my friend, please dont quit. I'm familiar with a similar situation = ok with supervisor but not so ok with the other. but there is no reason to give up because of her. stay and work your way through and you'll be superb at handling difficult people in the future (on top of having a Phd to be proud of). from ur post, its apparent that that's how she behaves to others as well. so you're not the problem here.

have a chat about this with your supervisor. be polite but dead honest. he'll may back u up in future meetings once he knows about the situation. or maybe he'll help u in a different way - prepare better, look at opportunity working with a different advisor etc. who knows until we try right?

as for your 1st year review, i think you'll be fine. if u worked hard, that means u have lots to show. which means lots of reasons why they'll pass u.

xy

thanks for the reply Walmin. It seems that you have a lot of experience with phd supervision. How I hope my supervisors are as understanding. Will act on your advice.

Thanks again for the help

======= Date Modified 08 00 2010 00:00:29 =======
Hi,

Just writing here in case someone can offer good advice about this. I have, in my opinion, an intelligent supervisory team. Experienced, well funded and well known. I am after all in a very prestigious university. The problem is that I feel the level of research they expect me to do is much higher than I am capable of at the moment. In meetings, when i present my results to them, i rarely get any supportive comments. Instead, i will first be cross examined thoroughly regarding the results i get. If i fail to answer the questions well enough, they will start to drill into it, give negative comments about my ability to be a phd student and make faces to vividly show their disappointment. Sometimes I do manage to answer the questions rather well I think but they never showed their agreement. Just silence.. then they move on to the next question until they find one that i cannot answer.

This makes me feel very demotivated after every meeting as I come out from them feeling I did nothing right. The meetings happen once in 3-4 weeks or so. I dread every meeting and feel down most of the time. I am afraid to do experiments and generate more results since I feel they'll just be shot down in the meetings.. Its been 14 months into this (supposedly) 36 months phd and the only thing that kept me going is that I am awarded a very good scholarship and that I am very interested i the subject I am working on now at the moment. Changing supervisors is not really an option I think since there's no other interesting projects around and I've invested a lot of work in this.

I dont think I am that stupid since I did graduate from the same prestigious university with 1st class but completing this Phd looks immensely difficult mainly because I keep getting this setbacks from my supervisors... I would love to complete this phd... but how do I do it?