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

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.

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?