Hi, I'm having some problems with my supervisor and just wondered if anyone had any advice for me.

I'm one year into a 3 year phd, and I'm really miserable. I've been working on a number of projects in my first year, one of which I really love, and one which is like flogging a dead horse. I would like to move to concentrate on the first project but there are several problems.

Firstly my supervisor has written a grant based on the project I hate, and wants me to do some follow up stuff that reviewers have requested. My supervisor's lab is not the richest so this would be useful to the lab and I understand why it is important, but it seems like I'm just being used as a lab skivvy. Also my supervisor is notoriously bad at having any cut off points for projects which aren't working, so I feel like I'll be stuck doing this stuff I'm not really interested in that isn't working for another 2 years.

Secondly a previous student did some good things with the project I hate, but since we tweaked it to make it more rigorous it hadn't been working.

My supervisor kept blaming me for this and questioning how hard I was working etc. which of course made me really depressed so I hadn't been working very hard.

Then I had an accident and was off studies since October until now. I have been back less than a week and already want to quit again. My supervisor always tells me off in a really belittling fashion. The trouble is, he's a nice guy in real life, and I think that he is not making my life hard on purpose, but honestly thinks he is helping. I can understand him being interested in the other project that I don't like, but him insisting that I work mostly on that is meaning I don't have time for the project I like and I'm just getting more and more depressed.

So I guess my questions are:
What are my responsibilities as a phd student? Do I have to jump and do what my supervisor says just because he needs help getting some information for a grant?

How do I get my phd back on track without having a fight with him (as I don't think he's being difficult on purpose)?

Sounds like a tricky one. Where does your funding some from? Your funding must be attached to a grant which your supervisor got from one of the research councils, unless you secured funding yourself. If it explicitly says on the grant proposal that the stipend you have is for work to be done on the project you dont like, well then that should be a no brainer. But if its not explicit, I am not sure how to approach it.

The kind of PhD you are doing seems to be quite common in Biology and Chemistry feilds. Am I correct? These programs are generally advertised as four year programs where you spend your first year working on maybe three mini projects, one of which you write up as a masters thesis. After this you choose the PhD topic " in consultation with your supervisor " It seems to defeat the purpose of doing exploratory cases if you have no say in what your PhD topic is going to be.

Is there reasonable, logical justification for your supervisor to want you do do that project over the other ones? i.e is that line of enquiry likely to be more fruitful? Will the output result in more papers? are the potential results of greater interest to the academic community? or is it just a case that this is what he is interested in?


Have a word with someone other than your supervisor in confidence in the department and see what they say (maybe your advisor/tutor or head of department). They should be able to tell you straight off if you have to do your supervisors bidding or you actually have a say in the matter. If anything they should at least be able to arbitrate if push comes to shove.

Thanks for your advice, I'll try talking to someone. I guess my main problem is that I don't know what I'm obliged to do - so hopefully someone can tell me. I actually got the funding on the back of a proposal (which my current supervisor helped me with) that was based on my masters research which ended up going down the toilet, so we came up with a bunch of stuff to try with the idea of keeping the best parts. To be honest I don't really understand why my supervisor is particularly interested in the part I'm not keen on - it's not his area of speciality altho it is quite "trendy". I suppose I'm going to have to bite the bullet and ask him..

oh and I suppose the other thing is that this other student got great results with the project that my supervisor's keen on, so I guess he thinks that it will get lots of publishable stuff - except for me banging my head into it for a year and yielding nothing, whereas I have one usable interesting result from the other project (and actually my examiner at the end of my first year thought there was more in the part I like - for a thesis though, I'm not sure it's going to set the academic world alight..).