My PhD
Well, it's not guaranteed I won't finish yet, but since I'm somewhere around the lower echelons of people capable of doing a PhD in physics at all, and various organisations thought it was a good idea to enforce something on me that was about the worst possible PhD for me makes it look unlikely. It's actually like they worked hard to figure out what I would REALLY suck at and made me do that, banning me from anything I'm actually good at. Then shipped me off to a lab with no student support in the form of professional sympathetic people to go to with problems (one was later employed, whose basic response to anything is it'll be worth it on completion, just man up) and said my funding would be cut if I tried to leave the lab and work somewhere stupid like MY UNIVERSITY.
(GothicTechie, Sat 26 Jun 2010, 14:15, 7 replies)

You're never going to complete
if you don't believe in what you're studying.

That's what I tell my PhD students, anyway. And I give them a good long time to work out what the "thing" that inspires them is.

Although there's a new breed of PhD student emerging who lack the imagination to discover a topic for themselves and, instead, expect to be told to "study X" for the next few years. How someone can reasonably expect to become impassioned about a subject that's been handed to them on a plate is beyond me. Let alone the implications for their future career (if they choose to make it an academic one...)
(dxg, Sat 26 Jun 2010, 16:24, closed)

Which is why
I'm on my 2nd postdoc and still don't know what I want to do...
(xanthine, Sun 27 Jun 2010, 7:14, closed)

I suggest ...
... that you do another few postdocs, and then decide. :-)
(haberman is singing in the changes, Sun 27 Jun 2010, 14:24, closed)

two is fine.
Three and then WE OWN YOUR LIFE, BITCH.
( the mighty badger Aphrodite, on a bar stool, by your side, Mon 28 Jun 2010, 11:39, closed)

I sort of agree
but as I said below, being handed something on a plate is (at least in some areas) enforced from above rather than at the request of the student. I wish I had the freedom to actually go in directions I found interesting as I have found a few and been strictly banned from following them.

However, the resulting generation of PhD students who don't give a shit about their subject is sad. I went into academia believing it to be something I'd enjoy, most people didn't even start with good expectations.
(GothicTechie, Mon 28 Jun 2010, 16:54, closed)

Sounds like you do need a good strong cup of man the fuck up and stop blaming others.
Why on earth are you doing a PhD that someone else chose for you? What made you get into academic research without an idea of what you wanted to do?

Very occasionally I'll take on a PhD student and suggest a topic to them rather than vice versa, but that's not very common. And only if they are quite clearly motivated by the field in general.
( the mighty badger Aphrodite, on a bar stool, by your side, Mon 28 Jun 2010, 11:39, closed)

I think you must be in a very different field
I got no say in what I was studying and have never met a physics student who did.

I knew what I wanted to do, I just got something else enforced on me. Sadly it's very common to lure students in with the promise of something they enjoy and then force them to do something shit instead.

Seriously, if I devaite from the exact word of what my supervisor says, bye bye funding.
(GothicTechie, Mon 28 Jun 2010, 16:52, closed)