Hi there, my views of my research direction has changed and I have found a new supervisor and department, but my current supervisor will not sign off on my change of supervision form. What do I do?

My girlfriend is in the process of changing to a new supervisor and she had pass 1st year vivas with her previous supervisor.

With her change in supervision, her previous supervisor says she must not use any of the data generated in his lab in any shape or form for publication or communication purposes without obtaining his unequivocal and written consent. Is this a policy or is her supervisor referring to courtesy?

Can my girlfriend's previous supervisor deny her permission to use her results to write up in her thesis, if she had passed 1st year viva with the results, and what if some of her original data is being used by her previous supervisor in a journal manuscript that will be published?

I know of a friend in a similar situation as you - working for a difficult supervisor. She said to me her supervisor even laid a complaint against her to try and get rid of her, went through the whole panel hearing process to finally have the allegations dismissed. It cost her three months of PhD hell to sort it all out.

It can be really difficult to establish a support system, especially if the PhD is consuming time and energy and eating into friendships and relationships. I find when the PhD is going well, I have more time to maintain extracurricular activities and my quality of life goes up. When the project is in quagmire I tend to withdraw socially until I breakthrough and overcome the difficulties. Having a significant other may seems great but I've seen marriages break up over PhD stress, in which case one'd be even worse off.

When all is said and done, loneliness and depression are only symptoms of a deeper root problem. These underlying issues may or may not be academic. Face those problems head on, solve them, only then can sanity be preserved. Having friends and family are important for support during those down times but you must solve the underlying problems to reverse the momentum of the troughs.

PhD definitely has its ups and downs. And when the lows come it can be normal to feel useless or even lose hope. The experience can be amplified if you don't have a good sense of direction right now. But doing a PhD is like holding down any job: the first 2 years you constantly put yourself in new situations, handling new problems, interacting and getting used to new personalities, dealing with new politics. Over time you will figure out how to survive, how best to interact with difficult situations and people, how to solve academically challenging problems that seemed insurmountable at the beginning. You will grow as a person and reach a point when most tasks become old hats. Then you will graduate!

I agree with bankjc. A good example of his/her comment is the comparison of the respective career trajectories of Keira Knightly vs. Felicity Jones (really!)

Both started their acting careers in The Treasure Seekers at the age of 12 (1996). Knightly had a much easier path to success, breaking out in Bend it Like Beckham and Pirate of Caribbean roles, thereafter landing leading hollywood roles consistently.

Felicity Jones on the other hand really had been trying to break in to the industry for 15-18 years, without major acclaim and toiling in mediocrity until receiving an Oscar nomination for The Theory of Everything. Now she is landing roles for Star Wars and Marvel sequels (be all and end all of course). If you listen to her interviews she comes across as blue-collared; describing hard work and family being the most important things in her life, seeing her through the tough years. She even went to the academy ceremony dateless. I mean, it just goes to show how life can turn around if you work hard and keep believing in yourself.

Academic success of the lab is an important factor but take a look at funding situations of these two labs. When does the grant run out? Does the lab have enough papers to secure the next grant? You need to be sure whatever lab you are going into will be structurally stable and supportive for the next 3-4 years, otherwise no matter how great the supervisor or colleagues seems now, the relationship will likely become strained in the future. If the funds run out then no matter how great the project is it won't be completed.

If there are lots of students in the lab then this is generally a good sign, especially if they get on well with each other.

Then the experience of the supervisor and personalities of the post docs as you have mentioned. Will you fit in? Can you do the work? If not immediately are your superiors patient enough for you to learn and make mistakes?

If the lab is well managed, you will give yourself the best chance of success.

What's happened has happened, but you can still put a positive spin on the situation. To be honest if you're talking about finding a job or future study, whilst your academic achievements is important, what's equally as important is how you sell yourself. Forget about the failure - what have you learned in the process? How have you matured in your outlook? How does this benefit your future job? Just don't ask for a reference from your supervisor.

Also, when it comes to getting a job in the industry, passing professional exams and being professionally licensed are far more important for getting ahead than having a PhD. If you are a qualified engineer or accountant nobody is going to care whether your experiments failed or not.

At the end of the day a PhD is icing on the cake if you have secured the time and funds to do it, but you're making it sounds as if nobody can get a job without a PhD.

Clearly changing supervisor is a distinct option, though I'm sure there will be blowback taking this route. You will probably have to change your topic and start again. Also this process of changing supervisors may cause you to suffer reputation harm within the department - he seems to be taking your rejection pretty personally at the moment, so when you start filing the paperwork he may turn against you and close ranks. He may be worried that once you switch supervisors, the word is going to get out and he will land himself in hot waters. It's actually in his best interest to keep you as a student under him as long as you don't blow the whistle.

If you want resolution with minimal blowback, there may be a way to settle all this tension without resorting to a switch in supervision. But you have to act tactfully. Be amicable and respectful, but drop hints like you have a boyfriend to see if he backs off a little. Bring your best guy friend along to functions. Take a break so you stop seeing him for a while. Use emails instead to seeing him directly. Whatever you do don't humiliate him or insult him. Don't confront his wife. Keep dropping these hints that you're not interested without confronting him directly, until he realises it is in his best interest to back down and keep things professional at all times.

All this being said, you seem to like him quite a bit. You need to sort out your own feelings before you can decide on any of the above. My personal advice is, use your head not your heart. He is in a position of authority over you and he is misusing it - are you truly in love with him or his authority over you? Just because you may have feelings for him, Is it ok to act on your attraction in this situation? You will be responsible for wrecking his marriage; you may not mean anything to him other hand an escape from wife.

Good luck.

Ah, I know how you feel. It's normal to feel like this, after all, it must take a self-respecting and competitive personality to pursue a PhD at Imperial. To know someone who is seemingly doing so much better than oneself is a difficult thing to swallow.

However, as pointed out by Rina, it's not worth comparing yourself to other people. Also, to quote George Orwell, "Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible." This person seems invincible right now, but winning the moment doesn't necessarily mean winning for life. The key is to be bigger than winning and losing. It's much more important to find your own path, be confident about who you are, what you want to achieve, and achieving it. Once you have a sense of direction and inertia in your life, and know that you are a step closer to your goal everyday, everything else will seem peripheral and insignificant. The sense that another person is doing so much better than you will then come to pass.

I hope this helps!

First authorship is of course the best. But the reality is that it is your supervisor who makes the decision who goes where on the paper. It is his lab after all, everything belongs to him. If you challenge him on this I can't see how you could get away politically unscathed. For me the first authorship just wouldn't be worth the trouble.

You'll get a good master's, second author papers, land a good PhD of your choice. Good decision to stay as second author.

I wouldn't say my project has gone exceptionally well, but it's not too bad. Right now I have almost enough data to write three results chapters, but because some of the results are negative and my work is not yet published, I feel writing up a full PhD thesis is a stretch right now. I'm basically a year and a bit into my PhD. I would have enough to pass the second year viva or transfer to a masters, but probably not a full PhD right now.

My supervisor does want me to write three results chapters, not intro/methods/first results chapter. Perhaps he just wants to see where I am, but with his funding ending and his job in a flux, I am concerned for my future.

My funding does run for three years even if he leaves. So I'm thinking the best approach is to get my second year viva out of the way before his potential exit, so that the department is obliged to find someone to babysit me during my third and final year.

It's a bit like doing a job you don't have a passion for. Sometimes you just have to get things done.

It sounds like your choice is between defending the viva half-heartedly and perform poorly, or defending as best as you can and getting a pass and moving on. Out of the two I would advise someone to choose the latter.

My supervisor's grant is running out and he wants me to write up three chapters; but I'm not even a third of the way into my second year of PhD? I do have enough data (just) and I have funding to pay for bench fees in my third year. What to make of this situation?

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?