What should someone do if they are a PhD student who believes their funded project is a waste of resources and their advisor agrees, but their advisor refuses to contact the funder about that?
Seriously, a lot more phd students just need to embrace their ADHD. Even if you are given a path, there is no path.
Fun times.
(What was the research? Basically taking Heckman's 70s-era selection correction and applying it to nonlinear models. Big fuckin' whoop. My advisor had already written multiple useless papers riffing on the idea anyway. He's probably still doing it to this day.)
On the other side I have multiple projects, the biggest one already presented in a conference. I meet multiple people my university and other big ones that are very enthusiastic about either that project or the official one (which got none in my own lab) so it's not like what I'm doing was totally dumb.
I'm not sure what to do now. I have 3 more years to write the thesis, but would need to find a job to stay in the country. Hopefully I used web technologies I can market on my CV but I'm bit sour about the whole thing (and life in general).
This hits so close to home that I think I just heard a knock on my front door.
I was diagnosed with ADHD about a month before I started a PhD (in my mid 30s). In my 3rd year, I finally took the required course on theory of computation and almost failed it because I spent all my time reading SEP entries about the foundations of mathematics and the origins of computing. I even started reading the Homotopy Type Theory book, despite a woefully inadequate formal mathematics background.
Meanwhile, I’ve got two papers in submission on a topic that I think is a dead end and a waste of time, and I’m hoping that my advisor won’t be too upset if I just refuse to work on any of the follow-up papers that he is considering. I prefer to hang out with math PhDs rather than my lab coworkers, so I can pester them with questions about category theory. And I’m supposed to scrape together a dissertation in, like, 18 months.