Hi everyone,

I started my psychology PhD in September and am worried that I'm falling behind already - its been nearly 6 months and I don't feel like I've done enough. I have a fairly good grip on the background literature and I've been running my 1st experiment with human subjects for the past few weeks. The problem is, my experiment is not going well and a lot of the data I have gathered is unusable. As such, I had to change my experiment half way through and now I think it will be early May before I have sufficient data to analyse but that will just be 1 experiment done. I doubt it will be publishable. I can hopefully do a second experiment before the end of the year but it is hard (though not impossible) to find human participants once the long summer holiday starts and all the undergraduate students disappear.

I know PhDs are very different from each other but I'd like to know how much people tend to get done by the end of the 1st year. My supervisor is nice but has absolutely no sense of urgency. He's not very demanding which is good as I'm self motivated but I never know if I'm doing enough.

Hey Sam, I'm doing a PhD in clinical psychology, working with people with Alzheimer's and other types of dementia. Basically all I did in my first year in terms of my PhD was write my lit review (and got it published), finalise my project propoosal, get school and NHS ethical approval, collect my control group data and start recruiting patients. It was only by September of my first year that I started to collect patient data, and this is the norm in clinical psychology because all the ethics procedures take so long to get through if you're working with a clinical population. If you're testing students I'm guessing you won't have the NHS ethics trauma, but even so I wouldn't worry too much at this stage...it's often into second year before people really get into the swing of testing. It's also better to find out the potential problems now rather than in another year, so you can put them right before you've gone too far wrong. How many experiments do you have? How many people do you need for each one? It sounds like you are doing okay to me, just keep going! Best, KB

I started my PhD in October (sort of in psychology) and I've not started any actual research yet. I've been working on my literature review, my supervisors are very happy with my progress and said at our last meeting that they don't expect me to really get started with the research until the end of my first year. I think it varies so much between between disciplines and departments that it's impossible to generalise. Are your supervisors happy with your progress so far?

I have no idea how many experiments I will need to do but I'm interested in writing my thesis in the Alternative Format which requires a minimum of 3 publications. A traditional thesis that I've looked at in a similar area to mine consisted of 5 experiments but this person may have done a lot more than 5 in order to get decent results.

Per experiment I only need about 20 people but my research is long winded and it takes about 5 hours in total to gather sufficient data from each participant and even then there are often problems with the way they responded which means I have to reject a lot of participants from analysis.

My supervisor has not said that he is unhappy with my progress and generally seems ok with the work I’m doing but he is so laid back I can’t imagine that he will ever put any pressure on me – even if I do start to slack off. I’m also very aware of the fact that he has never supervised a PhD student before so it’s a learning process for him too.

Hi Sam

I'm in social sciences. I didn't collect any data in my first year - I did my lit review and another chapter, ethics and wrote a conference paper. Don't worry about it - it sounds as if you're going fine, and if your sup's happy, great! But maybe you need to have a talk to him, work out some deadlines etc.

I didn't have any data collected in my first year, like others have said. Rest easy, Sam_RB1 - you're doing fine.

simple answer is NONE.
I only started data collection properly, even a pilot around 18 months and then it was always data collection and writing bits and pieces until the end of third year. Now, I'm in my write-up. I'm in the same subject area but my data collection can be finished in day or two if all goes well otherwise 2-3 months per experiment.
DON'T worry too much once you are more confident abt things they will pick up pace. If not your super will no doubt breathe down your neck;-)

I'm really surprised that a lot of people didn't collect much data in their first year. I was told I should start running experiments within the 1st couple of months of starting. This turned out to be unfeasible as I had to focus on my Literature Review and couldn’t get ethics in time. Still, it makes me feel like I’m behind. I have to submit a 60 page report in September with an introduction, method, results and discussion section and I'm concerned I won't have much to fill 60 pages.

I’m not used to working without deadlines and I don’t really have a plan of action that covers the following years so it’s hard to identify whether or not I’m on track. I guess I should discuss this with my supervisor but it’s often difficult to get a straight answer from him!