... continued...

I'm just looking for a bit of advice for how to handle the situation.

Thanks

Hello Everyone,

I'm quite new to this forum although I find myself wandering through occasionally, but I've never posted before. I'm 18 months through of a 4 year PhD in biology. I thought I'd post and ask for a bit of advice, basically, I'm not entirely certain that this is right thing that I should be doing anymore. I kind of sailed through my undergraduate degree and got a first class degree, at a loss of what to do with my life I decided I would apply for a PhD, it wasn't entirely on a whim, I'd been thinking about it for a while. Eventually I got accepted onto a PhD and started, the first year was great and I seem to be making some progress in my work now, which is good.

However, earlier in the year I had to present at a lab meeting we have after taking a few days off to go back home and celebrate my birthday, I didn't pick up the email as soon as I would have liked which basically meant that I had 2 hours to prepare for this - I threw together a presentation detailing my work and gave the presentation, later this day my supervisor asked me for a chat and basically told me that my presentation was sub-par, I explained the situation, that I hadn't checked my emails over the weekend and that I didn't have long to prepare. My supervisor then preceded to tell me that it wasn't really acceptable, and that we take holidays off on the basis that we will make up for lost work. I was pretty shaken up by all this - I've never really been told that my work isn't up to scratch or anything like this before. Anyway, after this I worked the hardest I have ever worked in my life for 3 solid weeks leading up to christmas, I was determined to make an effort even though at this time I pretty much hated my PhD life - my supervisor expected weekly meetings to discuss progress and everytime leading up to a meeting I just got really panicky and anxious.

After christmas, I went back to work and after a pretty dreadful first week, I got some project students to look after and had a really good 3 months doing my PhD, looking after project students and getting some useful data. Now the project students have left the lab and I'm back to doing my PhD, before Easter my supervisor gave me 17 days to write up my 2nd annual report and a poster that I have to present later in May, and I have experiments to do as well as this. At the moment I just feel swamped with work and like I have an unreasonable amount to do in the time given, I'm working every evening and weekend to get things completed on time, I've spoken to people and they tell me to just talk to my supervisor, but after what happened I feel anxious about it, and that if it's expected of me then I should really be able to do it.

I just want a bit of advice with what to do and how to handle this situation. The idea of just quitting has become some kind of fantasy in my head, I'm really interested in my topic and have a good life where I am, I don't really want to quit or change projects, so I'm just looking for