Stressed, you had a lucky escape. Look at how our emotions have been toyed with. Be glad you are the one that got away.

Vivian, you cold heartless bitch, getting me all excited then I find out you've been putting it around like some common floozy. How could you do this to me? I know I'm so desirable with my Belford PhD but did you have to break my heart so callously?

Have you had sex with him?

As a student from a mediocre university with mediocre grades, I have often wondered if I would ever make it in the world.

Simon Dixon has shown me there is hope.

I'm so happy I could cry.

Generally, life for me post PhD has been great. However I must admit I am completely on the other side of a lot of other people here - I have no intention of publishing from my thesis (despite my main supervisor trying to get me to, several times!) as I am more than happy to turn my back on a research career. I work now in the private sector in finance and find my skills have been put to good use. I also like the change of pace much more instead of something that takes months, years, to come to fruition.

I sympathise with your predicament though Claudia, when I was first looking for jobs it was the double edge sword - needed a job to get experience, but couldn't get experience without a job. I was lucky to find a company that valued my PhD skills even though I hadn't been in the workplace, but I had two interviews for two other great jobs where I lost out to a candidate with workplace experience. It is a really tough market at the moment.

I've never heard of doing this, although I have spotted a couple of typos in my final bound thesis so I sympathise. One option that a friend of mine did (I swear this is true!) is go to the Uni library with a tube of glue and an errata slip and stuck it the thesis so anyone coming to read it would know where the typo was and what it was.

It's also becoming more common for well established print/access only journals to offer an "Open Access" option with increased fees - the one I saw was about £800 for a leading journal in the area so a thousand euros sounds about right.

I did a mathematical based subject and ended up with about 300 in my final thesis out of about 500 overall (well, once I'd stopped counting). But then I did it interdisciplinary so ended up with quite a lot of references from different areas. My literature review was huge but very detailed!

I suffered from it and still do in everyday life! I had an interview the other day and made a complete boob as I had brain freeze and just went completely blank (luckily I recovered and they've invited me back for second interviews!)

The best way I've found is sometimes it's just better to think and wait - it's tempting to just try and blabber away to fill the silence but just say "Let me think about this..." and then think. The answer then should hopefully come in some form or other, or at least that's my experience.

Love this thread! I can relate so much.

The one thing that really bugs me is that many people (especially people at work) think that because I have a PhD I know everything about everything. Someone said at work the other day to someone else, "Oh, go ask Dan, he's got a PhD, he'll know". Yes, I am the all seeing and all knowing. My PhD was on absolutely everything in the world that has ever happened.

It's doing the rounds at the moment:

http://www.fbi.gov/cyberinvest/escams.htm

Probably just had their email accounts compromised. Tell them to make sure they change their passwords ASAP. If you're worried your email address has been compromised, then change it as well.

Had my (first) interview today. Went as well as can be expected but did get a bit of brain freeze at one point. Oh gosh, it's all a bit crazy, isn't it?

How is everyone else getting on with jobhunting etc?

Is it Belford by any chance?

8-)

If you're in China you're either up very late or very early.

Most of us are British. Are you doing some kind of product placement? I'm curious to understand.