Thanks for all the comments. I've been meeting with the people who offered my post-doc and explained my situation to them, and they'll be discussing what to do, but it seems positive - there was another candidate they liked but he wasn't willing to work for the full three years they wanted, so it's possible that the post-doc start can be deferred to next year. I'm feeling a bit better after the initial shock, and I've been meeting with my supervisor to discuss what to do next. Things are still very much up in the air.

my failure to ever have any sort of relationship - it's been making me lethargic, messing up my sleep patterns, and making everything seem pointless. I've tried internet dating, speed dating, going to parties, but nothing works and now I can't face any of them again. I've had to move back to my father's house because I was so lonely on my own. I was in therapy for months (costing thousands and taking away lots of time from my PhD) before I eventually became fed up and walked out because it was just making me more unhappy. I'd been told that a new job and change of scene might change things, but now I'm back to the same old office and the same old project. I don't want to continue anymore, but I don't know what I can do instead. :-(

Last week, after a laborious and trying process with two interviews I was offered the post for my dream post-doc in an exciting new field, and yesterday I was expecting that by today I would have passed my PhD, yet now everything seems like it's falling apart.

I've worked for four years at my PhD in chemoinformatics, and I'm now completely fed up of the topic. I've implemented algorithms into a computer program. I had a first-author journal article published giving an assessment of the program and comparing it to multiple other methods, and I collaborated with a chemist and identified a new molecule that is more active against a cancer target than any of the inhibitors previously known (this is going to be another article on which I expect to be joint first author). I expected that would be more than enough for a PhD, but apparently not.

The PhD was completed quite close to the deadline, mainly because I was so tired of the subject that it was a real effort to write it. Also, my supervisor didn't read it through properly: we went through some of the chapters as I was writing them and he made suggestions, but as we got close to the deadline he pretty much just waved it through and said he was sure it was going to be OK and as I had a published paper they couldn't fail me. Because of this I was expecting a lot of corrections, but I was shocked when I went into my viva and both the examiners said they had major issues with the thesis.

There was a two and a half hour viva that felt really exhausting. They were both really irritated by things that they didn't feel were properly explained, and during it I could tell they weren't really happy with the work. When I went back in, they told me that they didn't think that the work was sufficient for a PhD, and that some preliminary work that was summarised in the PhD needed to be brought to completion and validated to a journal article standard. The programming was deemed to be too much of implementing existing algorithms, the assessment was deemed to be "routine", and my contribution to the drug identification was just the application of existing algorithms.

In a meeting afterwards, my supervisor acknowledged that it was a disappointing result and told me that I'll need to spend another six months doing more work to get the preliminary work to a journal article standard. This also means that unless the department running my post-doc agrees to defer the start date by six months, or allow me to work for a few months and then take an unpaid sabbatical, I've lost an amazing opportunity.

If I'd known that the assessment and drug identification work I did wasn't going to be sufficient to get a PhD, I wouldn't have spent a huge part of my PhD doing it. I feel as though most of the work I've done, which achieved great results, is being dismissed because it doesn't tick enough originality boxes. Now I don't know if I have the heart to continue. I've been deeply unhappy for the last three years as well, due to