I'm in the middle of my fieldwork - fifteen interviews so far and counting,will probbaly end up with close to forty in-depth interviews.On dull days (I'm abroad at the moment and doing fieldwork in three locations,now switched to second one and negotiating access and all the fun part) I started transcribing-I type really fast,but I am quite frustrated with having to take my hands off the keyboard every couple of seconds to turn the dictaphone on and off.

your first step should be contacting the university where you want to study and checking their requirements, they are teh only people who for sure can tell you if you need a masters or not. regarding funding,search through the forum,and apart from ESRC,look at what the university/department where you want to study has to offer.good luck!

for me, one of the most useful things was discovering citation indexes (google scholar also has that function,just look for "cited by" under the link with the article) - and also,once i managed to locate something that looked more or less useful,i'd go through the reference list and check out the other articles,too - which is really easy on sage or blackwell-synergy,because the reference list comes with links to relevant articles already.Also,I managed to find a bunch of useful stuff by looking at references in already completed ph.d. theses. one more thing-for me, it also helpef to go back to basics and refresh my memory on basic operators in google,hope something helps!

the other thing which i found useful was attending the course on literature search provided by my library as part of research training scheme-and you could also try your subject librarian,they really know their stuff. you could also look up some of the general books about doing a phd-quite a few of them,and look up the section on literature search,my favorite one is organizing and managing your own research by phelps et al and they also have a great website, http://www.scu.edu.au/omyr/toc.html which accompanies the book and has some great tips. good luck!

which field are you in?i'm in social sciences,so sporry if what i say is not very relevant to you-also,what do you mean by journal search, trying to find relevant journals in your field or relevant journal articles?anyway,i recommend first of all google scholar-this will weed out most unuseful stuff and leave you with journal articles and book citations.second,web of science is a good thing to play with,third, you could also look into journal monitoring services such as zetoc which will send alerts about relevant articles straight into your mailbox.

I worked during my first year as a personal assistant to students with disabilities - maybe there is such a scheme in your place, teh work was not demanding, most of the time I just took notes,and the hours were flexible.tutoring seems to be quite a popular option, but I never looked into it.Good luck!

http://www.conferencealerts.com/
and, if you're based in the UK, i recommend subscribing to the academic mailing lists on www.jiscmail.ac.uk, this is where I get my info about conferences and workshops. have fun;)

hello! You can have a look at this digital library of theses (all US, but still could be useful) http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/
This link gives you information about a British library service where you can order a thesis:
http://www.bl.uk/services/document/brittheses.html
Another trick I have used to have a look at social sciences tehses - my field - should work for history is to type the following phrase in scholar.google.com
"Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy" and any other keywords you need, of course. This will give you a possibility to search through tehses whose authors were kind enough to leave them in cyberspace.

I found out that I much prefer working out of home - especially that this way I can have a clear divide between what is workspace and what is not (well, at least in theory;). The postgrad office is shared between ten students - but during the summer I had it pretty much to myself, and people only come in during termtime for an hour or two during the day - one of the informal rules we have is that calls on mobile phones are taken outside of the office to avoidthat call-centre feeling, and in general, people try to be considerate of each other.So maybe you could think of having some informal ground rules for your office - but then again,kind of hard with 20 people,in my office there's never more than 5 at a time.

Dear Adelina, you will have to do all the research yourself - especially as you didn't even specify the area in which you want to do your masters.Most do start in September/October, but there are exceptions.As for the money,you will be treated as UK/EU students,which in most of teh cases is around 3000 pounds per year(more or less).As for recognizing your diploma - only the university you are applying to can answer that question; the same for the timetable. Good luck!

feminist methodology here as well- I've done most of my writing in first person, I am much more comfortable with this, and in my field - social movements/gender studies it is very rare to find anything in third person, unless it's quite old stuff.

another good way to find out about conferences is to sign up to academic mailing lists in your field at www.jiscmail.ac.uk, this is where I get my information from.

Dear ybwc4u, this forum is populated by PhD students, not supervisors - you should start searching for a supervisor and funding elsewhere, and start exploring the links that are on www.findaphd.com

if only finding a scholarship was that easy...first of all, the topic - how to find funding-appeared hundreds of times on the forum already,and there are no miracle solutions:use google if you're looking for funding in the UK (don't know similar websites for other countries,but somebody else might),l;ook up the websites of the universities that have relevant programs,and set aside plenty of time to do that-it can take up to a year to locate a relevant PhD program and funding.good luck!

depends how badly you want that scholarship, I guess. In my case,being poor (no property or posessions to worry about relocating, just some books) and determined helped me to take the decision to relocate to the UK from Poland as soon as I knew that I received a scholarship offer.