PhD envy! I have always wanted to do a PhD and saw myself as the next Schopenhauer when I was a wee undergrad. However, I should remind myself that what I'm doing is really interesting and get on with it!! Yes, what is it with the endless meetings about nothing at all?? Cripes.

Yes, I'll stick at it - this seems to be the consensus. However, I now have an employee (whoops) and a large contract coming through with an important client, so may have to perfect my juggling skills.

Interesting point re: the funding. I'm guessing that most funding bodies give you terms with their offer? My letter just said we are giving you x amount over x number of years. I don't think legally they'd have a leg to stand on if they wanted to claim any back.

Thanks for your tuppence (up)

Screaming,

Thanks very much for your response. You're probably right! I should enjoy what I have now and stop whinging. It is the case at the moment that the PhD is somewhat neglected, but I think that's due to a lack of enthusiasm for it. I need to re-energise myself it seems.

Hi all,

I have been battling with this for some time now. I am in the middle of an arts PhD, fully funded (gold dust in the arts) and am pursuing a topic that I really love. However, my supervisor has not given me ANY direction over the past two years and knows pretty much *nothing* about my subject. I had to chose her as a supervisor however as I had funding from this department and consequently had little choice.

It has also dawned on me that what I'm studying is quite a luxury and with no jobs available in the arts, I think it is something that is fun and I'd probably be doing in my spare time, but it feels increasingly ridiculous to be spending such a lot of time in my late twenties effectively in early retirement!

Coupled with this, I took three years out and worked in business (completely unrelated) and I see this as what I want to do in the future. I started a business last year and so far it is going really well and *this* is what I see myself doing. So I'm stressing as I have deadlines for handing in parts of my thesis this year, whilst what I should be doing is doing that part-time and spending most of my time focussing on my future. However, can I ask to go part-time half way through a year? If so, do I have to hand back a whole chunk of money?

I'm concerned as I want to finish the thing, but not at the expense of building my company.

What to do?