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I'm doing my MSc. in Computational Mathematics in Central Europe. Right after finishing my Bachelor's degree I began to work in our National Supercomputing Center, a research institute that is associated with the university where I'm studying. It is considered quite a prestigious position in my country. Because of this offer I quit my job in the industry.

At first, I was enthusiastic about the research topic and after several months I was assigned to the second project (completely different from the first one).

This job began to consume almost all my time, so I gave up all my free-time activities and devoted myself just to this research. Because of the amount of work here I got into some serious problems with school projects and exams, but, so far, I managed to pass them.

In the first project my job is the implementation of some direct solvers, but some time ago we found out, that the technology used in the implementation is not suitable to our problem at all, so this solver will be useful just in some special cases, or possibly, it'll be unusable at all.

The second project appeared well - we managed to write some papers and tried to publish them. This week I found out that all of them were rejected.

Now I feel terribly disappointed and inferior to the others. All my colleagues have some publications, because, their other projects are usually successful. I'm working on two projects, where both of them are now just a waste of time for me, because I'm not going to have even one publication from them.

Normally I would try to discuss this with our team leader, but, to be honest, I'm scared to do that. He's not very sympathetic to the fact I'm still studying nor to the fact I'm there just for part-time job, so I shouldn't be working this much. I'm afraid he'll simply tell me, that in my position I should be glad to be working there at all, or something like that.

I'm not asking about some "improvement" of my personal feelings, as in How should I deal with discouragement as a graduate student? - I'd rather like to know, if it's a common situation and if I can ask to be assigned to another research topic (I have no prior experience with research, so I don't know if it's considered impolite etc.).

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Eenoku
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    It's not clear whether you're asking about overcoming your demotivation, or whether you are asking about talking to the team leader about assigning you to a different project.. – ff524 May 22 '16 at 10:43
  • (Note this answer in particular, which I think is especially relevant to your situation.) – ff524 May 22 '16 at 10:47
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    If you want to know about etiquette, you should specify what country you're in. You should also provide more information about the kind of workplace (is it a research institute associated with the university where you're studying? a private research institute? a government research institute?) The workplace etiquette will depend very much on those things. – ff524 May 22 '16 at 10:55
  • @ff524 I've added those details into my question. – Eenoku May 22 '16 at 11:04
  • When you add details to your question, you can just add them "naturally" into the narrative. No need to separately mark the edits, anyone can look at the revision history to see what edits have been made. – ff524 May 22 '16 at 11:08
  • "we managed to write some papers and tried to publish them" Mm... if you tried to publish several papers in parallel, this might be a misguidance on the part of your advisor. – Massimo Ortolano May 22 '16 at 11:12
  • We tried to publish 3 papers to 3 different conferences. And I'm not sure about "standard" publication procedures, but, obviously it could've been done better :-) – Eenoku May 22 '16 at 11:16
  • "We tried to publish 3 papers to 3 different conferences". You have not written a paper before and you co-wrote 3 papers in basically 1 year, working part-time? A good paper in many disciplines needs at least 1-2 full years when written by a novice PhD student. No wonder, that those papers got rejected. – Alexandros May 22 '16 at 11:36
  • @Alexandros I was not personally writing the paper. I was assigned as a co-author, because I was working on the research and so, those results were partly my work. All the writing was "physically" done/supervised by our project coordinators. – Eenoku May 22 '16 at 11:39
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    It is not the writing that takes 1-2 years. It is coming up with a novel solution and implementing it that takes all this time. In my CS discipline, the first good paper written by a PhD student takes at least 1-2 years, mainly because a) literature review b) coming up with a better algorithm / method c) implement the new method d) implement the old methods for comparing your work against them and so-on. None of this, can be done for 3 concurrent good papers in six months. Period. – Alexandros May 22 '16 at 12:16
  • @Alexandros I guess it was because of some deadlines the coordinators wanted to met, that we needed to publish so many papers almost at once. But, you're apparently right... – Eenoku May 22 '16 at 12:35

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