I am a second year PhD student at the start of my second year. My supervisor and I had a great relationship in the first year, everything was ahead of schedule, and I passed my probationary transfer after 9 months with good examiner reviews.
However, my supervisor's research grant is running out (at the end of this month), and as I had dreaded, he's become more and more unpleasant to me over the span of the last 4-5 months or so. Since my experimental progress is great, he started to nitpick at very small details to catch me out, such as not documenting every single experimental details in my lab journal, or not giving him the experimental results on the very same day I had performed them. He had been putting these things in emails as "Final warnings". Now it's at the point where he wants me to run every single experiment past him before I do anything, like he has totally lost trust in me. During one exchange, he finally mentioned at the end of the discussion he only has funding for me for 2 years.
I'm not sure whether this relationship is amendable - I don't think it is a simple issue of personality clash because it doesn't look like he is able to secure any funding in the near future. He tried to put me through disciplinary graduate committee meetings last week and the committee members for the issues mentioned above and they found me to be performing at a satisfactory level.
I don't know if I can trust him anymore after the disciplinary meeting however; switching to a masters and getting out of here sounds very pleasant to me right now... I could try finishing the PhD in 2 years but (a) not sure if I'm smart enough to get it done and (b) I wouldn't know how to discuss this with my supervisor. What to do?
PostgraduateForum Is a trading name of FindAUniversity Ltd
FindAUniversity Ltd, 77 Sidney St, Sheffield, S1 4RG, UK. Tel +44 (0) 114 268 4940 Fax: +44 (0) 114 268 5766
An active and supportive community.
Support and advice from your peers.
Your postgraduate questions answered.
Use your experience to help others.
Enter your email address below to get started with your forum account
Enter your username below to login to your account
An email has been sent to your email account along with instructions on how to reset your password. If you do not recieve your email, or have any futher problems accessing your account, then please contact our customer support.
or continue as guest
To ensure all features on our website work properly, your computer, tablet or mobile needs to accept cookies. Our cookies don’t store your personal information, but provide us with anonymous information about use of the website and help us recognise you so we can offer you services more relevant to you. For more information please read our privacy policy
Agree Agree