Post-candidacy & pre-thesis blues

[mestielest]

Dear everyone. I'm an attending urologist in the assistant professor position and in the physiology Ph.D. program at a Turkish university since 2016. I have passed the candidacy exam, suggested my thesis and obtained approval from the thesis committee. Now I need to obtain ethical board approval for the animal experiments, find funding and carry out the experiments. Then write a thesis paper and make it published. I also need one more paper with my advisor to graduate.

These all seem regular, I know. However, my greatest obstacle has been my advisor in the thesis period. She is always making things slower and harder. For instance, we planned to evaluate apoptosis in a part of my thesis and concluded to obtain TUNEL staining. First I organized a pathologist colleague for both H&E and TUNEL but the colleague did not want to make manual staining and I could not find a suitable TUNEL kit for his automatic system. Then one of my histologist colleagues offered me to help and said that she already carried out TUNEL in several projects. I offered my advisor to include her in our project. My advisor's response was: "bring her papers to me and let's gonna look together!". This has been her regular behavior to me during the whole project. "Let's look", "Tomorrow let's look again.", "I'm going to think", "Again we have to take a look"... Never-ending uncertainty and ineffective attitude of her are driving me insane. I'm working in a private hospital affiliated with a private university. I can barely leave my practice and I hate when I spend all my day to hear "let's look again when you come". Even for the most basic projects, we are in need of some weeks to conclude.

All my eagerness has perished. I'm in the cross-road of drop-out. I might have considered leaving private practice for one-year if believed that a year would be enough. But I'm pretty sure that the advisor elongates that one year. And in that year I'm sure she will just want to re-check, re-hear, re-think about the planning.

What's your advice? Drop-out?

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[ValentinNarcisse]

You are an attending, you don't need a PhD. Just do some high power research on your proposed project independently with your proposed collaborators. Do you need any of the infrastructure of the advisors lab? Just collaborate with a colleague who has the same resources. However, if you leave for private practice, the research career will be over.

 

[mestielest]

You are an attending, you don't need a PhD. Just do some high power research on your proposed project independently with your proposed collaborators. Do you need any of the infrastructure of the advisors lab? Just collaborate with a colleague who has the same resources. However, if you leave for private practice, the research career will be over.

Thanks very much. I don't need it, however, it can be a secondary career choice to me as well as some kind of prestige. At least I would be happy to hold a Ph.D.

In reality, my advisor has no currently working own lab. She is in the administrator position and her last SCI publication was in 2007. I can probably produce more effectively if I drop out and collaborate with my own colleagues.