- #1
gonadas91
- 80
- 5
Hi all, it is me again and I am sorry for what I am going to tell, but I am just a bit discouraged and lost and felt the urge to look for support somewhere in the community, so I do accept any kind of criticism that might help me to get out from this situation.I submitted my PhD thesis in December, had my PhD viva in April-May, and received very good feedback from my examiners. They both said my results should be published in high impact factor journals, yet I am awaiting for me and my supervisor to publish our first paper, which always seems to get delayed more and more... I was so discouraged to be without publications after having my viva, and to feel that our work would never get published on time, that I started looking for industry positions in very different fields like finance... There is where I crashed against the hard reality, getting interviews for a good number of well known prestigious companies, getting even to the last stages but being always rejected due to my lack of finance knowledge along with many other variables. The bad thing is that I was so discouraged with not publishing my results that I felt like a total time loss to apply for potential Post-Doc positions, therefore I focused to apply only for industry positions from May till early September. During this time, communication with my advisor was broken.. I love Physics, I have always loved it and I've been told that I am good at it... but somehow I cannot find my place anywhere. After 4 months of failure trying to get jobs in industry, it also served me to realize how much I care about physics and how much I value a potential future in the field rather than working on something I am not interested at all...Then I decided to come back to my supervisor (we didn't communicate after my viva at all), and he received me like nothing had happened, saying we will get our paper published soon and, to my surprise, he introduced corrections in the draft for the first time in a year time.My situation is that I am jobless for almost a year now, and I have found myself very confused towards my future career aspirations and which path should I take, and I have decided not to give up on the academic path yet... I have been working on some parts of my thesis that are still open to answers, but when I have applied for Post-Docs, I have received no reply, as expected, not even rejection letters. I totally think my lack of publications is the problem, and when I always told my advisor about it, he said that also references count a lot and that I shouldn't worry too much...but we all know how competitive the Post-Doc market is, and that nowadays not publishing results from PhD is a failure. I just seek for advice here, is it really that difficult to get a Post-Doc position without publications? I was always told the opposite...I just find myself miserable and to the rest of people (if you know what I mean, worried family and friends, seeing you as a failure...) I have firmly decided to continue applying for research roles, but our publication is getting delayed since we are waiting for one collaborator to write some text on his contribution part... I appreciate any kind of advice or criticism, what would you do in my situation, and similar experiences you might have heard of or even lived on your own. Thank you very much for your help and support