Hello,

I am a second year PhD student in electrical engineering, I am having some supervision difficulties, my supervisor does not know anything about nothing, since two, he has not been of any help to me, and now I came to a point where I completely sure that I cannot count on him, on any thing even his advices. Anyway, as I was stuck a while ago, i picked some work already done in my field of study, trying to reproduce the results in the hope that after that i can make some contributions. so my question is, does anyone know a better research strategy, i really trust my work and I am not ready to give up, and the feeling that i have to accomplish something original is really haunting me!!

Thx
Eric

It may sound silly but have you explained to him your reasoning behing your research? My supervisor does know about the area, but not in that much detail. He needed me to present him an 'argument' i.e. relevant literature and hypotheses for him to be able to understand what I was thinking and then say if that was appropriate for a PhD. I wouldn't assume your supervisor knows everything about your research area and may not be getting involved becasuse you haven't actually told him about it! - I realised this a year into my PhD, that although I knew a lot about it I hadn't actually communicated my thoughts to my supervisor! Anyway good luck with it, maybe you need to sit down and tell him how you feel.

Gage64/Eric,
Being too harsh on yourself - first of all, what you are describing is common and the advise of the other contributor is spot on in saying that you need to make a sound argument for your research. That brings us to the second issue - originality. True, your research does need a degree of uniqueness, but the level of this does not need to be earth shattering. I know very little about Elect. Engineering or your main topic, but one suggestion is that you would apply previous research to your geographical area (or use case studies to test somehing already tested by surveying). Here is an interesting article

http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:ZPxAGSfxycEJ:www.postgrad_resources.btinternet.co.uk/student-resources08-originality.htm+pat+cryer+website+originality&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=uk

As for help from the supervisor, be patient but keep him up to date with your progression and thoughts on a regular basis (preferably via email so to keep a record)

Good luck and godspeed, John Glynn!