Heya

This probably won't be the most useful response, but hello. I'm about the same way in and I think I feel a similar way about it. It's like being stuck on an escalator where there's a multitude of exits but no idea which one to take, and if you don't get off in time you're stuck there. That's how it feels to me anyway. Have you felt like this for a while or is it just a blip?

I guess the only advice I can really give is don't worry if it feels like you've wasted a year. You won't have. Even if you quit, you'll still have tried and you'll have learnt what isn't right for you. One of the best things I read (can't remember where) was that you become a success by making good decisions, you make good decisions from experience, and you get experience by making bad decisions. We're still young. Maybe some people get it right first time but plenty screw up occasionally, you've just got to make sure that you learn from it.

Day of the week underwear is just the most amazing type of clothing ever. *looks sheepish*

Obviously the next step is to actually assign people's scores to their subjects and then we might have some evidence (even if we don't really have a sufficient sample size) for the science bias. :)

I got 25.24655%, so just about hitting the ranks of "total geek". Also I now really want a thermometer that also measures humidity.

I'm a geek but possibly not enough in my subject. Get totally bored by inorganic geekery then wibble happily over equations. Definately a roleplay geek though - bring out the d10s! :D

Thanks for your replies. I guess I'm going to have to go and find someone in my department I can ask about things and hope that they don't talk to my supervisor too much. I don't really want to talk to him about it because I'd rather discuss it with someone who didn't have so much of an interest in the situation. We do have a head of postgraduate stuff so I guess he might be ok. I might ask if it's even a remote possibility that I could change to doing an MSc at this stage. It's probably not because of the funding, but that way I'd only have to stick it out until October and I wouldn't be stuck in the subject forever which tbh is the thing that really scares me.

I definately want to make sure that if I leave it's before the upgrade. Apparently it reflects worse on the supervisor if a student drops out after that point, and honestly I quite like my supervisor. I just can't always cope with him. I feel quite guilty about it anyway as I am the first person in his group at this university and therefore if I leave he has to start all over again next year.

Someone3 - did your friends change subject slightly and stay with the same supervisor or department, or did they actually leave and manage to get accepted somewhere else?

I'm a first year chemistry phd student. All during my undergrad I adored my subject. I found the idea of specialising so difficult but I asked my personal tutor and she advised me to just apply to what looked interesting and to work out what I wanted to do later. I did that and ended up with a sort-of-offer (they didn't know if they had funding) that looked amazing and somehow also got an offer from my university.

To be honest I was never entirely sure about this offer, it was in an area that was vaguely related to the amazing sort-of-offer and I didn't have anything else solid so I accepted it. I'm not convinced that this was the best plan. It's inorganic chemistry so it's very qualitative. Inorganic chemists seem to all get excited about the different colours of chromium and suchlike, meanwhile I'm much happier if I can make equations out of things. I miss being a physical chemist just so much (my undergrad project was physical). I've realised that for me doing the experiments is less fun than analysing the results. In my project you do the experiment and that's it. No further analysis required.

The other problem is my supervisor. He keeps talking to me. I can't handle it anymore. This is the second day I just haven't turned up because if I turn up he'll come into the lab and talk at me, and right now if he talks at me there's a good chance I'll end up screaming at him to leave me alone and that's really not how you want to talk to your supervisor.

Basically I'm just trying to work out what I want. I have no idea who I'm supposed to talk to as a postgrad. The real question is whether it's the project I have a problem with, or whether I'm letting outside things influence that? I know I probably could get through this and get this phd, it would be hard but I could do it, but do I want a phd in this area? How much does a phd restrict where you can go afterwards? How similar to the area of the phd do people want you to be when you apply to postdocs?

I know this is horrifically rambling and incoherent. If anyone manages to read this then thank you, and thank you even more if you have any answers :p. I've been puzzling over this for weeks and I don't seem to be getting very far.

Definately, although actually I found digging out my old Famous Five books was wonderful during my undergrad project. Maybe I like my reading a bit more childish than trashy. Terry Pratchett is fantastic for light reading too.

Most days :(
He has this habit of wandering into the lab to tell me something or to ask what I'm doing, and most of the time he'll either tell me everything that's going on in my results (kind of useful but it might be nice to actually analyse things myself occasionally) or/and he'll interrupt me right when I'm in the middle of something and end up talking to me for half an hour (that's probably a minimum estimate) while I sort of stand there trying to listen but really preoccupied with what I need to do next in my experiment. Basically it drives me nuts.

Work out what I actually want, decide if I want to carry on or quit before the time for the upgrade.
Get enough done and work well so I can either pass my upgrade or get a good reference and leave my supervisor with some useful research done and hopefully publishable (should be possible as the current plan is for me to spend this year looking at a group of catalysts in detail and to look at different groups in the 2nd and 3rd year).

Can't say that marmite spread like jam appeals much, but marmite is actually rather yummy stuff. It also has the advantage of being not that expensive when you consider how long a jar lasts and how many sandwiches it makes. It's pretty good to use in cooking too.
Basically marmite --> (up)

Thank you so much for replying. It has actually helped a bit, I'm feeling a lot better than I was this morning.

Algaequeen - it's really good to hear that someone can be in this position now and can go on to really enjoy it. The impression I'd been getting from what I've read is that generally I should be really happy and enthusiastic now and it would then go downhill and I'd find it harder and harder to motivate myself.
I'm trying to go along to any postgrad things in my department but I generally seem to find myself in the corner while everyone else chats to other people they work with. I guess I've just got to keep at it.

The individual things I get absorbed with aren't generally that related to be honest (other than all being chemistry). One month I'll be fascinated by surface science, the next it'll be all about the atmosphere, and then I'll get really interested in things like drug interaction and enzymes. Thinking about it I can probably find an excuse to get quite a few different areas into my background research at any rate. Not entirely sure what my supervisor will make of it, but if it's vaguely related and it keeps me motivated in the research I guess it's worth doing. I've already decided I'm not allowed to think about quitting until I've got through 6 months. However bad I feel some days, I still want to give this a proper go before I give up on it.

Starshine and Emcollins - thanks for the me toos and good luck to you people too! :) Joining in the discussions is a bit trickier when they're all in their lab and I'm in a different one with no actual reason for wandering into theirs when I don't really know any of them, but I'll just have to make more of an effort to say hello on the rare occasions I see them in the corridor. Also, is it just me who thinks saying 'everyone feels like this' is actually quite depressing? If everyone feels like this then presumably feeling like this is the normal state for a phd, and personally I'd rather not feel like this for 3 years.

It's definately really good to know that I'm not alone in being unsure about my project at this stage. Everyone else I know doing a phd seems so settled and happy on what they're doing and what they decided to specialise in. I've told my supervisor that I am interested in trying as many different methods and learning as many techniques as I can, so hopefully when I've got the hang of the basic stuff I'm doing now there will be more opportunities to expand on that.

Hello,

I started my phd in October and so far I'm mostly feeling depressed by it. I have good days and bad days, and I do try to think of each bad day as just that and move on from it, but when I have more bad days than good ones it can be tricky.

I'm the only person in my research group and as a result the only person I normally see during the day is my supervisor which gets quite lonely. I talk more to the lecturers than I do to other phd students. Everyone else seems to have settled in really well and I always see them talking and laughing and just sharing ideas with the other people in their group.

I know it's probably silly to be this bothered by just social stuff but to be honest I'm not even completely sure that I'm doing the right project. I was interested in almost everything at undergrad so I find that my mind keeps wandering onto thoughts of other things I could be studying.

I've been looking online and the general theme seems to be that people get really depressed about their phds in the second year. Almost everyone seems to be miserable at some point from what I can see, and if this is the case then when is it good? When is doing a phd actually worth it? If I feel like this now then can I expect things to get better and to enjoy what I'm doing? I am trying. I think today is a bad day.