pcxag1 you are now reborn as Andy. - You'll need to log out and then log in again as Andy (same password).

What email address got bounced back?

Pity about the post to China, you should have more luck in Nottingham.

There was a note enclosed when they arrived.

WARNING - Unsuitable for use with very hot drinks

We haven't had any complaints though - they just get a little deformed after a few months heavy use. We like to use them as frisbees.

Andy - send us your address and we'll send you a poster to put up - send us back a photo and the mouse mat's yours. By the way - did you want us to change your username to Andy?

We've already got FindA... Post-its and FindA.. mouse mats. We've even got some FindAPhD coasters which turned out not to be suitable for hot drinks.

We'll send one of these treasured items to anyone who can email us a photo of a FindAPhD poster in their department. If anyone can get a photo of one of our bus adverts we'll send you the complete collection.

Offer Ends November 10th

A quick survey: If we were to consider bringing out some FindAPhD/FindAMasters/PostGradForum merchandise, either to sell or to give away, what should it be? T-shirts? Lab coats? Small novelty dogs to sit on your desk? Stress toys?

Answers on a postcard (or Forum message) please......

pcxag1, if you send an email to [email protected] from your registered email address, I'm sure we can alter your username for you!

Visit FindAMasters.com, we have just added a 'Start Date' search option.

There is a picture of both a male and a female on the front page. We're sorry if you don't consider them "fit" - we can't cater for everybody's tastes! We like the "rate your supervisor" idea, but unfortunately it's not really possible - ideally we'd like to avoid court cases. How about a "PhD Love" section - dating for single PhD students? There is certainly a bit of Forum flirting already going on (no names mentioned).

Not allowing a single word thread title is pretty standard on forums. As the number of threads builds up, having 20 threads with the title "PhD" is no good to anyone. Having more detailed titles means users will only need to click on the threads that are of a genuine interest to them, rather than every post "just in case".

Hi Beshoy

I think we can let this one through as it's the BBC. Anyway for a lot of people Birmingham is in the North. I think if they'd have surveyed Sheffield they would have found courtesy levels went off the scale.

Have a nice day

Thanks for your comments H. The reason it changes the order to most recent messages at the top when you post is so you can instantly see your newly posted message displayed on the site. The alternative is to page through the forum topic, and if there are many posts, you would have to scroll through loads of pages, and that would be more annoying. The little boxes on the main page now work by the way!

Registration isn't something we really wanted to add to the forum, however we received a number of complaints with the old system, as it was being abused by people posing as other users. There was also a fair amount of bad language and rudeness, which is not something we will tolerate.

Welcome to the new forum Ann & H. We thought having the messages this way around would make life easier. You can change the order if you want to. You can also now enter posts of around 200 words and you can opt to receive an email every time somebody replies to one of your threads (you can also turn this off if you want to).

Oh, and we've changed our name as well.

It may be that some New Route PhD schemes allow you to work as a teaching assistant, but many will not. The same is true of traditional PhDs. The difference between a NewRoutePhD™ and a traditional one is that the NewRoutePhD™ scheme is a four year PhD, which includes taught elements and professional training alongside the research project. The traditional PhD is a minimum of three years with little or no taught element or formal professional training.

The usual length of a PhD in the UK is three years and there will be little or no formal taught element.