Hi everyone…


I’m doing PhD in mechanical engineering and my work involve in setting up the formulation to solve the problem, numerical simulation of the method/ formulation and hardware experimentation/ validation of those two. My problem is that I really want a PhD but feel scared to do all these works especially the experiments. I’m scared if the experiment won’t work, if the results are not as good as I expected, if I will break the mechanism/ devices as it takes more than one month to get them repaired/ made new. This slows down my research and I spend a lot of time on the formulation and simulation part as to delay/ procrastinate from doing experiments. My supervisor has already suggested me to change my topic as I am going so slow and so that I can publish paper as soon as possible as I am required to publish either 2 international journal papers or one international journal and one international conference papers in order to graduate. I don’t want to change my topic, but I really need to work faster and overcome my fear. Has anyone ever felt the same way like I do, and care to share how to cope/ deal with/ overcome this feeling?


Thanks

Well, it is not 100% on, but it is similar to your situation. When I was working as a Mech Eng for a US defense contractor, I had the same fears. So my boss made me come in one Saturday for a few hours with him. He pulled up all the specs and blueprints on the machines we were using for the tests. Then he helped me break the machines, intentionally. We went through a few of them, leaving a trail of broken equipment as we did the experiments, breaking it at strategic points. Then when he got tired of that 'game' and we were lined up with broken stuff that was much larger than my paycheck, he dropped a doozy of a thought on me. 'If only we had an engineer who could read the schematics and fix these broken machines.' Then the look of 'I hope you see what I am doing and get to work... you have until 5 p.m. today'.
Yes, he did stick about and help with repairs, but it took that bit of extreme demonstration to get on with it. So moral is that you have the knowledge of how to fix the stuff. Just check around for what spare parts are available so you know what your limits are.

I don't have the same issue with equipment as my PhD is in the social sciences, but I can definitely relate to the fear of starting to do the research activities in case I do it wrong and mess up all my results! I think that's only natural when there's so much riding on it. Sometimes I find that anxiety is almost paralysing and I end up wasting a lot of time instead of getting on with the actual tasks. But I'm starting to learn ways around that. The first thing I've realised is that it's unfamiliarity that makes me nervous (very like the previous poster was saying), so I try to break down every task into its smaller steps, and work out exactly what each step involves. Then I find that they do tend to be quite familiar things, or if they're unfamiliar I can see what it is I actually need to do, and this makes me much more confident about it. I also set goals for myself - I work out a loose timetable for each groups of tasks, and define an end target point when I want to have reached the next stage in the research. Breaking it down really takes away my fears - I don't know if that will help you?