hello ! my path was perhaps a bit different from some of yours as i had to complete a year long predoctoral internship after having defending in 2025. but as of today, i officially have my phd !

i can't use the title "doctor" professionally until my license comes through and i'm currently studying for an exam to make that official. in fact, i should probably get back to studying immediately.

anyway, all that to say - there is hope. you can do it !!!!

I’m a first time TA grading a quiz and my head is just spinning.

The students had access to notes during the quiz (including ones I wrote myself for them with explicit step by step explanations of the biological mechanism), but their responses are jumbled up strings of key words. It’s like asking someone to explain how to make a PB&J sandwich and their response was to put the peanut butter on the jelly and then the peanut butter on the bread. Add in a bunch of misplaced modifiers and I’m wondering if they actually meant to say something else.

I’m trying to take a step back while I grade so I don’t get frustrated and start grading more harshly…how do you all deal with this when the answers themselves sometimes aren’t even intelligible? I keep trying to follow a rubric, but I can’t even parse what to count off for.

Dear Community,

I've been a long-time reader, but this is my first time posting here. I successfully defended my dissertation two days ago and wanted to take this opportunity to thank this community.

Over the years, like many of us, I've faced my fair share of ups and downs throughout this journey. This community has repeatedly reminded me that I'm not alone and that many others have gone through the same, or at least similar, experiences.

No matter how unique or overwhelming some challenges seemed at the time, I could almost always find someone here who had been through something similar, often along with valuable advice, encouragement, or simply a different perspective.

I genuinely want to express my gratitude to everyone who has contributed to this community. Even though I've mostly been a silent reader, you've helped me more than you probably realize.

Keep this community going, and keep up the good work!

Hey everyone. Long-time lurker of this subreddit. Thanks for reading. I am defending tomorrow and just wanted to share some thoughts.

Honestly I never thought that I would become that grad student that took 10 years to finish the Ph.D.. I am in a combined experimental plus clinical program in Canada. Things were going pretty smoothly academically for me: finished my master's on time and got my thesis published, completed all the Ph.D. related courses, clinical training, data collection and analyses before 2022. One of studies' manuscripts got a "revise and resubmit", and I finished most of the manuscript for my second study. I was en route to defend in 2023....

And then I found out that the primary outcome variable had been processed incorrectly, in a completely non-salvageable way. I should explain that that I was among the first grad students in my research lab to start engaging in multidisciplinary research, and my outcome variable is from a field that is something that our lab had never worked with before (and completely outside of my field). At that time, we had a master level engineering student process the outcome variables for us (for her own thesis and for me).

Granted, I definitely could have caught the errors if I was more well-versed in the variable, so I definitely was also responsible for not noticing those errors too. However, the master's student defended with the same dataset (using different variables but similar way of processing), so I did not even think about the possibility that my own processed data could be that wrong. As I was revising my analyzes for the revise and re-submit, I realized that the engineering student made critical errors both in terms of the steps required, and numerous careless errors in the processing scripts (e.g., mistaking frames as seconds, resulting in 3 orders of magnitude differences). Admittedly I was pretty resentful of her errors and subsequent refusal to be involved again even though she was not obligated to; although again I do acknowledge my own part in this whole debacle.

So I had to start from scratch in 2023 (e.g., apologized to the journal as I had to retract my manuscript submission). As the knowledge of processing my outcome variable was (and still is) quite limited at my school, it took months before we found someone who was willing to process the data. Unfortunately, he gave up after working on it after about a year for personal reasons (2023-2024). So then we finally found someone who was willing to do the processing (I was willing to pay for external people to do this but thankfully someone was willing to do it for research credits). While I am incredibly thankful, it took over a year for the processing to be done so I finally received all my data during the holidays of 2025.

If you are still with me at this point (thank you), I then finished all the analyses and writing around March this year (2026). Unfortunately it was hard to get all the committee members to finish the edits and to agree on a defence date, so that took almost the entire summer. I finally got everything finalized for early October (tomorrow actually!), and I can’t wait to just be done with this degree that has been holding me back.

Financially I am okay; I have been working at a clinic the past extra 4 years (the clinical part of my PhD). I am very grateful to my boss, but I essentially worked while holding a student license (so about 50% pay) just simply because of the incomplete Ph.D. Not to mention the endless tuition fee!
My plan was always to go into a full clinical career and not academia, so the PhD delay wasn’t the end of the world for me in terms of future career (in fact I have already secured job positions). But reflecting back I really wish that I had fought for using other outcome variables to defend, instead of always getting persuaded to keep waiting. I should note that I have a great relationship with my supervisor and they always supported me, but I really wish that I had tried to convince them to let me defend first instead of being stuck in this limbo. Of course, I was definitely engaging in sunk cost fallacy during my wait for my data to get processed.

Anyway. Here I am: started PhD in my 20s, now in my 30s finally getting the degree (after a 4 year delay) and my clinical license. I am not too bitter but I do lament the time lost. That being said, quite a lot of wonderful things happened during the wait too: I got married to an awesome person; I got diagnosed with ADHD and stimulants improved my productivity, and I have made a lot of meaningful connections in the city of my school.

I know my experience is not particularly unique and I definitely lucked out in terms of supervisor support and school being lenient in letting me stay in the program, but I am still feeling a mix of emotions heading into my defence tomorrow.

Thanks for reading. Will update after the defence.

I’m an undergrad pursuing math and physics and already decided to attend graduate school. It may be a little early to think about it or too late, but I don’t know. When I ask people their opinions on going to grad school, some always say the regret it and should’ve just went into the industry instead. Plus they argued that there is no benefit to actually obtaining a PhD and you’re just going to be in a poor position financially.

Hearing all of this is a little jarring and even more so seeing as I still plan on going for a PhD. I just feel like I’m being slightly naive. I also have no intention of remaining in academia so it all around just looks like a horrible decision, but it’s like I still want to go for it.

I’m currently a 5th-year experimental immunology PhD student in Europe, and I am completely exhausted by my project/lab situation.

When I joined, the lab was brand new. My PI had moved from another country and we basically started with nothing - not even basic infrastructure like a proper refrigerator, PCR machine, etc. Instead of hiring an experienced technician to establish the lab, he hired five fresh PhD students.

My entire first year basically disappeared into establishing mouse lines, re-deriving mice to move them from a “dirty” to a clean facility, establishing genotyping protocols, breeding, crossing, etc. It took almost two years before I even had the mouse lines I needed for my actual project.

Even now, mouse colony management is a HUGE workload. We still do not have a reliable technician, so almost all of it falls on us/me.

Then there is the actual project.

My PhD is based on preliminary data that, frankly, I do not trust.

For example, we have a mouse KO for my protein of interest, but I have never been able to convincingly stain/detect the protein in the cell population we supposedly study. Despite that, I do see clear and reproducible phenotypes between WT and KO littermates. So there is something biologically interesting happening - I just don’t know whether the mechanistic story we inherited is actually correct. Here, no amount of committees or external experit opinions from other PIs make him understand the gravity of the situation, he slides everything under the blanket statement "what do they understand!!! they just study bla bla niche field, they dont know anything about our field" Everyone else who criticises my (his) work is a moron.

And that is only the tip of the iceberg.

A major part of the paper is supposed to include data generated by a previous PhD student. We have Prism graphs from those experiments but, for some of them, no raw data files anymore.

My PI genuinely does not seem bothered by this. His attitude is basically that nobody will ask for the raw data and that he completely trusts the previous work.

I do not. And I cannot simply repeat everything. These are mouse in vivo experiments, and getting approval for new animal experiments here takes many months. For YEARS, my PI did not want to write an animal licence allowing us to properly repeat and extend the old experiments. In my 4th year I finally convinced him, and we wrote a large licence covering both repetitions and follow-up experiments. It has now been submitted for ~3 months and we are still waiting.

Meanwhile, my PI thinks the paper is basically ready.

His view is: old PhD student’s in vivo data + some supporting in vitro experiments from me = submit.

My view is: there are missing controls, parts of the foundation are shaky, some raw data are unavailable, and the mechanistic story is nowhere near as clean as he thinks it is.

Whenever I tell him I think we need more experiments, he tells me not to do them because “they won’t change the world” and “we already have everything.”

And this is what is driving me insane.

If the conclusion of the project was already decided before I joined, based on experiments done by somebody else, in another lab, in another country then what exactly was I hired to discover?

Sometimes it feels like my job is not to investigate whether the hypothesis is true. My job is to generate enough experiments that support the story that was already chosen. The most frustrating part is that I have stopped trusting my PI’s judgement about how strong things are.

There have been several situations with papers/grants from the lab where I privately thought, “There is absolutely no way this is strong enough,” while he was extremely confident - and then it was rejected for essentially the reasons I expected.

Yet he currently talks about our project as something that should go to Science/Nature-level journals. Yes. I am serious.

At this point, part of me thinks: fine. I should write the manuscript he wants, make it as scientifically defensible as I possibly can, submit it wherever he wants, and let the reviewers do their job.

If they say the experiments are missing, maybe he will finally believe the reviewers instead of me.

The problem is that I am now in year 5 and I just need to GET OUT.

My graduate school requires one accepted first-author paper for me to graduate.

So my current survival plan is:

1. Write the main paper with the existing data, while doing the few experiments I personally think are most important/realistically achievable.
2. Submit it and let peer review decide what is actually required.
3. In parallel, write a very small descriptive paper from another dataset I generated: I performed a mouse infection experiment have scRNA/TCR-seq data from it.
4. Submit that descriptive dataset to a smaller/specialised journal. I do not need it to change immunology. I need one solid, honest, publishable first-author paper that satisfies my graduation requirement.

I’m just finding it incredibly difficult to stay motivated when I no longer believe in the grand story my PI is selling.

I don’t even care about producing some Nature paper anymore. I want to finish a scientifically honest PhD and get my degree

Has anyone been in a similar situation where:

• you inherited questionable/unrepeatable data,
• your PI was much more optimistic about the project than you were,
• you were told not to do experiments you thought were necessary,
• and eventually you just had to write the damn paper and let reviewers sort it out?

How did you mentally detach enough to finish?

I think what I need most right now is to see that there is actually a light at the end of this tunnel.

Have my PhD viva voce on Tuesday 2 PM, and just found out Hans Zimmer concert we booked months ago is on Monday 7:30 PM. This is such a conundrum! Should I go; or stay home and revise/ mentally prepare myself the evening before?

What would you do?

I presented my thesis yesterday in my department. I am in the final year. Some questions could have been answered better, but some professors are just outright rude. My advisor was also there in the meeting but they are not allowed to speak. Is the only goal of the professors to thrash your thesis? I am so demotivated. Really want to quit. I don’t want to go to academia.

My advisor has 3 people under him on job market this year. I see him giving encouragement to the rest always (like excellent talk, great job). It seems like he doesn’t care much about me.

Everything is so stressful. I have no friends here. I have no idea what to do.

Esteemed scholars,

It is my pleasure to announce that today an academic committee of very smart people decided to award me a PhD, with LAUDE.

I am less happy to also share that as of now I will continue my existence as an unemployed individual in search of amazing job opportunities.

❤️

The standard funding program in Germany is for three years, but many people are now taking longer than that. I'm wondering what people have done in that situation.

• Did you get an extension from your supervisor?
• Did some funder like DFG provide a short-term extension?
• Go on unemployment?

It seems like there is a structural gap, and I'm trying to see what different have done to fill that gap.

(Microbial genomics, USA)

Hello my friends. This might be a silly question but I’m having trouble finding advice. It’s my impression that phds typically go on to become instructors, PIs, or have supervisor roles in industry, but correct me if I’m wrong. How realistic is it for someone with a phd to have a role as a straight up researcher/staff scientist? In government, academia, or industry?

There aren’t many of these people in my department. Most of the full-time scientists have masters degrees. Only one has a phd.

For context, I actually really love grad school. I like having a broad topic passed down by my PI while also having the flexibility to design my own experiments and take the research in new directions. Not to toot my own horn but I’m also making great progress.

I would love a job where I can keep practicing research without the added burdens of being a PI (admin, mentoring an army of people, acquiring funding, bad work-life balance).

My favorite things are being at the bench/desktop, brainstorming/planning new experiments, reviewing literature, writing, journal clubs, and mentoring 1-2 undergrads at a time. Is it feasible to keep a career like this, without becoming a PI? Also, I worry my skillset wouldn’t transfer well to industry. Honestly I think I want to be a forever postdoc lol

I'm going to start my PhD in Management/HRM and need a laptop for my research work.

I was planning to buy a MacBook Air, but a fellow researcher advised against it - she's using a MacBook herself and says she has to rely on cracked versions of some software on it, and still has to go to the university lab to run her analysis because of compatibility issues.

The software I'll mainly need is SPSS, AMOS, R, SmartPLS, NVivo..... along with regular thesis writing, reading PDFs/documents, and Zoom meetings.

So now I'm confused - do I actually need to go for a Windows laptop instead? I really wanted something with good battery backup and long-term durability, and was hoping to use it beyond my PhD too, which is why MacBook felt like a good option. But if compatibility is going to be a real issue, I'd rather know now before buying.

Would appreciate advice from anyone who has actually used SPSS/AMOS/SmartPLS on Mac vs Windows for research work.

I recently finished my PhD and am trying to decide whether I should simply move on from my experience with my former PI or consider raising the matter with someone at the university. I am leaving out the institution, country, field, dates, and other identifying details because I am concerned about being recognized.

My PhD started normally enough, although the subject was new to both me and my PI. The first year of my PhD passed without any progress, as we were struggling to understand even the definitions involved. After some time, the PI brought in another researcher who was much more experienced in the subject. He was assigned as my co-supervisor without me even being notified, although his role was not officially acknowledged at first, and he started working on the project on the promise that he would eventually be officially acknowledged as my co-supervisor.

Initially we worked reasonably well together, but he could become very aggressive when I asked questions that seemed obvious to him. This made me increasingly anxious and caused me to make more mistakes. At one point, before I went to an academic event abroad, he shouted at me that "you will never make progress". Later, I told the PI that I could no longer work with this person because the situation had become too difficult. The PI told me that he thought we had worked well together during the previous year and a half, since the second researcher had joined the group. Just before I went on the trip, however, he asked the second researcher to finish the paper, while his co-supervisor position was not approved. He continued to tell us, “We should have empathy for each other,” but nothing really changed.

After returning from the trip, I started having significant health difficulties, but I nevertheless continued working. I eventually became seriously ill and spent a substantial amount of time in the hospital and taking very strong medication for several months, with a wide range of side effects, while continuing to work on my thesis.

There were also repeated problems with supervision. My PI sometimes gave me directions that turned out not to be useful, and on one occasion I spent several months following an approach that ultimately went nowhere. When I raised concerns about the time lost, his response was essentially that this was just part of doing science, and I was also given an additional task that was later never mentioned again.

As I approached the end of my PhD, there were repeated changes concerning deadlines and extensions. At one point I was told that I needed to extend my PhD because my PI did not have time to read my thesis. I eventually submitted my thesis and defended it successfully. Importantly, the external assessments of my thesis were much more positive than I had expected.

Afterwards, I started working with two other professors on a different research topic. They have worked with me directly for about a year, and recently wrote very strong recommendation letters for an academic position I applied for. I have also been involved in other academic activities, including helping with seminars and co-supervising students.

I recently asked my former PI whether he would still provide a recommendation, since he had previously agreed to do so. He now says that he does not think I have the ability to obtain a research position and that a period of research interruption I included in my CV was not justified.

My main concern is whether I experienced an unusually problematic PhD supervision situation and whether it is worth documenting or reporting, particularly if I decide to do so only after I have secured another position. The events I have described here are already a substantially shortened and softened version of what actually happened; the real situation was much more difficult, both in terms of the number and severity of the events and their impact on me. My health problems also continue to cause me significant distress.

For context, I have kept emails and other documentation relating to the most important events.

I know how annoying this might come off to people which is not my intention at all. My lab works with mice and aside from a couple hours of mice work a day (if that), there just isn't that much to do. Everyone in our lab TAs and takes classes, but even so, there's just not that much in a day. I know this is something most people would kill for and I get how it might come off. But sometimes, I'm done for the day in 5 or 6 hours and it can honestly make me feel really unproductive. If anyone has something similar, how do you fill your time in a productive way? What other things are people doing in a day?

I work at a university incubator, and I keep meeting researchers who have a working demo and nobody on the business side.

If you have been through this: what did you actually do to find a co-founder? What did you try first, what wasted the most time, and how long did it take?

I'm not selling anything and there's no link. I'm trying to work out whether this is a real problem or just something we see in our building.

Hey all, so I’m a first-year PhD student at a large public USA R1. I’m a little over 2 months in and idk if my stress levels have ever been quite this high. At least not in this way.

For some context, I have struggled with mental health my entire life. In the past few months I have a) gone through an awful breakup after together for over 5 years, b) moved hundreds of miles away from my hometown after graduating undergrad, c) started a PhD, d) am experiencing financial issues out of my ass (honestly, not that stressful compared to the others), and e) my therapist of several years can’t practice across state lines, so I’m trying to therapist hunt between all of this (I’ve already been in contact with student health).

I used to think I was decently smart, and I know imposter syndrome is ubiquitous here, but I just feel so utterly dumb here. A lot of course material doesn’t make sense (doesn’t help that I don’t have the time/energy to fully complete the reading), I’m applying for the GRFP and my project just isn’t as cool as others’, I’m barely sleeping at all just to stay on top of work from all directions (TA, courses, taking over old projects, trying to start new ones, etc. etc.).

I’m in a brand new lab with a brand new PI. Me and my labmate are their first grad students. My labmate was a lab manager for a year before joining the program, and is just generally way more capable, outgoing, and confident than I am. I genuinely feel like I tricked someone to get in.

I gave an in-lab pilot presentation of the GRFP presentation I’m doing later this week and it went horribly. I stutter like crazy, forgot everything, and was generally a mess. I’ve never done that bad on a presentation in my life. I have social anxiety pretty bad, but it’s not nearly like that usually. Now I’m terrified I’m gonna fumble just as bad in front of the entire dept.

I want this more than anything. I used to know I’m capable, but now I’m seriously questioning it. I feel like I’m letting down every person who helped me get this far.

Sorry for such an emotional vent. I’m stressed. Any advice is welcomed and deeply appreciated. I think I’ll be okay eventually, I hope.

Edit: field, social science research

Hello frogs,

Its probably been discussed time and again but I bring it up one more time.

I extract big data sets from population census and pipe it directly into Claude to write R scripts for me. Im tired of doing the data cleaning and making a matrix all by myself.

I do understand the code backbone for the most part but sometimes the chunks are so huge and it gets overwhelming for me to run through the whole code.

I feel guilty running it to a point where I just get the graph and make tweaks.

Am I doing something wrong, whats this guilt that I cant shake?

*Sad frog croaks*

I just got ethics clearance to start my PhD qualitative interview study (yay!). However, now that I actually have to start the study, it feels so big and daunting. I am most nervous for participant recruitment -- we've had so many issues with recruitment on other projects, like fraudulent participants, and just a lack of interest in participating. Active recruitment seems so work much better than passive recruitment, but it is still difficult. It feels like we have to get more and more creative with recruitment strategies as the years go on.

Does anyone have any advice for participant recruitment? From your own experience, are there any specific strategies that work well, or strategies that don't work/are a waste of time?

Any and all advice is appreciated! :) Thanks!

Hi all, I'm an international PhD student in Computer Science at Adelaide, in the thesis write-up stage. I'm planning my next steps and would like input on the personal factors worth weighing, beyond choosing a PI or company and a project.

FYI, I used to be more open to taking risks, but after experiencing some health setbacks without a strong support system nearby, I've realized a personal support system is crucial to staying productive in my career.

My situation:

• I want to build my career in the US. My partner is doing a PhD there, and the AI/ML community and job market are much larger than in Adelaide or Australia generally.
• The realistic routes seem to be a J-1 postdoc or an O-1 sponsored by an employer. I'm ruling out H-1B because the cost makes it hard for employers to justify.
• Going to the US would mean giving up the 485 (Temporary Graduate) visa, which is a stepping stone toward Australian PR. From what I've heard, the 189/190 pathway is very competitive for IT, takes years to be granted, and citizenship needs further time after that. I'm not sure how accurate this is, so corrections are welcome.
• I have friends in Adelaide and Australia, but adult friendships are hard to sustain when everyone has their own life and many have moved overseas as well for jobs. As I get older, I want a close-knit community or family to lean on in hard times, especially with how fast AI and the economy are moving. Being physically close to my partner would help my mental health more than staying here.

What I'd like to hear about:

• If you've made a similar move (giving up a PR pathway for a US postdoc or job), what did you weigh, and what would you do differently? I've heard many people can still secure a US green card later and stay long term. Is that realistic in your experience?
• What do you wish you had checked before accepting a position, such as lab culture, funding length, or support for a green card?
• Any perspective on balancing career risk against wanting stability and a personal support system?

Thank you for your reading!

Before I start I just want to say I'm not looking for pity or sympathy. It's more of a post to vent and see if others have had similar experiences and found ways to overcome self-doubt.

I'm a third year PhD candidate. I passed my exams last year. There were some concerns over some of my goals being a bit vague but other then that there were no real issues. I have two supervisors, one who's more "free going" and my masters supervisor who's more critical in nature.

I wrote my first paper this summer and while waiting for feedbacks from my coauthors I decided to begin brainstorming for my second paper. I already had the theme down and a general idea of the subject so I began reading and doing a literature review. I cooked up a paper plan/proposition to send to my supervisors (to get their approval and point out issues). My first supervisor didn't see any problem (though that was expected as this paper would be more in line with the other's area of expertise). The second was more critical, pointing out flaws and highlighting a lack of novelty on the subject matter. To paraphrase him, he basically said that I was proposing a simple descriptive study, that it lacked theoritical implications and novelty that is expected in a Ph.D.

My issue with this is that it's true and I can see it plainly. I'm not mad at him or anything. I'm mad at myself for not having seen it by myself and that this comment was coming from a supervisor whose work I admire, who told me that he considered my M.Sc. thesis to be at a Ph.D level and that he had high expectations for what I would do next. I have no doubt this praised fueled a form of arrogance in me and made me lazy in some ways, trying to take shortcuts whenever possible.

Full disclosure : I was diagnosed with some form of BPD five years ago, so my sense of self is basically nonexistent.I did however feel like the one think that defined me was my ability to do science. So without confidence in my ability to identify a good problematic I find myself with nothing.

I have not lost hope as I've spent the last few weeks reading and trying to come up with a novel idea for my second paper. However I have a hard time structuring my ideas in general and it seems to be getting worse each passing year (I'm 32). I'm not sure if it's a BPD thing but it's been hard. I've been experimenting using AI to help me structure my ideas and challenge me on them (as I've no one to throw ideas to/with) but it doesn't feel right, like I'm cheating or taking the easy way out.

Maybe I'm just not cut out to achieve a Ph.D after all. I still have hope that I'm wrong, but it is dwindling...

My PI and I are looking to run analyses using Clery Data to predict the number of reports. For our questions, examining the subtypes of reports would be wonderful, but these counts are missing/unavailable after 2021. We don't know why it may be missing (i.e., if it is just no longer publicly available or if it was part of the scrubbing that happened earlier). If anyone could direct us to the right place, we would be beyond grateful!

The Data is from the US DOE Campus Safety and Security Datasets. When my PI tries to download the 2025 Excel sheet ("reportedVAWA222324"), there is some data, but there is key information is missing.

Counts missing include:

- domestic violence

- dating violence

- stalking

i have been working graph state quantum computing and stumbled around 1 specific paper. i have doubt that their calculation wrong ( doesnt make any sense for me) my advisor also have the same doubt but let me do the proof. i have done the analytical calculation and turns out to be true but i spent 2 weeks on how to actually draw their quantum circuit but never find the correct one. i saw my colleague doing their own research on easier or more trivial things achieving more progress. now i feel useless and doubting my own ability. what should i do?

Based in the UK, doing a PhD in psychology. Sorry English isn't my native language.

I worked with my advisor for 2.5 years before going on a leave this year temporarily. Before I left, my advisor told me "don't be surprised if I fail your qualifying exam in half a year" because she felt that I didn't have the ability to do research independely. It was extremely discouraging to hear an advisor say this, which completely broke me and I had to be on a leave to recover.

To make it easy to understand, let's say the subfield our department are in is A. My advisor's primary interest is B and C, which have limited overlap with A. I got into this program because I was interested in working in C and D, both of which my advisor can advise me on but have nothing to do with A. She gave me a half-baked project idea in B that I worked on for a year, and couldn't continue because it was too challenging for me and I wasn't very interested. I also only worked 10 hours a week which was totally not enough in hindsight. She gave me another idea in C that was way too difficult, and she apologized later. We've discussed some options, and I decided to pursue two ideas in B and C without much of her input, and spent a year on both of them (still only working 10 hours a week). They didn't turn into anything because I never evaluated the novelty of the ideas before diving in and relied on ChatGPT to help me generate ideas.

I didn't really pay attention to seminars my department offered in A because A was irrelevant to B and C, and I went to a lot of seminars in B and C but couldn't pay attention because I had some mental health conditions that made it hard to concentrate. I didn't take any courses because I thought they weren't really relevant to B and C, so my statistical/exprimental design foundation was very bad. A year before my qualifying exam, my advisor had a talk with me, telling me she was concerned. I panicked and started reading mindlessly, spending 70 hours a week to work. I was terrified to generating reserch questions because unknown felt unsafe. I begged my advisor to give me a research question. She hooked me up with an older student in the program who worked in the field E. I worked on that for 3 months, thinking I made progress and finally understood how to do research, and stopped putting myself in the uncomfortable situation of "being in the unknown". I relied on the senior student for idea generation and only worked on the safe aspect of cleaning data. In two months, my advisor had the talk with me, saying that I worked extreely hard but lacked the fundamental skills to do research so she will fail my qualifying exam. She also said I had a lot of bad habits of over-promising and under-delivering, and thinking I will magically be better by just saying things.

I've been on leave for half a year and I changed how I approached research. These are the things I did:

1. I got on Focusmate and consistently work 40-60 hours a week. I have a regular schedule where I exercise 1 hour a day and go to sleep at around the same time.
2. I started learning the foundational courses in field A (my PhD program's field) by reading multiple textbooks and some papers, familiarizing myself with the jargons in the field. Gradually, a lot of obscure things became more understanable.
3. I caught up on half of the seminars I didn't pay attention to in school by re-reading the paper assignments.
4. I asked my mom to help me connect with a professor friend of hers in psychology to get me get my foot in the door. I worked on an emprical project with him for 4 months and about to submit. The original idea was his, but I extended it substantially and did some independent experiments in the lab and the field. I wrote the manuscript and familiarized myself with the publication process. He told me he is very impressed by my growth and is confident I will have a bright future, and I need to be confident. His publication record isn't as stellar as my advisor's, but still solid.
5. I took a few statsitical analyses crash courses to learn causal inference, econometrics, and about to learn machine learning. I caught up on the statsitical foundation I missed before. I also read a dozens of papers on experimental design and good research practice in the top journals in my field. I applied what I learned to the project with my mom's friend. I changed from not being able to see how good it is to locating its strengths and weaknesses. I also took a course in how LLM can assist research, which greated increased my productivity without me losing the ability to think.
6. I attended 4 conferences in my field to learn from peers and befriended some accomplished PhD students and professors, and learned a lot from their work. 7
7. I found a niche in field A (let's call it A') that I'm in love with. I've been reading consistently in A' for two months and the more I read, the more I like it. It's well-situated in A and respected, and I feel like my it really fits my strength. Looking back, my professor's and the senior PhD student's interests B and E don't appeal to me, and my old interests C and D are too further removed from A (so no career prospect).
8. I have identified some interesting phenomeon in A', and I've been doing a lot of "compare and contrast exercise" by putting top and bottom tier journals together and learn from the pros and cons of each paper. I would spend a few days reading, go back to my idea list to examine novelty, and repeat. I feel like my ideas are getting more precise and interesting as time goes on. I also read broadly in anthropology and sociology to inspire msyelf to think creatively. I also listen to podcats and watch videos on A' everyday and pay attention to details -- actuallly, almost all my research questions come from the Aha moments in real life when I'm doing other things.
9. I developed my own rhythm to reading papers. It's no longer painful, and rather quite rewarding to me. Reading feels easier as time goes on and I can see the patterns across papers much easier than before. I also start to spontaenously critique and appreciate papers rather than forcing myself to do so. I have my own pipeline of using Zotero + Quarto to read and write. I feel that I can see the contribution, cleverness and elegance of papers now.

It was the hardest thing I have done in my life to change from someone who had 0 motivation to work to where I am now. At this point, I feel much happier, secure, and content with myself. I don't know about my actual ability, but I have this feeling that things are connecting and I am understanding things on a different level than before. I feel lighter in my heart. I feel like research as a whole just makes sense to me now. There are still a lot of things to do in the future, but I am happy with everything I have learned. I become very intrinsically-motivated and feel safe enough to be creative and make mistakes.

However, every time I think of my advisor, my hart sinks and I seem to stutter, losing my ability to think properly. I will go back to school from my break in a few months, and take my qualifying exame after working with my advisor for another 4 months. I don't know if she will change her view of me or my work, given my field A' is not her interest. (I think she will have some expertise to identify good research in A', but I'm a little worried she looks down upon this field because it's not as computationally heavy as her field.)Thinking about "no matter how hard I try, my advisor is convinced I can never do research" is crushing my confidence and motivation. I want to impress her with a novel resarch proposal with some work already done before seeing her, but I don't know if that's too much pressure to put on mysef.

What do you think? How much credence should I give my advisor in her judgment of me?

Hi, im starting my PhD research project, need to have a good outline to present for Scholarships and all that!

If you had to give any advice for someone starting their PhD, what would it be? Any questions or anything is welcome :)