Dear everybody,

I'm in a situation that I would like to share with you and to have your opinion/suggestions about it.

Last October I enrolled as PhD, and after having get the invitation by the director. The process went quite fast, immediately after I finished the master, so I never really had the time to check about other opportunities, so I took the first offer I got. Since he promise me a scholarship at least for a semester I decided to enrol.

Just to give an overview, consider that I'm in an art university, so the subjects and approaches are more free and speculative then in exact sciences...

The problem is that since the beginning I kind of accepted any of the requirements of the supervisor... in other words he told me "you are going to research about this..." and during the time, the space of freedom that I was thinking to have, gradually reduced. Just now I started to realize that I'll probably have to spend at least 3 years doing something that:
1) I'm absolutely not interested
2) something which I don't have any expertise about.
3) something which I don't believe it to be very useful for my career.

Before it's too late, for me it's the time to start to consider if I should quit or continue, before it's too late...

There are maybe two ways out...

1) I'm not working on an application for getting funding for a research group. The success of the application would fully funding my PhD. In case of rejection, I can MAYBE renegotiate conditions and argument to be developed in the PhD. This was my unique condition: no money? Bye bye. Like this is fair...

2) Give some excuse to quit the PhD because of personal problems. Taking 1 year to search something else, eventually enrol again in the same Phd but with a different topic. This is quite risky, because even if I give a good and acceptable reason to quit, if he feel like, my supervisor is powerful enough to let find any door closed in the future.

By the way, also for respect, which is actually deserved, if I quit, I want to do it in the most smooth way... because my supervisor actually spent much time for me.

Here I have few questions, because I don't know how the things works:

In academic context, is it acceptable (polite) to quite a PhD position if a better one is found? How much is licit to negotiate and discuss my topic with the supervisor? Do you think it might be easy/possible to change everything from what is on the Exposé to what is actually done?

You can quit a PhD any time - you don't need an excuse! You don't have to give a reason if you don't want to; there's certainly no need to think up reasons.

Before you quit though, have you tried speaking to your supervisor and saying that you're not that interested in the project and you want to change its focus, plus you want to get more funding?

People do quit if a better opportunity comes along, but it's better to be honest with your supervisor first and see what options you have.

Thanks so much for the reply... You actually clarified my possibilities... at the moment the best is probably just to take some time and see what happen...