Hi, like I suspect many people, I've come here looking for advice. I'll try to explain my situation as clearly as possible, & I'll be very grateful for advice from anyone kind enough to take the time to give it!

I'm in the middle of my fourth year of a scientific Phd at a UK university. My (academic-only!) problems are

(a) whereas most such Phd work will study a particular material in depth, I have had to (drastically) change materials several times because of unfortunate external factors (suppliers going out of business etc.)...

(b) ...so I only really have results from 2013 to present;

(c) to understand/explain the few of these results that are not trivial means doing experiments which there's not equipment/time for;

& finally (d) there is no "narrative" to tie together what results I have. By that I mean that my supervisor wanted someone to investigate the materials, but instead of the "standard Phd thesis" in this field (which of course I only realized after getting some way into the project) which goes

[[synthesis->structural characterization->optical characterization->(iterate previous steps if time allows)->analysis->THESIS]]

...I can only include [[partial optical characterization->"analyze"haha->???]] because he didn't want/allow the rest (I did ask). He thought I'd be able to get good data but as I became more familiar with the literature/techniques, & limitations of our equipment, I've realized I'll only ever get trivial stuff out of this lab/kit. I've also shown that the samples we're using are unsuitable for these experiments, but due to horrific lack of communication (my supervisor sat on a report I'd written for the synthesis guys for TWO MONTHS) I still have nothing better to work on...

My supervisor has always focused on a continuing massive expansion of a quite different research area of the group (tripling in size since 2009-10), & I feel quite unsupported/abandoned. I've lost all motivation; I haven't written anything yet & I'm considering suspending/quitting. Any advice?

It does sound like a difficult situation and I guess you only have 6 months left to write up and submit right? It goes without saying it would be shame to quit now.

Have you had any annual vivas? Did they give any indication of whether the amount of work you have done is enough for a PhD?

Hi TreeofLife, thanks for your reply.

No, I haven't had any assessment along the way at all. This is because I did the first year of a Phd with a different supervisor - who went on holiday all the time and when he was here, verbally abused me. This came to a head during a time that was very stressful for me due to non-academic reasons ("boy loses girl") and I said "enough is enough", quit his group and changed projects. But in that 1st project I passed the 1st year viva and other milestones, so the university did not ask me to do any of that again in the project I'm now in.

I had to give a talk in my second year (of this project) and a poster in my 3rd - now the aims of the project have shifted yet again since then due to the changes in materials... I should also have said above (but ran out of words) that due to the problems with samples I have never had a well-defined research question in this project.

Ok... well if I were you I would go to another academic for an opinion and some advice - either someone you know or the head of the graduate school, pastoral carer etc because you really need someone to look at what you've produced and see if it's going to be enough. You don't want to wait until viva stage and receive revise and resubmit or something.

People quite often come on here panicking about these sort of things and it normally turns out fine, but because you have little supervisory support I think you should make sure it's going to turn out fine.

In my second year viva, my assessor told me I might not enough for a PhD if my experiments don't actually produce positive results, but because my supervisors have said I will be fine, I am ok with it because I believe them, so I hope it turns out ok! I think you need to double check with someone and get some reassurance too.

Thanks very much for your constructive advice! It's a good idea, I will try to find someone and see what they think.