More and more departments provide introductory lectures and seminars for new PhD students. Not all of them are given right at the start (they're too busy inducting undergraduates). If you're having trouble finding your feet ask other PhD students or postdocs in your department for advice. Your supervisor should help you as well.

You will need to check with the people paying you the £22000 if it is subject to tax. UK students do not pay tax on educational grants. Your university may be able to advise you. Is the £22000 the total ammount or per year. If it's per year and it is subject to x then www.i-resign.com has a UK tax calculator.

Probably. You will need to have a recognised first degree and you must have learnt English to a level equivalent to at least IELTS 6.

Being given the full research proposal could constitute spoonfeeding and we'd be interested to hear if other science PhD students have seen copies of the original proposal which was sent to the research council to gain funding for their project.

Working on a highly specific research project is relatively easy - having the background knowledge, experience and intuition to work out what the results mean and where to go next is the hard part.

Get stuck in with the background reading - it may be tedious, but it's worth it in the long run.

See our Funding and PhDs Explained sections for links and information. In particular look for information on the ORS awards.

We're working on it. What courses are you interested in?

If you are a UK student then it is likely that the studentship will pay your university fees and provide a tax free maintenance grant of around £12500 pa.

Journal Impact Factors are produced by Thompson Scientific (www.isinet.com). Most UK universities have subscription based access to these figures.

It doesn't sound like your friends supervisor has done anything illegal. As Stu says, the funding for the new student may not be applicable to your friends' research project. There is probably a lot more to this than you have had room to write here. Try contacting the National Postgraduate Committee for advice.

If you're in a position to publish in any of the Nature titles, during your PhD then you'll be very fortunate. The Nature Reviews journals only publish review articles, which are usually written by established leaders in their field, bringing together all the relevant research in a particular field.

What matters with a journal is the 'Impact Factor'. Nature Genetics has the highest impact factor of all genetics Journals (29 in 2004). Nature itself has the an impact factor of 32 - making it the highest of any multidisciplinary science journal. In other words a Nature paper would be more impressive.

Course fees are listed in the course details. If they are ommited search the web site of the university concerned.

Please forgive us for using a turn of phrase, we did not mean to suggest that the photographs were not taken by professionals. We just believe they don't represent good value for money.

Hi Jojo. We do remove some threads or messages from the site. This may be because we think they may be offensive to some people or sometimes if they just turn into a scrap between two or more people posting to the site. We very much welcome the contributions of current PhD students who provide most of the answers to the queries posted on this site.

The only other posts we have under the name of Jojo can be found by clicking here. Did you post under another name? - what was the theme of your thread?

Graduation photos are a scam - get a friend to take one of you and send as many copies as you like to whoever wants one.

It tends to vary from subject to subject and university to university. The vast majority of university lecturers have PhDs, but in some of the newer or more vocational subject areas it is quite common to find lecturers with no PhD (but plenty of work experience in their field).

In the more traditional academic disciplines it would be unusual to find a lecturer without a PhD.