I found this forum through Google and I feel better now after reading some of your stories. I forget sometimes that the problems I face in my PhD are faced by most PhD students, thank you all for sharing your stories.

My PhD start was extremely rough, I started my PhD with high expectations of the research environment but my supervisor was a control freak, he wanted everything done in his way, he treated me in a bad and racist way as if I knew nothing about anything. After 1 year and half of being lost and losing my confidence I changed my supervisor to the head of research in my department. He is a very nice person and helped me emotionally through the hard stages of getting my confidence back but he is not an expert in my field (Machine Vision).

Cont’d

I am in the 4th year now and things are much better, I have done good practical work. I am currently writing up my thesis. But the writing is slow and I still have panic attacks sometimes. I know that I don’t have far to go but sometimes I feel too tired or too relaxed to do any actual writing!!! I am writing around 7 pages a week which if far below my actual target.

How can I speed up my writing? How can I keep my self motivated? How can I look at the glass half full not half empty? Sometimes I totally forget about what I have achieved so far.

7 pages sounds like enough to me. Don't push too hard or you'll run out of steam. i had the same problems you mention. i changed my supervisor in my second year and things are looking up.

Hi K,

just interested in what machine vision is? Is that like cars who can drive without a driver and "scan the road", or am I completely wrong?

By the way 7 pages a day of writing is impressive!

Hi jojo and rick,

I am not have been clear I am writing 7 pages per week. That averages as 1 per day. The most I have writing in one day was 4 pages and I was too happy for two days that I have not written anything in them which brought me back to my 1page/day avg :)

Machine Vision is a large field but it mainly deals with machines recognizing objects in digital images. This can lead to many applications such as the robotic taxi driver you mentioned. The algorithm developed in my research is generic and can be applied to a wide variety of application. The case study in my thesis is based on a medical imaging problem.

What fields are you two researching?

hi K,

I am in medicine, so maybe a bit related to what you are doing. Looking at the quality in medical care

Hi K,
If you manage any significant breakthroughs with your robotic taxi driver project, can you hold off for a couple of years please, just until I finish my phd. (Im also a cabbie, to pay the bills!)

Hi All,

Rick, I am doing medical image analysis on 4D cardiac dataset. The analysis can be later used to detect heart diseases. I am from a computer science background so my work stops after automatically recognizing the heart chambers from the datasets.

Danny, don’t worry about your job. Robots driving taxis are still in the early stages of development. It will take years to build the first autonomous one, and when it is build it will be much more expensive than a human. I will say human taxi drivers should feel safe at least for the next 30-40 years