zhoutong

Thanks for your reply. I have already earned my MS, but my department's policies do not permit me to obtain my MPhil until I complete my thesis proposal even though I have completed my coursework requirements. A major factor that makes me (reluctantly) hesitate to remain with my advisor is his funding situation. Apart from being unsuccessful at obtaining new funding, he often seems to regard student financial concerns as a matter of low importance; after tersely indicating that he could no longer fund me without more external support, he blithely proceeded to launch into a discussion about a research topic I am working on without any further advice as to how I am to continue doing research and survive without any funding. Even his top student (who graduated a year ago and is now a postdoc) confided that my advisor never talked to him about the particulars of obtaining funding or writing grants. Given that my productivity apparently is insufficient in my advisor's eyes at this point, I feel that spending more time involved with part-time jobs will continue to put me at a disadvantage in comparison to the other students in his lab who are already more productive. The experience of that other student I mentioned in my first post also gives me cause to worry.

Does anyone happen to know whether it is possible to look up the status of existing/past grants from the AFOSR?

I'm a PhD student (with American citizenship) at a prestigious American engineering program that will remain unnamed. My doctoral research got off to a late start because I was working full-time while doing my MS/PhD coursework (my program doesn't guarantee funding); my advisor did not offer me any financial support until after I had completed my coursework. Although he did provide me with about 1.5 years of full support, I had to spend part of that time setting up computational infrastructure for our group and dealing with some family and health issues that I didn't want to discuss with my advisor because I felt he would be less than sympathetic. I subsequently served 4 semesters serving as a teaching assistant for various graduate courses. My adviser's continuous reticence about finances also compelled me to find some part-time work elsewhere at my university. After TAing my advisor's own course this past autumn (which took up most of my time), in December my advisor told me that he was putting me on "probation" because of my lack of research publications. Although I extended my work day to between 11-12 hours, set up a powerful new computational platform needed for our research, put in a considerable amount of work into a research project that I am still working on, and managed to submit a fellowship application (with my advisor's blessings) two months ago (which unfortunately wasn't accepted), my advisor recently told me that he can "no longer support me directly." Although he continues to seem superficially supportive because he still talks to me about my research plans and work, recently told me about another grant possibility to which we might be able to apply this summer, and has never said anything to me about leaving his group (which I initially suspected would happen when he raised the specter of probation), I strongly suspect that he has chosen to not financially support me until he deems me sufficiently productive but chooses not to explicitly eject me from the program so as to not endanger his own grant applications; in retrospect, his silence about funding in the past seems to have been a function of his financial situation (he has only obtained a few grants over the past several years). Given that I feel that I have been making some research progress these past few months and am not currently in financial straits (I still am doing some part-time work), I'm extremely loath to consider leaving my program. That said, my experiences are making me seriously consider whether I should cut my losses and move on after finishing up the project I am involved with at present. What particularly worries me is that I know a student who recently quit my advisor's group without completing his degree whose occasional remarks suggested that had not been funded for a significant portion of his stay because of insufficient research output. Although my chair and a dean in my school said that switching advisors is a theoretical possibility (assuming that someone would be willing to take me on), I'm not sure how advisable (let alone feasible) that is given that the two other faculty in my department who are doing work that I am interested in don't seem especially well-funded either. Does anyone have any wisdom to impart regarding my situation? At the present time, I am in the middle of the 4th full-time year of my program.