Don't apologise, Janice. People ask for, give and receive support on all sorts of issues on this forum. Stick around!

Don't apologise, Janice. People ask for, give and receive support on all sorts of issues on this forum. Stick around!

It depends what they want you to do. Sometimes it can be a sign of being a control freak. But sometimes they tell students what to do because (i) it's the right thing! and (ii) they have to protect their own as well as the student's reputation.

Does this supervisor have other students besides yourself? How does s/he respond to them?

Not strange at all. You will tend to find a more diverse mix of nationalities in the big cities than in the small towns though, so bear that in mind.

What field are you in (broadly)? Arts/Humanities students will probably give different answers to Sci/Engineering etc

I think you'd be better off with a specialist technical forum! Try Stack Exchange perhaps?

In the mean time, here are some other researchers' (not me!) reflections on the challenges of recruiting participants which might give you some ideas. The second piece is more for if you're trying to recruit people via other professionals:

No worries. There are plenty of people here who have had all sorts of experiences with postgrad study and research, so usually someone can say something useful! :-) Particularly if you carry on and do a PhD afterwards!

I think wowzers meant what's the study population you're trying to target. :)

Hi Kgali

I'm sorry to hear about your situation. Are you based in the UK? I would suggest you try to arrange a meeting urgently with your personal tutor or the course tutor. It is not appropriate for a supervisor to resign from supervising a student without making alternative provisions. Did the supervisor give any previous warnings that this action might be taken?

A month is still a long time and if you already have 30,000 words you're in a good position. If the word limit is 50,000 words (which sounds quite long for a Masters) that doesn't mean it has to be exactly that long. If the work is good, it can be shorter. So don't panic - you're already making good progress, and there is still scope for you to complete your dissertation in time.

Ultimately the aim of a PhD is to turn you into an independent researcher, capable of developing your own questions and driving your own research. While there may be a case for a second PhD if one was to move into a different subject area, applying for a second one in the same department would probably not lead to success.

If your first PhD is successful then you should be capable of carrying out postdoc level research, or else something has gone wrong in the process. If your first PhD is awarded an MPhil then I would think new supervisors might be unlikely to take you on unless there was a very good reason the first one didn't work out, that was completely out of your hands (e.g. bad supervision).

Either way, far better to talk directly to the supervisors of the new PhD and signal your interest in this area, than go straight down the application route which may lead to a misunderstanding of your position. Other than the topic area, it's not really clear why you would want to undertake this work as another PhD, rather than driving forwards a postdoc collaboration and maybe applying for fellowships/grants to enable this.

I would strongly disagree with TEHEPIKDUCK321's position that you should forget about a job at the end of the day. Unless you happen to come from a wealthy background and/or have no concerns about having to submit lots of applications to employers who may reject you on the grounds of your career path choices, then you should probably have a strong reason for pursuing this as a second PhD.

She may have meant that some people who are employed as RAs then undertake a PhD alongside their job (sometimes using material generated from their RA job). It's a way of doing a PhD while getting a proper salary. Or she may have meant that you could consider a PhD as an alternative to an RA post.

Hope this helps

Not entirely! A PhD is a research degree undertaken by an individual. While that person will no doubt get help at times from their colleagues, other people don't really 'participate' in them. Do you perhaps mean that you want to be part of a senior person's research group/project/programme? In which case, yes, a research assistant role would be the thing to apply for.

Actually from your post title it sounds like you want a PhD place (in which case findaphd.com is where you should look). But from your post it sounded like you wanted an RA job, hence my first reply.

The two are regarded (and funded) differently in the UK. It's not uncommon for people doing RA work to then go on to do PhDs.

Assuming you're in the UK, your best bet is jobs.ac.uk.

In theory this site has a sister site which would carry RA type posts:
www.findauniversityjob.com/
but there's hardly any researcher jobs on there right now!

*Link removed by Reenie - sorry!*