(Continued, sorry)

Even though my university literally CAN'T fire me, I don't want to put mine or my supervisor's reputation through the wringer.

I think the issue now is somehow finding confidence in my results, in which case I can publish without worry. My supervisor has even told me that the main focus is identifying the species, and that I shouldn't worry about mistakes in where they came from if I don't know for sure. If I'm confident then it'll show in my answers, and I'll be able to live with my own decisions and justify them when asked. If not, it'll just all fall apart and I could (a distantl could) be accused of fraud.

It's a shame though: everyone I've spoken to in my department either doesn't care (in a good way) about my mistakes or says that I shouldn't worry as much. I've tried. I guess it's hard to though when you wanted to do a brilliant first project.

I'm trying to take a break for Christmas, but I'm off to a conference tomorrow and the fear of being a fraud is breaking me.

Hey all.

My paranoia has just been building since three weeks ago. The fact that I could have done something wrong without knowing or recording it has really made me doubt absolutely everything. My confidence is shaken, and given my poor notes I can't deal with things now.

I'm not sure what to do about one sample which I ended up contaminating with useless small rock fragments (I checked through the material several times and could find nothing). But I can't be sure. I could only really tell before that I hadn't made a mistaken in that sample because all the material in it was the same as earlier records. But now I've found two good specimens of a species that I had only described fragments of from the sample before. I might have had the confidence before to say that I had found them pre-contamination. But now I can't even do that, and I'm scared they'll end up to be similar-but-slightly-different species. I doubt there's evidence to say that, but maybe someone in 10+ years will prove otherwise. I should probably say the sample was contaminated too.

I don't know how to justify to the university who leant us this material the mistakes I've made, and what to include or not, without seeming like a moron. I've made claims to them before that some mixed material I had to work was labelled that way on the rocks, even though I wasn't entirely sure of that, and since then I've found evidence they probably weren't, and they were just separately labelled rocks that had somehow been bundled together. I don't want to spark a major diplomatic row. My supervisor continues to tell me to just let the samples leave my mind and do the best I have, but the paranoia and fear is quite literally destroying me. I'm not eating much, hardly sleeping (but spending a long time in bed), and considering suicide.

Hi all

I've been working on my PhD since February this year. I will have lots of different projects, but my first has involved preparing rock samples to dissolve from different locations in one formation, and seeing the fossils that come out. I've had problems with it though: I wasn't supplied with all the data I needed to make the right decisions, I ended up getting very badly clinically depressed (since I had moved to a new country for my phd, among other things), and I straight up made some rather confused and boneheaded mistakes, which includes accidentally contaminating material and mixing up specimens to be dissolved.

I wanted to publish such a good paper for my first project, with wide ranging conclusions and greater relevance in my field. My supervisor isn't worried, and neither is anyone else I speak to, since I still do have good data on the species present etc, but my mistakes have really knocked me down and limited some of the wider implications of my project. Every time I find something new or unexpected (I recently found new species in material I hadn't checked for a few months) my first thought is that I've made another mistake, and even if I haven't, what "percentage" likelihood do I need to be able to be sure of something to publish? I don't remember contaminating anything, but I can admit it's possible, and memory is a poor witness. I guess this shows the absolute importance of notes (mine have been scrappy at best).

I feel like an imposter--like a braindead gibbon could do a better effort than me. Every new potential error knocks me down, and makes me paranoid that I've messed up. Things I was sure about before I'm no longer sure about. Mostly I'm scared of letting my incredibly kind and understanding supervisor down, being declared a fraud, or letting down the uni who lent us the material in the first place. I suppose it sucks to be both ambitious and disorganised.