Hello,

I am a science PhD who just passed the second year progression meeting. But I have been struggling with my situation since I just started the PhD long long ago. Sorry that I will give long statement detailing my problems. I hope some people in the same situation can give me some advice.

I started my PhD in Jan 2011 with an external sponsorship. The condition of the scholarship is that the project should be closely related to the industrial problems and the final thesis would end up giving the solutions to their defined 'problems'. However, when I started the first meeting with the sponsor, I found they just gave a big general issue and listed all kinds of problems with their current technologies. To be honest, they have no specific research purposes or defined research methodology. Hence, I have tried to read through their entire problem list and came up with some pieces or research topics during my first.

Actually, my first was going OK. I made efforts to finish the 1st piece of research and got a Journal out of it (Just a mid-level Journal paper). However, the work was not closely related to my own specialization and I gradually lost my passion.

During the last year, my supervisor forced me to do a series of experiments and researches which, I think, were scattered points and would never be packed together as a coherent thesis. Especially, some of these works never worked. I have been feeling awful and tried to communicate my supervisor regarding this issue. He insisted that all these works were self-related and could be useful for my sponsor. But for me, I just spent last year doing these and get little feedback out of the proposed jobs. As a result, I have been even criticized by my supervisor during my 2nd year panel meeting.

The point is my passion in this PhD topic has already fade away, I can do whatever my supervisor asked me to do in next 12 months but I am not expecting too much valuable materials out of the work. Therefore, I highly doubted the succession in my final thesis, as I said, my jobs were just randomly scattered but not networking with each other. I just procrastinated a lot last two months, really want to quit the current, boring works. I can never see anything exciting out of the next months.

I a by nature indecisive person. I dont know if I should make my decision to quit the boring project. As I always wanted to work in a research department, I am unlikey to give upon a PhD route. I will possibly make another application soon. If I choose this way, I dont really know how I should communicate to the potential supervisor on this issue.


I just want to ask people in this forum on whatever advice you can give. Hope somebody wise can take me out of the struggling. :-(

Hi Kingapple, PhD's are not all about the excitement and the passion. Sure there are moments when they are, but these are only moments in a long stretch of hard grind. The PhD trains you to be a researcher, who can run a project in a discipline.

Basically this means to pose a question or hypothesis or problem;
then to design a project to collect data to provide information on this problem, question or hypothesis;
then to interpret and analyse the results and;
finally to present them in a written work that is comprehensive and clearly written.

Passion is great but it isn't going to sustain you through those points where you just have to churn through the work (as you do in the world of work-even in careers you are passionate about). During those moments, you often have to hang on to other things until you find a peak moment or reach an exciting checkpoint or goal.

I think you should be careful about stopping your PhD now, because you are fed up, hoping that later you will find a better topic. PhD's are competitive and universities will look carefully at your reasons for quitting before giving you another chance.

But the situation you described in your fourth paragraph does sound difficult and sounds as if it needs to be resolved. Can you write down your issues and email them to your supervisor before your next meeting and just say you really need to discuss these? Don't bring up the issue of boredom but do talk about how you are having trouble connecting your series of experiments into a coherent piece of data that is useful for the thesis. Say that this is distressing you and you are not sure of what the next step is...or something along those lines perhaps?

Good luck with your decision. (My personal advice is don't quit-if you really want a PhD and see your career being in research-try to twist your topic into something you find a little more interesting- AND- if you can do this, then still expect to be bored quite often while you do all of the tedious data collection, experiments, write ups, etc.


:-)