Overview of rewt

Call a helpline or talk with a counselor. Your mental health is important and talking with someone is the first best step. Voicing your problems aloud helps the recovery process. I cannot stress enough enough - talk with a professional about this. Everyone on this forum wants you to succeed.

On another note, you have a job as an RA, volunteering and organising a workshop at a top conference. You are not in a bad position at all. The RA role may be below your skills but it is a job that can go on a CV. The workshop will also let you make some good contacts and potentially find a better job. Forget about everything back home or in the past and only look forward, you can do it. Everyone has set backs but it is getting up from them is the key to life. You have had a lot of set backs but don't let them hold you back and think about the future and be positive.

There always seems to be 3/4 new threads on a Monday morning that a newbie tried to post over the weekend. Can you change that waiting time/approval process so that they can post over the weekend.

Reset or change or require activity for the top 10 posters. How many of them have posted over the last year but we see their names every time we log in, I know it is historical but they have moved on.

When someone uses a blog there seems to be a double post which is annoying clutter

Categories- Can you update the categories or let us make our own categories and display them alongside the title. So at glance value I can see what the thread is about or even add some sign to show NEW or HOT. The glance value of the forum isn't great.

Thankyou for asking for our suggestions

Engineer here.

So you did your dissertation in the area of your proposed PhD but worried that you also did other modules. That sounds fine to me, you have some knowledge and you can learn new skills during the 3 year PhD. As long as you got a good score on the dissertation and can discuss it in depth you should have a chance. I know in engineering having some wider knowledge/experience is considered favorably

You are right pm133. I am realsing that I don't enjoy academia in its current form but still love research. I just need to figure what I am doing with my life then. I am naturally quite lazy unless I am working towards something and that spark that has kept me going, has disappeared. It is probably just second year blues but I don't want this to continue for too long

The PhD honeymoon has died for me over the last few weeks. It is kind of sad but also inevitable as I have literally sat at my desk for the last 2 days or so with no energy or motivation to do anything. I have so much to do but just can't be bothered and surf the web.

Honestly I think I have too many commitments and not enough support. By not enough support, I have let friends drift and find myself with an ever smaller group of non-PhD student friends left to talk with, who unfortunately tell me to "man up" and just deal with it. And it is hard to organise to do anything with them as they all have good graduate jobs and every time I suggest something it ends up at somewhere way too expensive for me. When I tried explaining to them once

But back to the commitments and my PhD. Simply, never sign up to a conference organizing committee or volunteer to chair it. It has caused me way to much stress and anxiety just for a line on my CV. The organisation has been a complete shambles and a lot of it is my fault. None of us had organised a conference before and the admin person helping us hadn't either, I should have seen that it was going to be a train-wreck earlier. Plus my supervisor never supported me doing it (should have listened). But as it went over the months we always just scraped by until a few weeks ago when that admin person left. Another admin person ,who actually knows what to do, replaced him as our support staff and basically said we were massively behind. Cue mass panic of work and activity and it seems to be back on track but there is still so much to do.

I keep having to do a lot of the work because the rest of the committee just want to sit back. I ask them to do something and day of their deadline they either have a sob story or ask for help as it is due(having done literally nothing). We have people who don't turn up to meetings saying give us something to do and then refuse to do it. Or one person who doesn't turn up to meetings but starts an argument over the decisions we made in her absence. It is a dysfunctional committee but when I try and escalate anything the others sit back. I feel responsible and don't want to quit so close to the end but I feel that this conference will have wasted 1-2 months of my PhD. I can't go the graduate team as they think it is my responsibility to get the committee to share the work but I can't force other committee members to do anything.

But I also sit back and think in the last 2 weeks, I have submitted my first paper (finally), got some great results (that could be the basis for another paper) and made another price of equipment finally work after 12 months. I just feel I can never stop as I have way too many commitments between the conference, my needy supervisor, my own PhD experiments and everything else. It isn't helped by my lab space issues that mean and I could potentially have at least 6 months with no lab space at all. So I have to keep grinding out data now or risk having to do experiments in the final few months of my PhD after spending several months twiddling my thumbs.

And I have kinda just cracked, for the first time in 18 months I can't motivate myself to do anything because it never ends. I still hold the slight hope of a career in academia and I have been trying hard to do everything that will maximize my chances but I clearly can't hack it. I am seeing my dreams slip away and can't help but do nothing. I hope that after this conference is over, I can sit back and relax, even for a week. Burnout is 100% real.

Take a holiday, even if it is a long weekend and go somewhere away from uni. Take it is a complete break from uni and try to stop yourself thinking about your PhD at all. When you come back you will know if you really want to quit. As a lot of PhD students (in my opinion) get too caught up in the PhD and forget that it is just a qualification. A short break may help you clear away the insecurities and burnout.

Also, you owe your supervisors nothing and should not be guilty. Put yourself first, as no-one else will.

That sounds absolutely awful. The external should not have acted like that. If he is saying you missed stuff when you have mentioned it, it clearly shows he had an agenda or didn't read it.

I would talk with the admin team or whoever is responsible for the viva and complain that there was no chair. A chair is there for a reason and it clearly has failed here.

Not an expert but as you say the result is binary (dead or alive patient) so wouldn't Bernoulli distribution work. Were you assume each disease at each week is independent and you can get a probability of the patient being dead at that week, then you can just compare probabilities. I might have oversimplified it but might help.

I have heard of people in worse positions than you still passing. You still have 18 months which is plenty of time but you will have a crazy final few months.

On a funding basis, I would say it will be hard as you will be doing a course below your current highest achievement. But I know my supervisor did a second masters after her PhD, as part of her lecturing job, to meet a university technicality.

Though what do you want to do after the Masters? What benefit will it add and in what sector?

I would ask if and after you get an offer. They will probably discriminate against you if you say before. But they can be flexible with start time depending on circumstances. From my limited experience deferments, breaks etc are case by case basis but are generally fair.

Have you clicked "keep me signed in"? I had something similar a while back and I reinstalled office, which fixed it. But then again, I have an .iso file of office on my laptop so it want that inconvenient.

Just get into the lab and use the equipment. I spent a few months trying to replicate someone else's work from about 4-5 years just so I knew what I was doing. Because it wasn't for my thesis, I could make mistakes and try different methods and learn what I needed help with. Everyone had to learn the methods at one point in their career, so don't blame yourself. Just take the time to learn it properly now as you probably have another 1-2 years left.

Just post the link and we will do it.

Generally speaking quite a few people pass through this forum over a week and people will do surveys at their own leisure (like 2am on a Thursday night).

That doesn't sound good. They should be asking questions about research in a PhD interview. It could be a massive red flag or they think you are capable enough, not to bother asking technical questions. It is hard to tell if it is good or bad but it is definitely not normal.