I think I have screwed up pretty bad and am too afraid to speak to my friends and colleagues about this situation, it would be great if someone could share some experience and perspective with me. I am a PhD student coming to the end of my first year and the relationship with my supervisor has deteriorated to the point beyond repair. I feel really bad about it, but the harder I try to make the project work the more it worsens.

He gave me a high risk project without any fallback plans at the start of the year, and reassured me it was going to work. Not knowing any better I took it on, performed experimentally well, only to find out it the project failed experimentally 7 months into the PhD. Instead of helping, my supervisor took sick leave for 6 months, and stranded me with a stressed out post-docs trying to push their own experiments, having no time to trouble-shoot my project. Friction with lab members started during my supervisor's absence as I grew frustrated. Ultimately I independently came up two fallback projects that were just now getting results. When my supervisor came back, initially he played along with the alternative projects I proposed. However when he saw that the initial results were promising, he distributed these results behind my back to my post-docs, to help them publish papers. I was upset with him not discussing this with me and confronted him, which ended up with him taking me to HR and dismissing me for disruptive behaviour in the lab.

On the side it turns out that he took sick leave because he had legal problems, and was diagnosed with mental illness.

At this stage I am more than happy to change supervisors, but do you think other supervisors in the university will be scared to take me on as a student? I have my own funding, performed well experimentally, but I have developed a bad reputation now which precedes me.

Sorry to hear of your troubles MountainSpring. Does anyone here have any advice?

Hello! I cannot really give you any advice, but I am in a similar situation. I recently started my PhD, just to find out that the information advertised does not correspond to the actual project. I tried approaching it with the supervisor and the student advisors but, to my surprise, even though it should be a confidential service aimed at helping the students, they stopped replying to my e-mails after I enquired about my options.