I was my advisors first grad student, he was fresh out of a postdoc and just got hired to a tenure-track position.
>Start in August of 2020, PhD in aerospace engineering
>Wanted to just do a masters
>Advisor says "apply to the PhD program anyways, you can always leave after your masters, and you'll be eligible for more scholarships"
>"Since you're a PhD student, you should take the qualifying exam in year 2"
>"Qualifying exam" is a 7 hour long written exam covering the entirety of the aerospace eng. undergrad course material
>My undergrad was mechanical engineering, which has some overlap, but a lot of differences.
>Spend an entire semester prepping, pass on first try
>Research is experimental
>We have no proper lab space, and no equipment
>Spend 2 years slowly acquiring the equipment I needed to run my experiments
>Project sounds really cool, but was too ambitious for the time frame and budget, especially considering we were starting from scratch
>Ended up finishing my masters in 3 years
>Thesis was full of questionable claims and improper uncertainty analysis due to my advisor telling me the bullshit I was doing was correct
>Only find out otherwise after it's too late
>Want to continue with the PhD at this point, to prove to myself I can do something right
>He drops me because he had no money for my experimental equipment
>Hires a new PhD student under a different grant, for a project with very similar looking experiments
>Basically a new chunk of change to buy equipment that can be reused for both projects

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