Hello
Thank you in advance for hearing my story. I am about to finish my second year of PhD studies. After 20 months of work, I had a meeting with my committee they judged that I should "refocus" the research problem, which basically meant scrapping all the work done before. I only had a small publication before that. They asked me to refocus the problem and in two months, they will recheck what has been done. Now those two months have elapsed and the review is very near. I did my best, and I have refocused the problem, although took some dead end alleys, and progress has been slow, as is normal on research.

I got a meeting with my main advisor yesterday just to discuss about the upcoming review. I told him I was going to tell the committee what I have been doing the last two months, including of course, the dead ends I took. He told me, "what do you expect that they tell you? that is a list of failures. What you should do is tell them how you are refocusing" and so and so. I have never been able to really satisfy my advisor, despite his best efforts and mine, seems like we really don't communicate academically, however, in a personal sense, we get along really well.

I have funding for another year (the 3rd one). However, yesterday at the end of the meeting he told me exactly this "two years and no progress. Have you thought of other options?". Immediately, politely but firmly I told him "what other options? do you want us to stop working together?" and he started being evasive, telling such things as "you are an adult, I cannot decide for you" and "I am not like a boss that fires you". I suggested him that maybe we should not do the meeting with the committee and stop immediately, but he said "do the meeting and we'll talk later".

I don't know what to do. I believe I have done progress towards refocusing and I have a reasonable view of the "new" problem, but all the things said before (and others I did not include) are very bad signals. I believe my advisor does not want to lose face, he just wants to bring me in front of the committee and that I fail in front of them just to save face. I am thinking on seriously not doing that meeting (next week) and stopping right now. At least I could save the scarce dignity I have by quitting before I fail. But maybe things can turn out for the better, who knows? I don't know what to do. What do you would recommend? Thank you again.