Hi Annieslim,

I really sympathise - poor you, it sounds like you're having a miserable time. Have you thought about the idea of taking a bit of time off and maybe suspending your studies while you have a bit of a re-think? I know that at my uni, you can suspend your studies for up to 12 months (unpaid) if needs be, and your hand-in date will be pushed back. That way you don't have to completely burn your bridges and quit, but can get a bit of perspective away from your work, and maybe see if doing something else makes you feel better.

You really shouldn't feel sad all the time. Try to remember what made you want to do this in the first place, maybe write some lists of the good and bad about what you're doing, of a list of ideal-world scenarios of what would make you feel better. Talk to your supervisors, uni counsellors and other phd students and post-docs. At the end of the day, remember the phd isn't the be all and end all of life. If you're miserable there's no point to it. Finally, although its great to talk to friends and family, personally I've sometimes found my own family's advice less than helpful simply because they've really got no idea what doing a phd is actually like, and although I'm sure they want the best for you, they really might not be able to understand what you're going through.

Good luck with whatever you do, chin up!

:)

Hi Mystic Guru,

I'd probably second Rubyw's view about the usefulness of doing a Masters to gain experience and help you formulate ideas, also to get a feel for whether a phd is really what you want to do (but at the same time it is possible to go straight in without a masters if you want). Re. your background, there's lots of scope for phd projects that span disciplines, so 'crossing over' from molecular bio to social sciences is definitely feasible in theory :) I'm doing an ESRC/NERC interdisciplinary studentship so am supervised between biology and sociology (kind of!), so that might be something to look into http://www.nerc.ac.uk/funding/available/postgrad/schemes/jointesrc.asp Finally, don't worry about the quantitative thing, lots of social science type phd's take a quantitative approach, maybe a good starting point would be to just start to do some reading about quantitative social sciences methods (have a look at something like the Sage handbook of quantitative methodology for the social sciences). Getting to grips with the types of approach out there and reading about example studies might help you to clarify the sort of research question you want to tackle.

hope that helps, good luck!