ugh. i'm not sure anyone can really give me any advice on this - i mostly need to vent to people who can appreciate my position - but if you have some helpful words, i'd love to hear them.

i've just started the third year of my full-time PhD. for most of my first year, my supervisor was on maternity leave. during her absence, we were in touch by e-mail and i got on with a few experiments and everything was generally ok. however, as i was busy testing, i didn't get around to writing my literature review. so, at the end of my first year, my supervisor advised me to take the 'quiet' time over the summer to get it done.

needless to say, i didn't. my second year flew by in a whirl of experiments, conferences and a lab visit abroad. still no literature review. by this point, it's almost a running joke between my supervisor and i - she asks about it, i laugh and say, "it's in the pipeline" or "i keep fiddling about with it" or something similar and she nods and we talk about something else.

so, here we are now, at the start of the third year of my PhD and i still have no literature review. worse still, even though i have time to write something right now, i simply cannot get my thoughts together. i feel like i know my topic area pretty well but i just can't get it across on paper. i think part of this stems from the fact that my stupid brain knows, on some level, that this is probably the most important piece of writing i'll ever do and everytime i try to get started, what i'm writing seems so trivial, so useless, so undeserving of the start of the biggest piece of work of my life.

also, i'm sort of terrified i'll miss out something that's crucially important in the literature so i seem to spend forever reading and reading and reading but never writing. i know that you're never going to write a perfectly worded, all-encompassing review on your first draft but my brain just doesn't seem to want to let me get started on even a rough draft upon which i'd be able to build.

lastly, i'm at the stage where my supervisor is starting to press me for written work. don't get me wrong - she's been really understanding with my working methods (or lack thereof) but i think she's now starting to feel the urgency, too. i've given her one complete chapter draft and the method/results/discussions for 3 others but it's really the literature review that's stressing me out right now. the day will come, very soon, where she gives me an ultimatum and i'm not going to have anything to show other than a bunch of rough ideas.

so, that's about the size of it. apologies for the long post but i just needed to get this off my chest. i haven't slept properly for the last few weeks because i can't stop worrying. it seems such a silly thing to screw up your PhD over - not being able to survey the existing literature - but i just cannot get on and do it. at the moment, i feel so disconnected from my work and i just can't see how i'm gonna finish this thing.

i have no idea what my first day will be like. i enrolled on-line this week (as i'm transfering from MSc to PhD) but i've had no other instructions as to when i should attend. i popped into the department yesterday but the admin staff didn't really know that much. my supervisor is on maternity leave until january so i'll be going in on monday with no idea of where i'll be based, what i'll be doing and who'll be supervising me until christmas.

i can't wait :)

i find powerpoint really clumsy for making posters.

that said, i have an electronic copy of a poster a friend of mine made in powerpoint. it's sized to A0 size and the body text is in 32-point font, headings in 93-point.

good luck!

i've checked my e-mail about 200 times today! my nerves are completely frazzled.

if i don't hear by friday i might combust

hi! first post!

i've applied to esrc, too, for a 3+ award. i'm just finishing my MSc and on our professional skills module, we were scheduled to have a 2 hour session on how to complete an esrc form and proposal. when the day came for the session, the guy leading our group just sort of said it was highly unlikely we'd ever be successful and went on to talk about something else instead.

that said, even though i know there's an ultra-low chance of being successful, i can't quite extinguish that tiny bit of hope inside me that i know will make me unreasonably, irrationally upset when i'm told my proposal was unsuccessful. oh well!

good luck to you all!