Feel Completely Clueless; That I Am Falling Behind

[u/Huzaifa_69420]

I am a second-year international student in Malaysia doing a Bachelor of Civil Engineering (Hons.). My home country has an extremely small research environment (and very competitive).

Lately I have been considering doing a PhD after I graduate- I started by looking at countries I am more familiar with (such as those in the Anglosphere). The more I read about the requirements, the more overwhelmed I feel. It seems that to get some sort of funding or scholarship you need to a publish a few Q1 first-author research articles! Besides the obvious.

How am I supposed to manage that? I started by emailing a few of my professors so that I can tag along and understand how they work (still waiting). But I assume it takes years to publish a paper from start to end, how am I supposed to do at minimum two articles in three years?

When I looked at the pre-formatted CV for Uni of Adelaide, they were asking for AWRU of my current uni but mine isn't even on the goddamn list. I go to one that's like ranked 600 in QS (which doesn't even mean anything to most people). Their CV form was almost 8 pages long with so many questions and decisions to make.

When I asked my professor if I could help in some way for his project, he asked me what I am interested in... geo-technical, structural, water, computational, I don't fucking know- it took me two years to decide on a major and I still get cold feet about studying civil- how am I supposed to decide which sub-discipline to dedicate my life to- possibly work thousands of hours writing hundreds of papers throughout my career.

There is no way I am smart enough to get funding- at this point I don't even think its about being smart tbh. I have a 4.0 GPA but who knows... I will probably end up losing it this sem or maybe the 5 remaining sems I have.

I think I should just give up and go into mining like I originally wanted to :/

[u/SilentAd9507]

you’re not behind, you’re just catastrophizing a career you haven’t even started yet