hi all
i am a third year PhD student in engineering. i came in north america from Europe 3 years ago with very high expectations. the research i work on is multidisciplinary but my supervisor is primarily an engineer.

my experience was limited in the topic when i came in and fully trusted my supervisor as to in which directions to get started. i was asked to do some modeling for the first 2 years and it was "needed" "highly relevant" and "will be my first paperS". i worked hard and i have been really succesfull at doing what i was asked and even more.
the paper got rejected 2 times with the kind of reviews i wish no one here will ever have. starting then my motivation went downhill and i have been questioning a lot of things.

first the huge gap between my supervisor beliefs and other people. i assumed he knew what he was doing but he obvisouly did not.

now my knowledge in the project is such that i question the relevance of everything i was asked to do for the first 2 years. i see a lot of non sense, a complete lack of scientific reasoning and if i was to review my paper i would refuse it too cause a lot of it is pointless or does not make sense. same for the upcoming part of the project.

now i am in the lab preparing experiments supposed to use / confirm the model. i realize that some things cant be answered, and that there are several huge technical challenges to get these things started. i am not saying this is not doable, but what is sure is that losing 2 years is probably putting me now in a non return point: i wont have enough time to work on all of these challenges to make this working and do something interesting with it.

some equipment needed for my project is still not ready. my supervisor has kept on saying for 2 years that it will be done soon and i am still waiting.

some people are needed in the lab with a non engineering background to help more in these multdisciplinary projects. he said they would come but they dont and i assume they wont.

i also found during the first year that the same system was developped by a team 2 times in 1996 with a different application. i am also wondering: how is this possible that he had no idea this hapenned and put a stundent on it trying to sell it as a novel approach?

I cant leave easily because of the financial aspect. my family supports me a lot and i don't want them to feel i have wasted their money.
i could consider applying in another lab if i decide to quit. the thing is we are part of a research network, and pretty much all the people that do similar research know us. I am scared that if he decides not to help me, well he can say whatever he wants to all these people.

I dont know how to approach the topic with him and also another professor. I am scared people will feel i am the trouble. I just think i have been completely mismanaged and he just does not know what he is doing.

any comments would be greatly appreciated

cheers

Hello, first things first, I am also doing a multi disciplinary PhD between engineering and another discipline [biology] so I fully appreciate the difficulties when doing this sort of research. Strangely I am also in my third year. What is the other discipline for you?

To get back to your question, DON'T QUIT!! You have come so far and y the sounds of it you do have some data, always keep in mind that a PhD teaches you how to research and is not totally about having results or all the answers to the question. When I started my research I thought it would be quite straight forward, theoretically, but after every experiment I have ended up with about 10 more questions! You seem to know the errors you unintentionally made so maybe you can put a different slant on the findings, e.g. change the way you are viewing your results. It is not easy commenting on things like this when you don't know exactly what you have done.

Regarding the models, you said others had tried them with DIFFERENT applications, the novelty of your work was trying to use them in another way. If this hasn't worked then you can show why they didn't and can also explain the reasoning behind this. In your thesis you can hypothesize on what modelling technique would be better suited for that application and also suggest an alternative approach regarding data to use to develop this model.

It is very easy to be negative about your results, especially if you feel they are bad due to a lack of help/support from supervisors about them. One suggestion might be to meet with the  main supervisors from the different disciplines and find out what each of them would view to get from your research, there must have been a joint goal at the beginning. Once you find this out you might be able to focus you final bit of time on looking at using the data you currently have and doing some final small experiments to tie it all together towards the goal of what your supervisors were after.

Hope this helps and any more information may help in trying to see the wood through the trees!!
;-)