binftastic

Thanks again for the responses, everyone. After reading my posts and your advice, I'm starting to realize how out-of-whack my thoughts are getting. Good thing I started seeing my therapist again last week...

Sorry, there were a few things that I haven't made entirely clear: My advisor gets stressed out and angered easily, which makes me afraid to talk to him. If I reveal to him that I haven't found a qual topic after an entire month, he might become furious. He's been helpful to me in the past, but I can never tell what's going to set him off. How can I keep my cool around him when he gets angry, and is this a trick that PI's play on their students to get them motivated?

Hey everyone, Having posted on this forum before, I was very impressed with the comments and encouraging feedback that I received from everyone and now I'm returning for round 2. I'm in a PhD program in computational biology and I've been here for about two years. I ran into some serious snags during my lab rotations and as a result joined a lab somewhat late (April 2013). My PI is very supportive and I enjoy working with her so far. For our quals we are required to write a research proposal on a topic that we have never covered in any of our lab rotations, and it must be on a topic that is totally unrelated to our thesis proposal. I have been researching topics for a month and I still have no idea what I want to do, in spite of the fact that I have been reading research articles. I am a slow reader, I can't remember anything from my classes, and I still suck at reading scientific articles. Our topic submission deadline is June 15th and I don't trust myself enough to come up with a feasible/defendable research topic in a week. What's worse is that my proposal deadline is in December and at this point I have no convincing preliminary data. Ultimately, this is all because I seriously miscalculated how long it would take me to do all of these things. Because of my lack of foresight and apparent inability to plan things ahead months in advance, I'm thinking about dropping out of my program. I have no intention of being a PI, and for this reason I don't need a PhD. Nobody knows this yet and I don't feel emotionally prepared for the fight that's ahead, should I choose. Not to mention the frightful job market. I'm so paralyzed with fear that I cannot think clearly, and I predict that this will continue to be a problem. Should I just quit before I waste more of my department's time and money?

Thanks a lot for the great responses, you guys! I have a question for Tall Chai Latte: How many rotations did you have to do before you finally settled? I might do another one, because I heard that some new faculty in my field are coming in, but I feel like 5 rotations is excessive. Should I have expected this rush? The advice given to me before grad school was always "just rotate until you find what you like!" which ended up being bad advice in the end because I found a lab that I liked, but couldn't join.

Hey everyone (apologies in advance for the wall of text), I am attempting to get my PhD in a field at the intersection of computational and biological sciences. The only problem with that is that it’s been a year and I have still failed to select a thesis lab after four rotations. Here’s why: Last year, I started my rotations. The first one went well, I enjoyed the research, the PI (let’s call him Dr. X) seemed to like me and aside from him being very busy, I enjoyed working with him, and we worked well together. The two rotations after that were not so great. I returned to Dr. X, e-mailed him with a request to join his lab, and he said yes. Problem is, he was on leave when I e-mailed him and would not be able to sign all the paperwork until his return a month later. He then agrees to meet with me a week after he returns. When this happens, he tells me the department won’t let him take on any more students and that there’s going to be some kind of administrative struggle involved if I try to join the lab. Other than that, he says he wants me in the lab. However, this shouldn’t be a problem because my stipend comes from a pool of interdepartmental training grants, so I should be covered no matter what. Because of this, I feel like Dr. X is not being completely honest with me. I don’t know why he won’t just flat-out tell me that he can’t take me on or that he actually doesn’t want me there. If I can’t join Dr. X’s lab, I’m out of luck because there really isn’t another available lab at this school, which wasn’t the case when I first got here. Somehow the other labs I wanted just seemed to "fill up." All the other PIs that do what I like and have skills that I want to learn either aren’t taking students (due to similar “funding issues”) or have awful labs, according to other grad students I’ve asked. I’m now on my fourth rotation, which I’m not totally thrilled about and I’m considering leaving grad school. This is an undesirable option because A) my degree didn’t give me the background I need to get a job at a good software/web company, all the jobs I would get (ie, being a codemonkey/data entry drone) are probably being outsourced to India and C) I don’t want to quit before I’ve actually joined a lab (that's like quitting the game before you've even put your piece on the board), plus I’m told that if I ever want to get back into academia after leaving, it’s very very difficult to do so (not sure how true this really is). How does one deal with PIs like this and how can I tell if he’s being honest with me? Am I as screwed as I think I am? Am I thinking about leaving for the right reason (ie just because I haven’t found my calling after this many rotations)? I feel like I’ve wasted an astronomical amount of time.