I had an idea for a PhD proposal and found a supervisor for that topic. My supervisor is pretty busy and is reachable only once every month or two at best.
Unfortunately, I saw that my research topic could be usable only for publishing a paper, but not to develop something really novel that could justify its presence in a PhD thesis. Thus, I feel like I've "wasted" a couple years of my PhD.
When I realized that my current research was not enough for a PhD thesis, I came up with another idea related to the same field and topic, but the problem is that my supervisor is not an expert in the field that I am proposing. To discover this other technique I spent an additional year.
Now I have the following courses of action:
- Since my supervisor is not an expert into the field that I am proposing, then I should try to find a co-supervisor at another university. This is not so easy because a lot of professors have their own set of students to advise.
- My supervisor has a list of projects that could serve ås PhD research topics, but I'm not so interested in those topics. However, I need to graduate so I am seriously thinking of picking one of them. The problem is that I am very rusty in the background of the topics he has because since I haven't looked at those topics since my bachelor's program.
- I am pretty confident that I can continue to develop my new idea by myself, even though I know that is going to be pretty difficult. The problem is that I will have to do it all by myself, and my supervisor will not be able to give me any advice because it is not his field of expertise.
If anybody is curious my PhD is in Computer Science.
So what should I do? Should I aim for a new topic or should I stick to my "feelings" that I can make my proposal work, even I have to do it alone.