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. :-(

Yes. Thanks. I understand the situation. But I have checked my funding amount with the account sector. They told me that the total amount of the scholarship is only 90,000 (and they dont know if there will be other forthcoming funding through the scholarship). Cause I am a student in engineering course, my expenses on lab consumables will be extremely high. Normally, my group colleges get around 3000 a year for supporting their experiments, office items and conferences (I get only 5000 for the whole duration). Therefore, I am a bit worried about I should pay a future conference with my own money.

Sorry for not claiming that clearly. Actually I am an international so I need to pay full rate of tuition fee which is around 14,200.

Hi everyone,

I am a new PhD student with a Dorothy Hogkin Scholarship in University of Manchester. I have a question here.

The total amount of my scholarship is 90,000 pounds for all three years. Excluding my tuition fee and basic stipend, it seems I can only get 5000 pounds for my experimental item ordering and office consumables. I would like to know if this amount is enough for a PhD student for staying in the university for three years. If not, can I have other ways to working the consumable fee out.

Cheers