Hi all and thanks for you replies.

@Mackem_Beefy: The PhD at my university is planned in a time of 5 yrs. As I just did my Lic this means that now I have to make some significant contributions in order to be able to finish my PhD. In the last few month I lost a lot of time and most importantly momentum. Change in supervision is out of the question for me, the project was devised by my supervisors and there may be only a few other persons who could supervise me, but they are again very close to my current supervisors.

@derose: I know that, but I think the PhD is not meant to be such that you start feeling physical consequences or deterioration in mental health. If it is then what's the point in having a PhD and not being able to work after that?

At the moment I'm still considering what to do but am leaning towards leaving and am looking after industry positions. Even if I finish the PhD I do not intend to stay in academia so I don't see the PhD as that crucial. I'm even thinking that it would be better to start working on my career in industry sooner than later.

Hi everyone,

I know there are a lot of threads like this one floating around, but still I will try to describe my situation in hope of some feedback from you...

I'm in the third year of my PhD (technical field, engineering), more precisely 2y10m in. It's been already 3 months that I'm feeling really down: have no motivation to work on it and completely lost interest in the topic. During that period I worked and developed some stuff (extremely slowly though) but I'm not very happy with it: my supervisors put no importance on the things I find most interesting and they only focus on what is written in the project description. This has been a source of real annoyance for me. What is worse, my main supervisor is on sabbatical and the assistant supervisor on parental leave. This leaves me with little and only occasional feedback from them. My main supervisor A doesn't reply my mails and I get some feedback from the assistant supervisor, which is like: "...I talked to A and we think your idea is good, but you should do this as well while you are doing that...". As you can imagine this is really not helping and it just kills my motivation even more.

Long story short, what is really happening now is that I', seriously considering leaving my PhD and get a job in industry. I know I spent a lot of time on my PhD, but at least during that time I got my licenciate degree (an intermediate degree in Scandinavia). After reading a bit online and speaking to some persons who got their PhD, I'm only getting closer to leaving. What I can read between the lines is that you do not gain much in industry by having a PhD, there is not even a strong financial advantage. I also have a feeling that I'm forgetting what I learned during my bachelor and master studies like working with tools that are used in practice.

Do you have any advice for me?
Thanks