I was just wondering if anyone could give me some advice/share their experiences with me! I'm now half way through my PhD and so far I've not got any results. I only get to see my supervisor every two months and he never really gives me any advice, he just tells me that I should be the one coming up with the ideas. I never get any technical advice off him and the senior postdoc in our lab is no better, so I feel like I'm just going round in circles trying to get things to work and failing. I have written a project outline and my supervisor says it's fine, but I'm still feeling at a bit of a loss. I did feel like quitting before christmas but I persuaded myself to give it some more time, and most of the time I can stay positive, but I've just had another meeting with my supervisor which has left me feeling stupid and a failure. I love science and I don't really want to quit but I'm just not sure how long I can keep pretending that everything is ok.

At my first committee meeting I told my committee that I worked 40 hours a week and they really laid into me about a PhD being more than a job. I wasn't working 40 hours a week because I'm lazy, it was just that I had a lot of overnight incubations and there are only so many papers I can read. The minimum expected of you in my faculty is 50 hours a week, and you are expected to work weekends. You get out of it what you put in! But then again it depends on how efficient you are, some people can pack everything into 9-5 whilst other people do the same amount of work but not finish till 8 etc.